This coming Tuesday, I’ll be facilitating the first meeting of the Bay Area Agile Managers Support Group. The event will start off with a short workshop focused on one of the key criteria for having successful meetings. Today was the day I practiced the workshop with a live studio audience.
Compliments and criticism are the two edges of the feedback sword. Today, The Chief Happiness Officer’s Blog explains that to be effective, compliments must be specific. This generalizes well to ‘feedback must be specific’. In particular, you want to clearly describe the behavior that you observed. For instance: “Bob, I see that while you were fixing that bug you also added several new tests and refactored the module.” Now that Bob knows exactly what you are going to compliment him on, tell him about the impact this will have: “That will really make it easier for people to work in that module in the future, and probably prevent some bugs too!” At this point, if we were delivering criticism, we would request a change in behavior. Since we are giving a compliment, we can simply say thank you: “I really appreciate you doing that. Thanks.”
You can find more on feedback here.
The Chief Happiness Officer has a good post today on knowing when it is time to quit your job.
If you are unhappy in your job, go read it. No really, stop reading this and go read it. OK, since you are still reading this, I’ll give the upshot of his article, but really the whole thing is worth reading.
You are invited to join the Bay Area Engineering Managers Support Group.
Share the adventures and challenges of managing engineers. Each session will start with a short presentation on a topic of interest to technical managers. After that comes a facilitated discussion where participants can share challenges that they are facing and get feedback, ideas, and support from the group. The event is free. Food and beverages are available for purchase from out host restaurant. Come out, join the discussion, and become a better manager.
Our first meetup will be held on Tuesday June 19th at 7:00 PM. We will meet in the event room at Hobees 4224 El Camino Real, Palo Alto, CA. You can RSVP by leaving a comment on this blog post or by joining our event on meetup.com
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Dannyman pointed out this quote from William L. McKnight, past Chairman of the Board at 3M.
As our business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to delegate responsibility and to encourage men and women to exercise their initiative. This requires considerable tolerance. Those men and women, to whom we delegate authority and responsibility, if they are good people, are going to want to do their jobs in their own way. Mistakes will be made. But if a person is essentially right, the mistakes he or she makes are not as serious in the long run as the mistakes management will make if it undertakes to tell those in authority exactly how they must do their jobs. Management that is destructively critical when mistakes are made kills initiative. And it’s essential that we have many people with initiative if we are to continue to grow.
I was recently invited by techdirt’s Mike Masnick to be a part of the Techdirt Insight Community. The idea is really interesting:
The Techdirt Insight Community is a service that lets a company engage a dynamic and diverse group of experts who provide analysis and insight tailored to meet your specific needs quickly and cost effectively. Our qualified community of expert bloggers tackles your issues through an interactive online conversation and quickly provides you with the answers you need to drive your business forward.
I’m looking forward to it!
I just met with Shobeir Shobeiri and Kayvan Baroumand at Plug and Plug and Play Tech Center. It has been almost a year since I was there for techdirt greenhouse (one and two). The place has really come along. I think that they were hosting about 20 companies back then. Shobeir told me that they now house over ninety!
Last night I participated in a panel discussion about the career of consulting at Santa Clara University, put on by the newly formed consulting club of the MBA program. My fellow panelists were Ken Wirt and Megan Shields. Mike Levenhagen moderated the panel.
I spent yesterday morning with about 30 other entrepreneurs, learning about some real-world legal, HR, and funding issues that startups typically face. The program was one of six that Technology Ventures Corporation (TVC) puts on in rotation. The program is free, and they even include a decent continental breakfast! Interestingly, TVC is funded by Lockheed Martin and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. The event was hosted by SRI at their headquarters in Menlo Park, CA.