Life with Tim

 In the more global world that we live in, people are not only working remotely, but people are working across the globe and critically across many time zones. Due to our global reach even within a team, we have less daylight that we share with our coworkers. In the past, I’ve been part of very successful remote standups, but I noticed they only really work well if you are in close time zones. If you only have 1 hour of overlap with your coworker, do you really want to be going over high-level status with your broader team? I’ve asked my teams about this, and I got a very loud “NO!” We all use Slack as a communication tool, so I started an experiment with a team where a bot posts in the channel at the beginning of the earliest person on the team’s day. It asks a few simple questions: @team-name welcome to today and good morning! What did you work on yesterday? What are you intending to work on today? What blockers do you have on your priorities? What help do you need? As people tri...

When you approach a bridge that overlooks a river do you tend to look upriver at the past, or downriver to see the future? I am naturally drawn to looking downriver because I like to plan for the future. For the role of manager, you have three major areas of responsibility, the people, the projects, and gluing those together. That last part is where the magic happens. If you get great alignment with your people and what they work on, that is where you have the best outcomes. People Helping people thrive is the cornerstone of any people manager. How we align people and set them up so that they can be at their best self is critical to our success, and the success of the company. It's a win-win-win situation. It all starts with hiring and onboarding. For me, there are three critical areas that I focus on during the interview process. Do they have a growth mindset, do they include others during their decision-making process, and overall is the candidate a kind human being? Beyond the ...

So I have some news, after much consideration, I've decided to submit my notice to Sonatype. I've grown tremendously during my 3 years at Sonatype. First joining as an Engineering Manager working with wonderful people on the Lifecycle product. Then later moving on to the Director of Engineering for the complicated sub-systems of Sonatype. I’ve met some wonderful people on the way, and they will be forever missed. I have no doubt that they will be successful in their business market going forward and I wish them all the best. That being said, it's time to start walking through succession planning. I really want to set my successor up for success when I leave. I'm reminded of a great episode of The Office (US) when Dewight gets fired for the episode. After a few weeks, things start falling apart in odd ways. The plants start dying, the fridge starts smelling, etc... He didn't get the chance to hand off the things he did around the place before he left.  During my time...

I was asked recently for a list of resources for management by a fellow manager. I have so many, but I didn't have it readily available. This post is for that. I'll regularly update it with references and the like. Podcasts Simon Sinek Podcas t; interesting interviews with various leaders Jacko Podcast ; the discipline of leadership. Interesting US military leader view of the world. Good stories and lessons learned. HBR IdeaCast  - Harvard Business Review's collection of stories about business. The Knowledge Podcast - Really interesting interviews with various leaders of the world Making Sense with Sam Harris - Most of these are pretty good listen. Sometimes relevant to leadership, other times just about humanity. Video Channels Simon Sinek - a collection of lectures, cuts from the podcast recordings, and tips of the day. Leadership Nudges - Great collection of 2-5 minute reminders. This comes from the author of "Turn the ship around". Books See my book...

Backstory One of my goals for Q3 2019 was to find a good way of collecting notes for 1:1s. Historically I just had a rolling document that had a spat of notes from various meetings. I wanted to get a little more organized. First I was listing off what I should cover and how often. Not as a hard rule but just as a guideline. Second I looked into a medium to share this information with the people I support. I read a blog post from Trello 1 that suggested having a board per connection with various boards. Check that out for more details. Implementation My Template (link in summary) I really liked the idea from Trello, so I did an experiment and created a template 2 . Then I took one of my teams and created a board for each individual. It was pretty well received from the teams. For the repeatable tasks I listed out the things that I thought about during my first part of this goal. 1) performance feedback, 2) company news I've heard, 3) ice breaker questions, and 4) quarterl...