This is Kommon People — the newsletter from Kommon which highlights stories about people, organisations, and technology to help you be a better manager. If you like it and want more like it in your inbox, consider subscribing.
In this Issue
This week we were at LeadDev Live, the virtual conference focussed on sharing best practice in software engineering leadership.
We were there last year too when it was packed full of relevant advice for all managers, not just engineering leaders, and this year was no exception. Two of our pieces this week are summaries of their great talks and panel discussions, so thank you LeadDev.
- A new home for our management advice: many of you have asked us to make our content more accessible and shareable, now it has a shiny new home in our Manager Guide.
- 6 tips for a good coaching conversation: an excellent panel from LeadDev Live, particularly for those just starting to think about how they can be a better coach to their teams.
- 3 practical strategies for leading a distributed Team: Molly Struve’s presentation had more practical advice on this topic in 15 mins than we’ve seen written in thousands of words online.
- You should probably praise your team more: research shows we should stop worrying about how we come across and just say the nice thing, it has a dramatic impact.
A New Home for Our Management Advice
There’s a consistent theme in the comments we get about this newsletter. Here’s one example:
‘I wish this content were available online and linkable - it's fantastic and I'd share it all the time’
Well we’ve finally done something about it.
We’ve gone back over all the previous issues of Kommon People and categorised and collected our advice in one place in our new Manager Guide.
It makes it easier than ever to find guidance on a particular management topic.
In future, you’ll also notice that we’ll now provide dedicated links to individual articles in each newsletter if you just want to share a particular piece of advice.
Hopefully that’s what you were all after 😉
6 Tips for a Good Coaching Conversation
We’re told that coaching is a vital part of being a good manager, but it’s a huge topic, and it can be quite daunting to know where to start.
At LeadDev Live, Nik Knight of JHC led an excellent panel discussion with Zego’s Phillipa Rodney and Ecosia’s Jessy Halison on Holding Effective Coaching Conversations.
They drew out some of the fundamentals of getting coaching right, which we know will be very useful, particularly if you’re just starting to think about how you can be a better coach to your team.
- Think about your role as a coach. Your role is to guide the coachee towards finding their own solutions to achieve their goals. As Rodney said, ‘guiding the journey, but letting you steer it’. This is different from mentoring, which typically involves more direct transfer of knowledge and expertise to the mentee.
- What does success look like? You may be aware of a particular area a team member would like to improve, but to make sure you meet their expectations, you need to make sure you understand what success looks like. Both to give you a goal to aim at, but also to check whether your coaching will be sufficient to help your team member reach it.
- Be sure of their motivation. It’s essential to understand why a team member wants to work on a particular area of improvement. Without that, even if you achieve ‘success’, it may be that it doesn’t help them in pursuit of their ultimate goal. Both Rodney and Halison gave examples of discussions with team members where once they discussed motivation, it led to a completely different goal being pursued than the one the team member was originally focussed on.
- Don’t be afraid to challenge people. Part of your value as a coach is to offer a different perspective to the coachee on their work. That’s not to say there should be a lot of disagreement, but there should be room for discussion about their motivations, approach, and goals. This can be particularly valuable for more senior coachees, who are more confident in their work, and may not be used to having their assumptions challenged. Of course, this has to be done in the spirit of helping the team member grow, it should never become adversarial.
- Listen for what they’re not saying. Every coaching manual will tell you that you should spend most of your time listening to the other person rather than talking, otherwise it’s likely that you’re not fully understanding their needs. But this discussion went a step further. When coaching you need to be paying close enough attention to be able to notice what the coachee isn’t speaking about, what areas they’re avoiding. This is often instructive as to what you really need to be talking about.
- Be aware of how your advice fits with someone’s lived experience. Societal realities and systemic discrimination means that the advice you give to one person may not be relevant or helpful for another. As Halison mentioned, coaching a Black woman to achieve her goals by being more assertive may result in her just being stereotyped as an angry Black woman rather than fulfilling her career aspirations. Any advice needs to be tailored to how it would work in practice for the individual.
3 Practical Strategies for Leading a Distributed Team
We’ve seen a lot of advice over the past year on leading a remote team, and Molly Struve’s talk at LeadDev Live was amongst some of the very best.
Struve is a Senior Site Reliability Engineer at Netflix and runs a team across eight timezones from Thailand to Denver. She had some very tactical advice for any manager looking to put in place new processes to help their distributed team work together, successfully and inclusively.
Her approach is based around three core strategies: Async Standups, Rotating Meeting Schedules, and Setting Async Work Expectations.
Async Standups
If you’re distributed across eight timezones (or even much less!) finding a time for a weekly standup meeting which works for everyone is almost impossible. Yet sharing that context about what everyone’s working on for the week remains invaluable. So what to do?
Struve’s standups aren’t meetings at all, they’re a blog post.
Every Sunday evening she creates an internal post of relevant team updates. Team members can then view the document and leave comments if they have anything else to add. There is also a dedicated section for team members to introduce their own topics, and praise colleagues for their work.
Everyone stays updated, just like a standup meeting, and everyone is always included. As an example of inclusion, even the date format specifically references the month in full rather than using US formatting (July vs 07) so it’s clear to everyone.
Rotating Meeting Schedules
Although async docs work well for standups, teams need facetime to help them bond and build relationships. Rotating schedules, where several meetings of the same type happen at different times over a period of several weeks, are key to doing that in an inclusive way,
She arranges two types of meetings this way.
- Engineering roundtables. Every week at a different time. Not everyone can attend all of them, but that’s not the idea. It creates plenty of opportunities for people to meet with their colleagues and most of her team manage to attend 2-3 every 4 weeks. She includes some sample discussion points in each meeting invite to help facilitate debate, particularly for those who might not be comfortable just raising their voice spontaneously. For those who can’t attend but still want to catch up on what was said, every meeting is recorded and Struve publishes an accompanying set of notes for those who don’t have the time to watch the recording.
- Watercoolers: 15 min zoom calls for less formal, non-work discussions. As she acknowledges, these are most successful when they have an advocate - e.g. someone makes it clear on Slack they are attending - so people know they’re not going to be the only one in there.
Setting Async Work Expectations
Setting specific norms for your team can be very powerful in creating inclusive habits which foster distributed teamwork. Struve mentions three that have worked for her:
- 24hr Pull Request Review: this gives everyone on the team the opportunity to review the majority of the code which is being shipped, whatever their time zone.
- Slack as async: create the expectation that Slack messages don’t have to be responded to immediately. In her words, ‘a massive win for work-life balance’.
- Record all meetings: pretty self-explanatory, and a big benefit for inclusive team-building.
There may be other norms you could put in place for your teams based on your pattern of work.
You Should Probably Praise your Team More
Research suggests that we may be holding back from praising our co-workers as much as we should.
The power of a small compliment can be immense, but we’re less forthcoming than we could be because we’re worried about it being perceived as clumsy, patronising or fawning.
Vanessa Bohns, a professor of social psychology at Cornell University, has been doing research on how people give and receive compliments.
‘Across numerous experiments, the researchers found that the participants significantly under-estimated how happy the other person would be to hear the praise, and significantly over-estimated how cringe-worthy they would find the encounter.’
Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioural science at the University of Chicago, and Xuan Zhao, a psychologist at Stanford University, have found similar dynamics in their research.
They found that worries over whether the compliment was delivered well, or if an individual was offering them too often, were unfounded.
“They just care about how nice or kind the compliment is.”
So next time you feel like praising someone on your team, just do it. Chances are you’re overthinking the process, and underestimating how happy they’ll be to hear it.
For more on giving praise, you can see our piece on ‘Praising in Private’.
