An Easier Path to Behavior Change on Engineering Teams Over winter break, my partner and I listened to 3 hours of a podcast interviewing Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep. Our takeaway? Sleep is really important! So we decided to try
A Simple How-To Guide to Writing Your 2020 Intentions Flying on airplanes has recently become a great time to reflect for me. I do some of my best writing and thinking on the plane. I’m disconnected from the internet — and since
A Whirlwind of Foundations of Effective Tech Leadership My heart rate picked up as I sat across from the brave volunteer who had raised his hand to be coached in front of the room. It felt like a lot was weighing
Ask for What You Really Want In my bathroom at home, I have a framed poster that reads “Ask for 100% of what you want 100% of the time.” I actually have a lot of inspirational quotes scattered around
5 Limiting Beliefs That Hold You Back from the Impact and Influence You Want For many years, I thought I had to be tough — and my toughness gave me the thick skin to get through countless computer science classes being one of few women, playing on sports
The 5 Most Common Mistakes That New Tech Leads Make In his book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Marshall Goldsmith talks about a common, big mistake that he sees his coaching clients make. They hold onto a belief that
What Does It Take To Be a Successful Tech Lead? Earlier this year, we interviewed a few dozen tech leads and asked them this simple question: “What does success look like as a tech lead?” Across small and large companies, infrastructure and product
5 Key Investments That Every Tech Lead Should Make What separates effective tech leads from everyone else? For the past few months, in preparation for a new course for tech leads, my co-founder Jean and I have been doing extensive market research
Being a Tech Lead with Teammates More Experienced Than You Many years ago, I was a tech lead on a short but intense 3-week project. It was also my first time as a tech lead, and I had to juggle a seemingly endless
Self-Sacrifice Is Not How You Grow as a Leader “You're the sh*t umbrella for your team.” The first time I was introduced to a tech lead role at my first startup, I remember being told that I was to be a
Managing Stress in Chaotic Times The team is pushing hard, sprinting towards a launch date. You've been staying late at the office for the past few weeks, submitting pull requests all hours of the night. So has everyone
How to Make Sense of Your Impact When You're No Longer Coding FYI, we still have a few spots left for Reprogramming Yourself and Building Alignment next week in SF. A few years ago, I was leading engineering on a team that had just finished
The Surprising Power of Visualization on Our Ability to Lead “The more I become conscious of the effect on me, the more I wonder why this super successful thing in the sports world is not more commonly applied to all these other situations.”
Bethanye Blount on Helping People be the Most Badass Versions of Themselves "I think the idea of looking at somebody as on a journey and that you can help them on that journey makes a lot more sense. To me, that's thinking about helping people be more badass."
Camille Fournier on Prioritizing Emotional Energy “Figure out what's important for you to be feeling about.”
Reflecting on Our First Year of Co Leadership “What are some of your favorite peak moments from the last year?” I shared a moment that stood out from one of our workshops. My co-founder Jean and I had just split the
3 Impactful Ways to Improve Your Onboarding Process — That Don't Take That Much Time A few years ago, I noticed that one of the engineers on the team had very quickly gotten up to speed. A few months in, she was dealing with external stakeholders and owning
A Company is Not a Family Two years ago, the company I was at went through a round of layoffs. Members of senior engineering leadership met to discuss — how do we engage the people who are left, when they
Bridge Communication Gaps to Make Better Tradeoffs One by one, engineers in the room started to voice some of the tensions they faced at work. One engineer shared that he found it frustrating whenever goals changed mid-way through a project
The Impact of Expressing Gratitude and Appreciation at Work A few weekends ago, I was at Edmond's weekend birthday gathering, lightly facilitating some sharing of impact — what we appreciated in Edmond, what we saw in him that he might not see in
How to Reprogram Yourself to a Better Version of You I used to have trouble being in the spotlight, sharing my accomplishments with my friends or with my co-workers. For years, I wouldn't really ever talk about the journey in publishing my book,
How to Build a Feedback Loop for Your Own Growth In 2012, Professor Neal Roese made a powerful discovery in the science of happiness and motivation. He surveyed hundreds of people across the United States and asked them to describe, in detail, a
What a Free Hugs Adventure Taught Me About Leadership The mom pushing her stroller down Chestnut Street stopped to give me and the person I was with a hug. “Thanks,” she said. “I really needed that.” And then she continued on her
Asking Questions to Trees: The Power of Mindsets A few months ago, I started working with a coach. I had seen her masterful coaching in one of the coach training courses I took, and I was blown away by the ease
Retrospectives: The Most Important Meeting You Can Run for Your Team At the end of every month, we run a retrospective. It's the single most important recurring conversation that we have. We always leave them feeling re-energized and re-motivated for our work, and that
