A panel discussion around the Day to Day TL Practices topic sparked tonight amongst the #TeamLeadTO members:

We each get through our everyday TL lives with our own bag of best practices, life hacks and mindful habits. We’ve collected those from books, blogs, mentors, and our own hard-earned experience.

Now it’s time to share!

We’ve gathered a small panel of folks with team lead experience to share some of the strategies they use to do their very best TLing.

The Panel

In the order in which I was seeing them from my seat, the panel was composed of:

• Ofer Guttman - Director of Software Engineering, Points
• Luke Reeves - Developer Lead, Shopify
• Ash Christopher - Director of Engineering, Wave HQ
• Ania Halliop - Development Manager, Freshbooks
• Will Harford - Integrations Architect, Unata

The Topics

The original plan was to as many of the following topics as we could

• How do you give positive/negative feedback?
• How do you deal with inter-team conflict?
• How do you run your one-on-ones?
• How do you deal with a frustrated person who reports to you?
• How do you deal with complaints from people who report to you about your superiors/the company?
• How do you deal with complaints about people who report to you from others in the company?
• How do you help your reports plan their career growth?
• How do you manage high performers vs low performers?
• How do you onboard new employees?

In the light of what happened about week ago, I wished I knew how other people handled issues like that. So I joined the meetup, went, and I even took notes.

My notes

• Ash: Defensive versus heroic
• Ash: tactic versus strategy
• Will: People are not mathematical models. The sum of the inputs doesn't always equal the sum of the outputs.
• Ania: Trust — if you go in good faith, 99% of the people will match that. Similarly about respect.
• one-on-ones
  • This is their time, not yours: you put yourself out there, be there to help them, let them own the conversation.
  • Luke: Notebooks, no computers.
  • How are you? versus What's on your mind? Either as soon as you walked through the door, or since the beginning of the week.
  • What do you want to do in three years. blank
  • If you were to leave Freshbooks today, what would make you go?
  • Luke: There is no book, no Wikipedia page on what to do in one-on-ones.
  • Ania wrote an internal handbook in mentoring, one-on-ones etc.
• Performance
  • Luke: What is your impact? How do you make it broader?
  • Anonymous feedback: How is your manager doing?
  • Low hanging fruit.
    1. Be clear with your expectations.
    2. Document them. Easy to come back and keep track.
  • How do you define a performance metric?
• Paul: Experience working with someone with Asperger / autism
  • Very performant, maybe difficult to deal with socially.
  • In the majority of interviews, it's teamwork that is sought after.
  • Remote work? Not accepted in some companies.
  • Building rapport, safe to ask for help.
• Depression, social anxiety, mental health
  • Build a safe environment.
  • James W: employee assistance program (EAP).
• Ania: the Turn the ship around book
• Ash: Humility is a very heroic human trait

David Marquet's book, plus many of the topics that were touced, they all remind me of this article about creating not a sense of urgency, but fostering a sense of purpose instead.

These were my notes on Day to Day team leading practice. And yes, it’s time to share! Which practices managed to catch your attention?