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Jason Toff - Telling a good story is everything Takeaway: Have a compelling story. Repeat it over and over again. Appreciation is best tool for getting people motivated.
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Kate Heddleston - Criticism and Ineffective Feedback Takeaway: Critical feedback finds something wrong with the person without giving them feedback on how to fix the behaviour. Tell people how to be successful, not how they are currently failing.
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Phin Barnes - 23 Tools to Make Your Feedback Meaningful Takeaway: Remind people that you are there to maximize their potential as you already know they are smart and talented. Shorten the feedback loop - check in regularly to catch them doing something right.
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Kate Matsudaira - One Technique to Being Awesome You Aren’t Using Enough: Questions Takeaway: Best managers are great teachers, ask questions to help people reach their own answers. Use different types of questions. Questions that give you perspective. Questions that help you evaluate. Questions that lead to action. Questions that lead to knowledge.
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Kate Matsudaira - Tips and Exercises to be a Better Listener Takeaway: Make it about the other person. Take notes. Use active listening techniques.
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Derek Parham - Making Engineering Team Communication Clearer, Faster, Better Takeaway: Have a Technical design review document. Let juniors write it, then have the seniors edit it. Get people outside of engineers to read it - security, ops, product etc. Include the tradeoffs made to build the system. Create a separate document for the questions about the design. In the meeting - no talking unless you've read the document. No email and no typing, apart from the note taker. Participation in the questions document can indicate who is ready to move from Junior to Senior. Moderator to batch questions according to context. Question author reads out question - its all about a discussion rather than a presentation. Toughest criticisms may be the biggest reprieves - be grateful.
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Alan Ackmann - Pluralsight - Being a Better Communicator: Grammar, De-jargoning, and Articulation 💲 Takeaway: When communicating with non-technical experts remember they are experts in something else. Avoid jargon when talking with non-technical experts. Aim for clarity, conciseness and comprehensiveness in written communication.
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Paul Randal - Pluralsight - Communications: How to Talk, Write, Present, and Get Ahead! 💲
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Sasha Laundy - Your Brain's API: Giving and Getting Technical Help [31:01]
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Julian Treasure - 5 ways to listen better [7:44] Takeaway: Premium on accurate listening has disappeared due to recording. 5 Exercises for conscious listening. RASA - receive, appreciate, summarise, ask.
- How to make sense of any mess Takeaway: Introduction to Information Architecture. Free version online or you can buy the book (💲). Really concise read but provides tools on how to think about messes and bring shared clarity.
💲 - paid for content