Welcome to the $TEAM! Whether you are a new hire or transitioning from another area, I am excited to work with you at$COMPANY! The intention of this document is to serve as a user guide for how I work and accelerate the process of "getting to know each other" phase of our working relationship.
I am personally a work-in-progress, and so is this document!
I have high expectations for you. Never fear though. I hold myself accountable to those same expcations, and will work with you to excel in your role.
I believe in building people and products, which is a higher priority to me than company profits.
While I am a leader, I believe my role is just another member of the $TEAM at$COMPANY. When you view an org chart, I am at the bottom.
I am a coach at heart.
| What | What I expect from you | What to expect from me |
|---|---|---|
| Own your career | You have a personal responsibility to learn, level up, communicate your experiments and take control of your career. Every day, find a way to make yourself better than yesterday! | I want to work with you in your journey through coaching and exposing you to amazing opportunities. |
| If you are blocked | Overwhelmed? Can't do your job? Heard a rumor? Need clarification? Blocked on an assignment? Need an unbiased perspective on an issue? Reach out to me and we will find time to work through it together. Don't let anything fester to the point of being a distraction; distractions move us away from action and results. | I want to work with you to remove road blocks, enabling you to be in a healthy and productive state of mind. To do this, I will ask questions, some difficult, some elephant in the room, to help you to move forward. |
| Be a good team member | You and your team should have each other's backs, push each other to excel, hold everyone accountable (internally and externally to our team - especially me!), focus on outcomes, understand vision and foster an environment of continuous learning. | I will be hyperfocused on creating a culture and an environment for our team, allowing us to build great products, while having a safe place to share our thoughts. |
| Understand why | We are more effective when we know our purpose and understand the "why". When you don't, stop and ask! I want everyone to be able to communicate an elevator speech about what you are working on to any audience. Practice. I will be asking you from time to time. | With your help, I will try to clearly communicate vision, goals and direction. When I don't, let me know! |
| Problem resolution | Everyone has a different style to solving problems. Some need to think aloud, some internalize, while others like to do stuff. Whatever your style is, before you hold up the white flag, put some thought into it as it will show your effort. | I am here to help. It may not be the answer you want to hear, but my goal is to help give you direction in solving the problem yourself. |
| Yell at me | Disagree with me! Tell me when I screw up or when I don't live up to something I said. | One thing is for sure... I will mess up. Please tell me so I can learn from it and make better decisions in the future. |
I have a authentic style of leadership. Qualities include:
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Self-aware and genuine
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Mission driving and focused on results
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Lead with my heart
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Focus on long term
As of 2016, my Strengths Finder results were:
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Achiever (Executing)
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Analytical (Strategic)
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Arranger (Executing)
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Learner (Strategic)
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Developer (Relationship)
Your time. 1:1s are your time to talk about topics that you wouldn't talk about with a larger group.
Frequency. How often and how long is really up to you. Some individuals like weekly, biweekly or monthly. To start, I would lean toward more frequent, adjusting along the way, and rarely going past monthly occurrences.
A safe place. Sometimes you will just need to vent, swear or talk about life problems. Our conversations will not go past our walls. At no point will I share something personal outside our conversations.
What will we talk about? I don't like to treat these as status meetings, though I may hold an IM or question til this time because I need more context. I will bring up elephant in the room topics and highly suggest you read The Art of the Awkward 1:1 and The Art of Getting Honest Feedback.
Humans first. I believe that happy, informed, and productive humans build fantastic products. I optimize for humans. Other leaders will maximize for the business, the technology, or any other number of important facets. Ideological diversity is key to an effective team. All perspectives are relevant. We need all these leaders, but my bias is towards building productive humans. 1
Leadership comes from everywhere. I’ve wasted a lot of time in poorly-run meetings by bad managers. As an engineer, I remain skeptical of managers, even as a manager. While I believe managers are an essential part of a scaling organization, I don’t believe they have a monopoly on leadership, and I work hard to build other constructs and opportunities in our teams for non-managers to effectively lead. 2
Just get started. My wife hates when we make a big purchase. I call 20 people and research to the Nth degree. In the end, debate is often what requires us to get comfortable with a decision. We all been in meetings that require another meeting to debate direction, which are often valuable. However, I believe starting is the best way to begin learning and make progress. 3
Don't confuse pain and progress. We are humans, it's a natural for us to follow the easy path. If the right thing to do is difficult, follow the right path, break it down into small chunks and push through it.
Interview once a year. It is important to keep your skills up and gain perspective of what you are missing in the current job market at $COMPANY.
Transparency. Having information allows us to make better informed decisions. I share everything that I can. When I can't share, I will let you know. If you have a question, please ask. I will let you know if I can't tell you.
3 factors of control. There are things you can control, things you can influence and things you can't control. Focusing on things you can control and influence will bring you to action. Things you can't will just be left for debate or speculation.
Feedback. Feedback is critical to both our personal growth and $COMPANY success. Be respectfully blunt, share often and cite specifics.
Our time together. In the end, I hope that we have created an environment where you have better yourself, better your team and wherever you go, it will reflect on environment we have created at $COMPANY.
Work life balance. Life happens! I don't believe that anyone should work crazy hours to get their job done. Our $COMPANY may have cyclical times, but is on us to work together to prioritize and improve processes that will reduce the need to be at work more than 40 hours per week.
Passion. I am very passionate and LOUD. It can be overwhelming for some people. If I get too excited, let me know!
Inquisitiveness. I ask a lot of questions - it's how I learn! I like details, and when I don't understand, I keep asking. Please do not interpret it as me challenging what you are doing.
Celebrating success. I have a mindset of an offensive lineman, I played center at UW-Whitewater. I keep chugging and burning until I can't go on. This leads to me not giving enough high fives or singing enough praises. I continuously work to understand how we can celebrate successes together and continuously try to get better. If you need feedback, ask!
Thoughts as a LinkedList. My brain doesn't work in a contiguous thought process. It works more how a LinkedList stores information. I have a concept, share thoughts, collect feedback, and sometimes it matures, while other times it doesn't. It never comes to me all at once.
Lots of lists. It began when I was a child. Growing up, my mom always had a chore list for my 5 siblings and me. This is how I manage thoughts, TODOs, etc.; I will create a list. When you see a list with your name on it, and you don't know why, ask!