Leaders rely on having a good emotional intelligence (EQ) and one part of EQ is self-awareness. Recognising your current emotional state is the key to better communication and navigating difficult conversations and topics. This is why I like this article from Sarah Baca using colours as a way to recognise different states. In the context of facilitations, she shares some clues about noticing how others might show signs of their current brain state.

Awesome Zine maker Julia Evans (@b0rk) offers some great advice for taking an act of leadership and sharing some great tips about what great sponsorship looks like. It’s underrated and underused practice that leaders and non-leaders can do that can make a huge difference 🎉 for someone.

I love the first subheader in this article, “Great leaders vacuum up chaos” from @staysaasy. It resonates a lot with a saying I often repeat, “Great leaders find order in disorder” and this is another variation which rings true. The opposite also rings true, and one I’ve seen too many times. As the article states, “ineffective leadership is a tendency to add chaos when one enters a room.” Don’t be the one that adds chaos.

This short article from Dave Winsborough (@winsboroughdave) introduces a nice short model for leaders who can’t step away from the detail - Tight-Loose-Tight for a better way to delegate work.

This article from Phil Bennet (@phil_bennett) reminds me of the Manager Readme phase (with negative reactions). What I like about this article is that it’s more about the process of introspection and self-awareness that reminds me a little bit about personal retrospectives or conversations you might have with a leadership coach. YMMV.

It seems to be the week of “avoid these practices” and this is another great article you should use to test against yourself, to make sure you’re creating the best possible workplace for your team. Dana Severson (@danerobert) offers a great set of example behaviours to avoid.

Leaders have all types of resources at their disposal, but there is only one that is irreplaceable. Read this to discover a leader’s most precious resource.

This article from IEEE Editors Evan Ackerman (@BotJunkie) and Erico Guizzo (@ericoguizzo) show an exciting development about a simple and useful robot for around the house. What I really love about this article is some of the behind the scenes like the selection of the robot grabber, using the wisdom of crowd choice from Amazon! ☺️

I’ve seen a lot of buzz around GPT-3 from OpenAI. See tweets here and here to see it in action. But Head of AI @ Facebook Jerome Pesenti (@an_open_mind) shows it’s already potentially trained with biased data (see here). This article by Manuel Araoz (@maraoz) is also worth reading to understand what GPT-3 can do.

This nice article is advice all developers need to read and use for writing tests that are useful. Thanks to Philipp Giese (@philgiese) for putting such clear, actionable advice in a short article.

One school of thought means that architectural decisions are those that are hard to reverse. To avoid this some may create over-engineered solutions to allow reversing but from a bigger perspective is not worth it, like multi-cloud strategies. Highly opinionated Corey Quinn (@QuinnyPig) shares other elements that are worth thinking about that will make you think twice about a multi-cloud strategy.

I wouldn’t normally link to TechCrunch but this article highlighted an interesting Zoom-product add-on that has some interesting modes with trialling - one focused on collaboration (turning Zoom into more of a shadow mode) and the arena mode that has some interesting features like showing how much “air-time” participants are using and automatically adding entered text into a google doc. The “air-time” will be an invaluable feature for those trying to prevent a single person from dominating a conversation.

A joint study by Microsoft and North Carolina State University came to to the conclusion that a common interviewing process (i.e. using a whiteboard) tests for “stage fright” more than “technical competence.” This underscores how important the candidate experience is at reducing anxiety to allow candidate’s potential to really shine ☀️. The Register also highlights the paper’s conclusion that whiteboard testing also adds inherent bias to the process.

A lot of technical leaders struggle with OKRs (and goal setting in general) so I like this short and sweet article sharing some lessons learned from Engineering Manager Arylee McSweaney (@adrainbowsend) from Etsy.

Thanks to Heidi Waterhouse (@wiredferret) for this fabulous book review. For organisations that have been around much longer, this book will be essential reading and a lot of the lessons learned resonated a lot with my time at ThoughtWorks helping companies with [digital|agile|CD|DevOps] transformation.

A lot of startups/scale ups and leaders looking for guidance about processes others use can find checklists, process guides, templates and more at this website. This stretches across more than tech/engineering disciplines to all types of fields. Definitely one worth bookmarking.