Resilient Management

Meet your team
- Work style and preferences
Grow your teammates
Set clear expectations
Communicate effectively
Build resiliency
Resources

A team is composed of a least two people who share the same strategic objective.

Glossary:

Teammates: People you’re responsible as a manager.
Discipline: The skill set you primarily use at work. Peg: Design, or Brand Design.
Functional team: People who work on the same discipline.
Feature (Product) team: People from different disciplines who work together on a specific feature or product.

Sometimes, a team might be described as both functional team and feature team, peg: Mobile Platform team.

As a manager, you must be able to assess and improve your team’s dynamic.

Tuckman’s stages of group development:

Forming, when the group comes together. It might have a name and some understanding of tis goal, but processes and patterns still need to be defined.
Storming, you’ll start to see some friction. You’ve gotta feel some confusion and clashing to make it to the next stage.
Norming, where things start to iron themselves out. Individuals resolve their differences, and clarity is introduced.
Performing, flow state. You’re effective, you are communicating well, and you’re shipping.

When a person joins, or a manager changes, or the mission changes, these stages of group development can restart.

Meet your team

One of your primary jobs is to foster a foundation of trust on your team. To foster trust, you’ve gotta start by understanding each other.

To get to know your teammates as individuals, start from a place of genuine curiosity and authenticity.

Paloma Medina research indicates that humans have six core needs (BICEPS). Needs that must be met in order for us to feel safe and secure.

Belonging, a connection to a community or to a group of people. When you feel rejected or left out from a group, you’ll feel threatened.
Improvement/progress, A sense of making progress, whether for your organisation, your team, or your personal life. People may feel frustrated when their work doesn’t affect the greater good, or when there are no enough challenges, or when they change from the maker path to the manager path.
Choice (or autonomy), the power to make decisions about your own life and work. This needs calls for balance, too many choices can feel overwhelming; too few choices can make you feel powerless.
Equality/fairness, the idea that your environment includes equal access to resources, information, and support for everyone in it. When this doesn’t happen (or there’s a perception that doesn’t happen), people take to the streets and revolt.
Predictability, requires balancing too. If change is the only constant, it can be exhausting. If there are never any surprises, it gets boring. When our sense of certainty is threatened, we may have a really hard time focusing.
Significance, or status. Understanding where we are in a hierarchy, especially in relation to others. How do we get recognised also plays into it.

Each person might care about some particular code needs more than others.

Often we project our own core needs onto someone else, which means you’ll likely be trying to help them have their needs met while not quite addressing the core of their core-need problem.

Work style and preferences

It can be really helpful to gather insights about each teammate’s growth areas, preferences about feedback and recognition, and other aspects of their work.

You can ask a list of simple questions to your teammates in your first 1:1 together. A template.

What makes you grumpy?

How will I know when you're grumpy?

How can I help you when you're grumpy?

In what medium (Slack, email, in person, etc.) do you prefer to receive feedback?

When do you prefer to receive feedback—routinely in 1:1s, or as-it-happens?

How do you prefer to receive recognition—publicly or privately?

What makes 1:1s the most valuable for you?

What are your goals for this year? And for the next three months?

What do you need from your manager?

What do you need from your teammates?

What do you need from your peers outside the team?

Human learning and growth requires the right amount of four things: new challenges, low ego, space to reflect and brainstorm, and timely and clear feedback. How are these four going for you? Is there one you need more or less of?

What's your favourite way to treat yourself?

As you’re kicking off a relationship with a new direct report, it’s just as important for them to get to know you as you get to know them.

When managers share their approach to management with their teammates, it can create an opportunity to develop better working relationships.

Articulate what you’re personally optimising for in your role, so you can share that with your teammates.

What are you optimising for?

The framing of this question can help you identify your “style” or “philosophy” as a manager or leader.

I was optimising for growing emerging leaders. I asked open questions and offered reflections much more than I issued directives. Direct reports who wanted more direction grew frustrated.

Think about the scenarios in which your particular management approach might manifest day to day, such when you are:

Coaching, mentoring, or sponsoring your reports
Requesting and delivering feedback
Goal setting or vision setting for/with your team
Scoping, delegating, and shipping work for/with your team
Communicating to/with your teammates in different mediums

In those environments, what do you find you optimise for most as a manager?

Optimise for long-term relationships.

In the beginning of your relationships, share with your teammates:

What do you optimise for in your role?
What do you hope your teammates will lean on you for?
What management skill are you currently working on learning or improving?

Sharing the one thing that you want to make sure your teammates know about you, so that they aren’t mystified day to day.

Grow your teammates

This is the Storming stage. Previously, each person had been doing their own thing asn individuals, now a few things need to be ironed out: how to collaborate, how to hit goals, how to determine priorities. There will be friction.

You’ll end up wearing four different hats: Mentoring, coaching, sponsoring and delivering feedback.

Mentoring

In mentoring mode, we’re giving out advice, sharing our experience and perspective, and helping someone else problem based on that information.

If you are not a member of a marginalised group, and you have a mentee who is, be aware of the way members of underrepresented groups are perceived. Make sure that your advice is going to be helpful in practice for your mentee.

Our mentee success is ultimately our success.

Managers often default to mentoring mode because it feels lke the fastest way to solve a problem, but it falls short in helping your teammate connect their own dots.

Coaching

In mentoring mode, you’re focused on both the problem and the solution. While coaching, you’ll be asking open questions and reflecting upon them.

Asking open questions

To explore more of the shape of the topic, rather than staying at the surface level.

The best questions are about the problem, not the solution. Questions that start with why tend to make the other person feel judged, questions that start with how tend to go into problem solving mode, bot we should be avoided. What questions can be authentically curious.

What’s most important to you about it?
What’s holding you back?
What does success look like?

Coaching would start a two-way conversation, which would help make an otherwise tricky conversation feel more like a shared exploration.

Open questions, asked from a place of genuine curiosity, help people feel seen and heard.

Forming lots of open questions (instead of problem solving questions, or giving advice) is tremendously hard, but totally worth it.

Reflecting

Holding up a mirror for the other person and describing what you see or hear, or asking them to reflect themselves.

Help your teammates reflect by repeating back to them what you hear them say.

What I’m hearing you say is that you’re frustrated with how this project is going. Is that right?

Don’t be worried about giving a bad reflection; reflecting back what you’re hearing will still help your teammate.

Sometimes the act of reflection forces the other person to do some introspection an realise new aspects of the problem.

When coaching, you don’t need to have all the answers, you’re just there as a mirror and as a question-asker, to help the other person to think deeply and come to some new, interesting conclusions. It may not feel all that effective but coaching can generate way more growth than giving them advice or sharing your perspective.

Sponsoring

The sponsor hat is more often worn when they’re not around.

Sponsorship is all about feeling on the hook for getting someone to the next level. You will put your personal reputation on the line on behalf of the person you’re sponsoring.

Giving visible/public recognition
Assigning stretch tasks and projects that are just beyond their current skill set, to help them grow and gather evidence for future promotion
Opening the door for them to write blog posts, give company or conference talks, or contribute open-source work.

Members of underrepresented groups are typically over-mentored, but under-sponsored (in-group bias).

Put in the time and intention to ensure that you’re sponsoring members of underrepresented groups too.

Constructing and delivering feedback

It’s important to routinely deliver both positive and negative feedback to your teammates about their performance within their role.

You’ll want to look for opportunities to help your teammates grow or work better together by giving them feedback.

The best feedback is specific, actionable, and delivered in a way that ensures the receiver can actually absorb it.

The feedback equation:

Observation of behaviour + Impact of behaviour + Request or Question = Specific, actionable feedback

Observation, describe the simple facts of what happened, the who/what/when/where part of the feedback.
Impact, this is where you can share how you feel. Share the effects of the behaviour you’re seeing. The impact is often personal. Framing the impact in terms of what the recipient cares about will more quickly motivate them to change their behaviour.
Request or question, if you’re always defaulting to making a request, the other person doesn’t have to do much thinking or problem solving on their own. Hit pause on the mentoring mode and go into coaching mode instead. Asking an open question at the end of delivering feedback is often much more powerful than making a request.

Coaching teammates to deliver feedback

Feedback is really hard to deliver when you don’t personally own it. Feedback is also much more impactful and easy to understand when receiving it directly from the person who has it.

The first step usually should be taken by the person who has the feedback to share.

Start by coaching your teammate, what they might want the outcome to be, and what they want to optimise for as they have the conversation.

Then, in mentoring mode, walk them through the feedback equation and help them craft some good words and phrases for each of the three parts. Facts without judgement.

If there’s no impact, then likely it is not feedback. Coach the teammate who wants to give the feedback to introspect and develop a new perspective on it.

If there is feedback to be given, mentor and coach your teammate to develop a solid set of questions, to be more of a conversation.

If you ever find yourself needing to deliver feedback as a third party, find an aspect of the feedback that you can personally own. Care about team trust and psychological safety.

If you want your teammates to get into the habit of giving feedback, encourage them to align it to their career goals.

Striking a balance

Managers and individuals often aim to accomplish the following in their 1:1s

Build trust. A manager wants to develop a relationship and get to know their report so they can best support them. A teammate wants to know if their manager cares about them and is invested in their success.
Gain shared context. A manager wants to disseminate clear, relevant information about day-to-day work and company goals. A teammate wants to hear rumours, news and higher-level strategy.
Plan out and support career growth. A manager wants to help their teammate identify goals and plan their career trajectory. A teammate wants to keep growing their skills, gain new opportunities, and get feedback on their blind spots.
Solve problems. A manager wants to hear about blockers and other challenges so that they can help their teammates get unblocked. A teammate wants advice, mentorship, and assistance in making progress on their projects.

Open questions and reflections (coach) do so much more for building trust and helping someone grow than mentoring activities do. Sponsoring is great for growth and for building trust. If a teammate needs a bit more direction, mentoring is great. Feedback is the icing on the cake.

Once you’ve build a foundation of trust, be open to feedback about which skills you should practice more.

Sometimes the other person won’t fully understand feedback, it won’t take it seriously, or won’t be able to change.

Consider whether or not this teammate might flourish if they moved ot a different part of the organisation.

When someone’s behaviour is damaging to those around them, talk with another leader in the organisation about what to do. It’s possible that there’s another way you could be approaching this person to help them see how serious the situation is, and what needs to change; it’s also possible that it’s time for them to go. Lean on your network of support, you don’t need to do this alone.

Set clear expectations

Develop clear expectations in collaboration with your team, document them in a searchable, central location, and keep them updated over time. Team-wide expectations that are worth documenting and iterating:

Teammates’ roles and responsibilities, including the manager’s role
The team mission or priorities
How teammates should be collaborating, communicating, and shipping work

Roles and responsibilities

Clarity typically comes in the form of documentation like a career ladder.

Individual’s day-to-day or project-specific responsibilities can feel ambiguous. You can use two tools to nail down specifics, the assignment matrix and Venn diagram.

Responsibility assignment matrix

A responsibility assignment matrix (RACI matrix, Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed), the most frequent roles for people involved in a project or decision:

Responsible: People who do the work
Accountable: The person (just one) who must ensure that the project gets completed or the decision gets made. Often the one that do the most communication with stakeholders
Consulted: Folks whose opinions are sought as the work progress, they’re actually not working on the project
Informed: People who are updated either as major milestones are hit, or when the deliverable is complete

Naming some folks as Informed or Consulted can add clarity and reduce design by committee.

Responsibility Venn diagram

Venn diagram that could answer “who should be doing what?”.

You can held meetings with product managers, engineering managers, and engineering leads to chat about their responsibilities. Then write down the things that need to get done to ship work.

For example:

Product Manager owns the story of “what”
- Translates company goals into tech roadmap
- Is communication conduit to Product and broader org
- UNderstands customer needs + produces customer insights
Engineering Manager owns the story of “who”
- Coaches makers’ career paths and personal growth
- Recruits and owns interview workflow
- Delivers annual performance reviews
- Monitors team health
Engineering Lead owns the story of “how”
- Pairing/technical mentorship
- Surfaces major arch changes to Eng leaders
- Translates “why” for project to “how” (arch decisions, UX, product health)
- Identifies technical risks

All of those bubbles, intersect on:

Define + improve team processes (standups, etc)
Deliver feedback to teammates
Communicate hiring needs
Ensure team is hitting key results
Identify and solve execution roadblocks early
Understand, own, and share the story of “why”

You can use this tool with any intersection of roles. It’s helpful any time you have people in distinct roles or functions all working together toward a united goal.

The most important outcome of these exercises is that everyone on the team will have a shared understanding for who is doing what, and who they should go for which kinds of questions and decisions.

Team vision and priorities

Companies usually have a high-level “north star” to inspire and align the work that gets done by individual teams. Goal-measuring systems like OKRs or KPIs to measure progress over time.

What’s your team’s “north star” and how does your team work toward it every day?

Vision: The team’s north star; a dream of what the future could look like.
Mission: A more grounded version of the vision that describe the team’s role as it works towards that north star.
Strategy: How this team goes about achieving that mission every day.
Objectives: Measurable goals that reflect the mission and strategy, to help benchmark the team’s progress.

Collaborating on an publishing a vision and mission helps teams to gut check project plans, share what they are doing with stakeholders around the company, and back up on hiring strategy.

Team practices

To help add clarity to your teams, it’s a good idea to document details on your team practices

Meetings: Identify all of the meetings. Jot down the purpose, frequency, and participants. Add descriptions so potential attendees decide which meetings are important to attend, which might be interesting to attend, and which they can probably skip.
Email and chat channels: Document your team’s messaging channels, email lists, and resource pages, include context about why someone might (or must) choose one channel or method over another. Make it clear that you want your teammates to take part in improving the way the team works together.
Collaboration and interaction: The kind of work your team does, the processes your team has collaborating and delivering projects, and what you value in team settings. At Etsy they had the “Charter of Mindful Communication”
- Reflect on the dynamics in the room, to reflect when they were dominating a conversation
- Elevate the conversation, by being constructive to feedback
- Assume best intentions
- Listen to learn to stay curious about other’s perspectives

Documentation should be developed collaboratively, like a living document.

Communicate effectively

You will be continually tasked with communicating information to your team as the organisation around you evolves, especially when you don’t have a say.

You can give feedback to those in charge and help sculpt messaging so it will be heard and understood.

Planning your communication

When you need ot deliver a critical new message, it’s a good idea to prepare a communications plan.

Julia Grace, director of engineering at Slack, created a simple communications plan template

Header: author, date, status (e.g. draft)

Background:
* The What (most important thing you want to communicate)
* The Why (why's it changing)

People:
* Who knows
* Who will be directly impacted

Timeline:
* What will be said in [IRL or channel] when

Talking points

If you need to coordinate with others, you can turn the template into a table including date and time for each message, who’s communicating it, the medium used, an dhow the talking points will evolve for each step of the plan.

Share the document with whomever else is doing the heavy lifting of communicating, so that you can hone the messaging and the timing together.

Delivering sensitive information

Sensitive information should be executed as swiftly as possible, there are too many things that could go sideways. Take care to understand how your team will absorb this new sudden information.

It can be helpful to brainstorm ways to address their reactions so you can adequately prepare

Map big changes back to the things you know people care about
Choose your planned words carefully
Plan out who can be informed early on, and who should be informed later
Optimise for creating clarity and transparency as soon as the information is set in stone
Remember that other’s reactions can affect and threaten yourself

You are in the best possible position to help changes land with your teammates. Share this knowledge with the people above you if they’re spearheading the communication rollout.

Navigating confidentiality

Consider who can be trusted with sensitive information that will impact their coworkers in the early stages of a change, and think through the ripple effects at each stage if someone were to share information they shouldn’t.

The top things on your mind should be cleaning up any misrepresentations, clarifying the message, and then learning from this moment.

Wrestling with misalignment

Sometimes, you’ll be tasked with communicating information that you don’t agree with or believe in.

The absence of trust is the foundation of most team dysfunction. If you agree to decisions on the surface, but don’t support them or commit to them, way more friction will emerge over time. This behaviour will be seen as undermining or backstabbing and it will create fissures in your team environment.

When you disagree and can’t commit to a higher-up’s decision, first be transparent and professional about it, give feedback. Sometimes the decision will be already made and your feedback won’t change it.

If the misalignment between you and leadership is sever, you might decide it’s worth walking away from the team or the company, otherwise it’s time to “disagree and commit”.

Disagreeing and committing is the most mature and transparent move you can make.

Avoid sharing your brutally honest feelings with or win front of your teammates. If you need to disagree publicly, make sure you phrase it in a way that won’t sow seeds of disgruntlement and uncertainty with others.

Whenever possible, add steps in your communications plan explicitly designed to collect feedback, to make people feel seen and heard as they learn about this new information.

Choosing your medium

Your go-to communication style, cadence, and channels depend on what’s typical for your company culture, as well as what feels right for your message.

Meetings

Meetings are there for you to both push information and pull information, especially when that information requires additional context.

Sensitive, difficult, or surprise information is best communicated in person first (and followed up with an email). You can pivot your message based on the questions or reactions in the room.

Sharing information in a meeting can significantly reduce negative gut reactions to hard-to-hear news.

All hands meeting

Gathering everyone for the same meeting is helpful when you want to roll out big news. It can be organised for subsections of the company.

Walk people through the following:

A high-level description of what’s changing
Instructions on what to do with questions
An explanation for the change
A list of specific changes, as well as what’s not changing and what’s still undecided
Answers to questions you foresee them asking right away

The bigger or scarier the change, the less likely you’ll create space for feedback, so the people can process individually or in a smaller setting afterwards.

If you do hold open Q&A, avoid saying you’re disappointed in a question or behave in a demeaning way toward a question-asker. You can always answer a question by saying you don’t know, or that you’ve got to find some more information first; just be sure to follow up.

It is recommended to do routine All Hands meetings, so you don’t bring people up only when there is something and often scary happens.

Email

Emails are great for communicating status and announcements when there’s not a lot of nuance or context to share. Beware that your emails might last forever.

Choose emails when you’re ready to set facts in stone, especially after big verbal announcement in a meeting.

You can practice repeating decisions or actions after a meeting with a recap email. It creates a paper trail of decisions that come out of meetings.

You can use images for communicating:

The stated company line on the topic
Facts about what it means in practice
Your personal take
An invitation, for questions, feedback, etc.

Don’t just drop bullet points, share your broader context!

Iterating and evolving

Your job isn’t just to communicate out information, but rather to ensure it connects with your audience. To help absorb the communication.

People rarely remember information the first time they hear it. You’ll have to repeat it several times until it gets assimilated.

You’ll find also that particular word choices land better with different audiences, or different mediums get more feedback or attention from others. There is another element to think about: your energy as you’re communicating.

There is a range of styles for communicating the same message. For example, you can use colours, so you are aware of different styles available for your toolbox

Red, a bit of anger, frustration, edge, or urgency.
Orange, cautious, hesitant, tiptoes around topics
Yellow, lighthearted, effervescent, crack jokes
Green, in tune with other’s feelings, loving, high emotional intelligence
Blue, calm, cool, collected, steady
Purple, creative, flowy, great at storytelling
Brown, adds (and lives in) nuance, complexity, or ambiguity
Black, blunt, unfeeling, no nuance, cut and dry

Sometimes people need to hear a different tone, or feel a different energy. Strong leaders understand the spectrum of communication styles.

We also tend to assume that everyone understand, prioritises, and cares about the same things we care about, but that’s not often the case. Do the leg work of listening and learning what others around you are motivated by, are optimising for, and are prioritising. Then translate your message into something that’s more digestible and easy for that audience to care about.

Just like your communication style and cadence will evolve over time, your organisation’s will, too. As the company grows, as the vision pivots or becomes better articulated, as people leave and new people are hired, how and what they communicate will necessarily evolve too.

Build resiliency

Every organisation-wide action ripples out to both teammates and managers. Change tends to be our only constant; as managers, it’s on us to step up and support our teammates as best as we can.

Each new storm is an opportunity to gain experience, try out different tactics, and build up new skills so you can manage the next inevitable wave of change.

Managing times of crisis

Before a crisis

The clearer you can describe processes, the easier the cognitive load will be for dealing with a crisis.

Ways you can prepare in advance:

Know your benefits. Research company-sponsored support mechanisms for employees.
Lead by example
Ask for input. Ask the team about what information or resources they need to stay resilient in times of rapid change.
Keep setting expectations. Give them the gift of clarity, so they can also communicate with you about whether they can accomplish the work they’ve been assigned.

During a crisis

If you sense that something has gone awry for one of your teammates, you can say “As your manager, I want to make sure I’m supporting you as best I can. Is there anything that would be helpful to you to chat about?”

If your teammate does share with you that they’re experiencing something difficult, partner with them to figure out next steps.

How else could we meet this goal?
What can I do to help you meet this goal?
What would be the impact of moving this goal?

A natural instinct is to express deep concern, or deep sympathy; please do not respond in a way that requires them to calm you. Do not put more hardship onto your direct report.

Instead, acknowledge that you feel for your teammate, and refocus on their needs. “Would it be helpful to take the afternoon off?”.

If it’s not obvious, ask your teammate how you can best support them.

Managing your energy

During times of major change, managers will find themselves on the receiving end of their teammates emotions; this sometimes will personally affect managers.

Some managers find that the labour of managing or more strategic thinking drains their energy much faster than the work they did as individual contributors.

This is normal, there are a few tactics that may help you out.

Tracking your energy levels

You can color-code your calendar events based on the kind of brain that is going to be used during that time. You can get a sense of how you are spending your mental energy each day.

It can help you realise what kind events drain your energy and which ones reenergise you.

Experiment with your scheduling and see how the changes impact your energy or stress levels.

Repriorising your tasks

Scheduling and context-switching might not be the source of your energy drain; you might be overwhelmed by your volume of work and spread too thin.

The Eisenhower matrix can help you to figure out what to do with the tasks on your plate.

	Urgent	Not urgent
Important	Do these tasks now	Schedule these tasks for later
Not important	Delegate these tasks	Eliminate these tasks

Delegating projects

When carrying too many tasks, delegate work to others.

As managers, we want to give our teammates beautifully packaged, cleanly wrapped gifts of leadership work. However, the best gift you can give a teammate is a messy, hard-to-measure, unscoped project. It’s the biggest opportunity for someone to grow as a leader.

Hones folks’ problem solving abilities
Forces them to lean on more people around them
Stretches them into new leadership skills faster

It’s not just okay, but actually important to hand off bigger, scarier projects to emerging leaders. And as you do, you’ll need to support them along the way.

Tell them how and in what medium you will support them
Tell them that you expect this to be a stretch for them, and that’s the point. You’ll trust them to raise a flag if they are stuck
Use a RACI. Tell your teammate that they are the “Responsible” role in the RACI matrix for this project, and you are “Consulted” and “Accountable”.

Some folks may be wary of giving away your Legos, by what most don’t realise up front is that by doing so, you’re creating space to pick up new ones.

Be there to lend support when your teammate needs it, by asking coaching questions or reflecting back what you’re hearing. Warning about pitfalls, or helping them get unstuck. Stay in coaching mode when delegating.

Saying no

The best way to troubleshoot your energy drain may be to reduce how often you say yes.

Priorities and objectives are there for a reason. Wield them as a tool to help you practice saying no more often.

Several tactics you can experiment with to help you say no more efficiently.

Ask someone you trust to hold you accountable to saying no more often.
Make a calendar item at the beginning of the day to spend twenty minutes figuring out what to say no to.
Draft emails that you can copy and paste whenever you need to say no clearly and gracefully.

Building a support network

Diverse group of people to lean on when you encounter a workplace challenge. Consider each individual as a facet of what an imaginary ideal manager would be. This is what is known as a Manager Voltron (referring to the show where heroes join forces to create a giant super robot).

Always lookout for people who:

Will push you out of your comfort zone
Have different levels of experience than you do (both more and less!)
Have experience in a different industry
Are good at the things you’re terribly at

Where do you find more supporters? And what do you say when you do?

Growing your Voltron

Consider folks you’re connected to on Twitter, LinkedIn, and other asynchronous networks like industry email lists or Slack channels. Attend local Meetups to meet more folks there, or even better, give a talk at one!

First-team mentality

Leaders who are strong team players understand that the people who report to them are not their first team. Their first team is their peers across the company. This first-team consider the needs of the company as a whole before focusing on the needs of their team.

Shouldn’t you be prioritising what your teammates need over what your peers need?

In order to support your teammates well, it’s important to build a strong relationships with your peers.

Instead of spending time and energy watching their backs, your leaders can be focused on moving your organisation forward. When your leaders have built trust with each other it becomes significantly easier to manage change, exhibit vulnerability, and solve problems together.

If you consider your peers your first-team, you would have a more holistic picture of how others across the company are tackling changes to strategic direction, or are coaching their teammates to grow in their careers. And they would be learning from you, too.

A good metaphor for growth is what happens to caterpillars. A caterpillar will have to wrap itself into a cocoon, digest and convert itself to some kind of a gruesome soup, and reform itself into a butterfly.

Growth is beautiful, growth is magnificent, growth is what we should be aiming for. But in actually, growth is painful.

Embrace the uncertainty. Know that it’s there for a purpose, and that you will emerge a transformed manager on the other side.

Resources

Books

Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.
The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change, by Camille Fournier

Papers

Mentoring: Strategies for building an effective mentoring relationship, by doctors Hilary Sanfey, Celeste Holands, and Nancy L. Gantt
Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams by Amy Edmonson