The Leadership Garden Newsletter – #44

Everyone thinks they’re resilient until they’re standing in the slightly slower checkout line

Hello friend, I’m Csaba from Leadership Garden, and this is a weekly list of interesting articles that I come across that help me grow my thinking.

I hope you find something new to think about and share it with your friends.

And, if you forgot, this is in your inbox because you asked me to send it to you. You can always unsubscribe by clicking the link at the bottom of this email.

Move past incident response to reliability

We once relied on crossed fingers and optimism as our first line of defense, but there’s a better way. In this guide, you will learn about the current standard for incident response and analysis; where some teams get themselves in trouble with the current standard and how to find your path through the innovation and dogma of leading a company’s approach to reliability.

A Year of Scaling to a Multi-hundred Person Engineering Organization at Pleo

“Developing Our Capabilities through Training and Hiring” is one of the areas most companies still struggle a lot with. Pleo’s answer was: “We launched a peer mentorship program that offered suggestions of mentorship topics based on the career framework and paired people across teams. Most important, the mentorship provides a sense of feeling connected to and supported by the tech community in the company.”

Practical Motivation And Engineering Management – A Tale Of 2 Frameworks

One of the first challenges fresh engineering managers face is to figure out what makes their engineers tick. If they don't build out heuristics to understand their direct reports,  eventually they are bound to fail. Understanding what moves other humans (not only engineers!) is a shortcut to better communication, and greater inclusivity at work.

Startup Decoupling & Reckoning

Elad Gil's article is a great starting point for anyone seeking a broader overview of the tech economy. His analysis reveals some harsh realities: numerous businesses are shutting down or being sold off as “zombie startups” exhaust their resources, once abundant thanks to readily available VC funding.

Employee engagement: What to expect after layoffs

Unsurprisingly, engagement collapses during layoffs, including among those “non-affected”.

Finding Adequate Metrics for Outer, Inner, and Process Quality in Software Development

Many leaders struggle on the question of “What to measure?” or “Do we have the right level of quality?” QA Engineer at REWE digital, Michael Kutz (@MichaKutz), outlines different types of qualities and ideas on what you can use to measure each of them.

This week’s parting piece of wisdom: Discipline is superior to motivation. The former can be trained, the latter is fleeting. You won’t be able to accomplish great things if you’re only relying on motivation.