leadingIn(tech)#20: What I've learned so far
December 2022
Hi there! 👋🏽
Welcome to a new issue of leadingIn.tech newsletter. I’m Roberto, and this is where I share ideas, practices, and learnings toward becoming a better leader in technology.
I've launched this newsletter as a sidecar to leadingIn.tech as a place to try to put in my own words the learnings from all of the content I read about technology, management, and leadership. This issue is meant to be a compilation of those learnings since this newsletter was first sent.
The first issue of the newsletter was in late 2020, and I published just two issues; the first one caught me just after reading "The Coaching Habit" and "Leaders Eat Last" two books that helped me start setting the foundations on the leadership approach I felt primarily identified, a servant leader, as someone who’s mission is to help their teams to overcome the challenges ahead by creating safe environments for experimentation, failure, and continuous growth while inspiring them to achieve ambitious missions.
The second issue of this newsletter is also today the second most read issue so far,"What does an Engineering Manager do anyway?" an evergreen post that helped me put in writing the areas where I believe Engineer Managers spend most of their time and also have the most impact for their teams.
2021, was the year where I explored a few topics like hiring, estimations, upstream communication, and improving our resiliency. Early in the year it felt like the worst part of the pandemic was over and things started to gain traction again. But, I've started seeing things through a different prism and my focus moved to thinking about adaptability, reacting to unexpected changes. I’ve closed the year writing about retrospectives, an activity that has become; in a primarily remote environment, one of my favourite moments of getting the team together and openly talk about what ways we could be doing better to work as a team.
Finally, on 2022 I did a small modification about the structure of the newsletter and started dedicating it to continuous improvement, I’ve discovered the book Atomic Habits which I dedicated the first issue of the year. Using the book as inspiration I started a series of posts dedicated to the book “The Art of Leadership; Small things, done well“ on issues 12,13,14,16 and 17. The series were meant to be small bits of learnings extracted from the books that would help me summarize the main learnings from each chapter. While reading it I’ve learned a lot about the levels of abstraction and influence an engineering leader has to deal with depending on their level on the org and the size of it.
My last two issues this year were about one of the most important skills an engineering leader should develop, writing and asking questions. By mastering these two skills you have the most basic tools to communicate and influence in your teams and others.
Thank you for reading me all along, I hope the lines written in this newsletter will you and others to find tools and learnings we can use in our day to day to be better leaders. I would like to invite you to stay with me for one more year and find more ways to share our learnings together.
I would like to wish you a Happy New year andd a wonderful 2023!
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