"I'm about to schedule 1:1s with my team, and I don't know what to say."
The Soft Stuff gathers how-tos, templates, and articles to help you be the manager and leader your team needs. It's a place to discover helpful tools and share what you know with your peers.
"I'm about to schedule 1:1s with my team, and I don't know what to say."
The Soft Stuff gathers how-tos, templates, and articles to help you be the manager and leader your team needs. It's a place to discover helpful tools and share what you know with your peers.
The Soft Stuff has articles in the following categories:
Interviewing
This topic is all about interviewing, from the other side of the table. You'll find interview question banks, interview scenarios, and interview processes you can adapt for your own needs.
Meetings
Meetings are an important tool for getting stuff done, and for making sure your team is in sync. But there aren’t novelty awards that read “I survived another meeting that could have been an email” for nothing. Find techniques and templates in this topic for making the most of meetings (not making the most meetings).
Diversity & Inclusion
There’s plenty of evidence showing that diverse teams function better and produce better results. This topic has blueprints for building diverse pipelines, fostering an inclusive environment, and overcoming your own biases.
Self Care
As managers it can be difficult to find people to bounce ideas off of. The additional burdens of the job can get overwhelming. And many of us want to keep our individual contributor skills sharp. This topic can help.
Building Culture
Your product or service is what your team does all day. Culture is why they do the work. Why they enjoy their work, why they stay, why they refer friends for open positions. You should build your culture authentically, but this topic shows you how others built and defined their culture.
Recruiting
It’s hard to be successful as a manager and leader without a great team. This topic is all about tools and techniques to help you sell the opportunities on your team.
Departures
Even in the best teams, sometimes it’s in an individual’s best interest to make a change. And sometimes as a manager you’re forced to take action to remove someone from your team. This tooic is all about handling these processes authentically and humanely.
Templates
No one likes looking at a blank page. Use the templates in this section to give you a starting point, or as inspiration for your own documents.
Growth
When you have your team in place, how do you guide them and help them grow as contributors and as individuals? This section has tools and templates to help you help them.
Further Reading
High-quality books, articles, podcasts and long-form content related to leadership and management. Even if you can't put them in to practice right away, you'll get a lot of value out of these recommendations.
Open Source
The open source movement in technology has accelerated change and made organizations more nimble. Leveraging open source technology means not reinventing the wheel every time. This topic holds posts that are specifically licensed for re-use.