There’s lots to be said (and felt) about Performance Improvement Plans (PIPs); they’re often a step that a company takes when an employee is not meeting the expectations of their role, and their manager (or the company) is considering whether or not to terminate this person’s employment. I’m oversimplifying here, but you can think of a PIP as explicit documentation about what a person needs to do differently within a specific timeframe, both to make sure there’s clarity and a shared...| Lara Callender Hogan
I’ve been working with the rad team at Fly.io for the past few months as a fractional VPE, mainly focusing on management-y and culture stuff as the team grows. One of the things I really dig about Fly.io’s company culture is how teammates use their internal forum for sharing questions about work, project progress updates, oncall recaps, and other stuff that I’ve traditionally seen live (and die) in email inboxes. I’m finding that the internal forum helps keep conversations going async...| Lara Callender Hogan
We face decisions every single day, big and small. Sometimes those decisions have tradeoffs that feel impossible to decide between, which naturally will feel particularly hard to settle on. For example, let’s say you’ve been struggling to enjoy your current role at work, and you’re ready to make a decision about how to address that. You’re feeling some stress about the volume of work you need to get done every week, but you also recognize that you don’t have relationships or strong ...| Lara Callender Hogan
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your...| Lara Callender Hogan
“What we recognize is what we reward.” I first heard someone say this in 2013. My leadership team was deep in a heated discussion about how to get more engineers to consider mobile web when building out new features. An absolute given now, it wasn’t then. At my organization, I was simultaneously trying to convince my fellow managers to think about how their new features might work on mobile devices and ideally, add UX improvements for the mobile experience to their roadmaps. Mobile wasn...| Lara Callender Hogan
Congrats, you’ve made it through your first 2 months as a new hire in a leadership role! You’re in the home stretch of this initial season. You took advantage of the first 30 days in the role to build trust by employing “sponge mode.” You asked lots of questions, genuinely listened to your teammates’ answers, and avoided enacting any sweeping, permanent changes to the way work gets done. Then you leveraged what you learned during those first 30 days by announcing and running two exp...| Lara Callender Hogan
Woohoo, you’ve made it through the first 30 days in your new leadership role, and you didn’t change a thing! Congrats—you’ve been building trust by soaking in information and helping folks on your team feel heard and seen. At this stage, you now have some ideas for how your teams accomplish and communicate their work, what the roadmap looks like, how performance is assessed, and a number of other things that you want to implement. But wait—before enacting any lasting change, it’s ...| Lara Callender Hogan
You’ve started in a new role: congrats! Throughout my years as a coach, I’ve seen lots of my clients land in a new leadership role as a director or above, and make a well-intentioned but enormous mistake: they make a big change within their organization before building up trust with their teams. I’m eager to help you avoid this classic pitfall! Let’s break it down into how you should think about enacting change in your first 30, 60, and 90 days as a senior leader. First 30 days: spong...| Lara Callender Hogan
My most-used tool these days is definitely this list of 20 great open questions. There are so many things it’s useful for. If you haven’t leveraged the list yet, here are some easy ways to start using these questions! Deliver effective feedback Transform a feedback conversation from a one-way feedback dump into a collaborative problem-solving session with one of these coaching questions. Use the Feedback Equation: first share your observation of someone’s behavior, and the impact of tha...| Lara Callender Hogan
An attendee from one of my Delivering Feedback workshops asked: I think the Feedback Equation we learned today could work well with my manager, but I’m concerned about implementing it. One of my biggest fears about giving them feedback is their negative response to it, so tying it back to what’s important to him makes a lot of sense to me. However, how would I use coaching/open questions without getting salty that I have to coach them through the situation? I don’t have power in the rel...| Lara Callender Hogan