The one-on-one meeting is probably the single best tool in any managers utility belt. I would also wager that it is the most under-utilized as well. The benefits of this meeting outweigh almost every other meeting vying for attention. If you do not have regular one-on-ones scheduled with every one o…
Brett McCarty
The words you use carry weight. The further up in an organization you climb or the more influence you acquire, the greater the weight of your words. I need this reminder regularly and I have only just begun my management journey. This is not to say that I analyze and carefully craft every word I use…
Brett McCarty
One of the biggest challenges leading a group of developers is keeping the team updated on everything that I can see. As time flies by in meeting after meeting it is easy to forget that I am the eyes and ears for those on my team. Until recently I had trouble figuring out how to relay all, or at lea…
Brett McCarty
The switch from an individual contributor role into that of a manager comes with some challenges. One that is a particular shock to the system is meeting overload. You not only need to manage direct supports, you also have to manage your calendar. The sooner you develop an intentional approach to ma…
Brett McCarty
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. Phil Karlton The quote above is a common saying in software development. After reading Scaling Up by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, I began to think about how we name things. In the book, the term dir…
Brett McCarty