Management Dynamics
Reading🔗
| Reading | Why |
|---|---|
| Help Your Boss Help You | Assuming the motivations and purpose of your management is the same as you as an engineer is wrong. An interesting read for understanding more the motivations and factors that go into management dynamics. |
Notes - Help Your Boss Help You🔗
It's an interesting book, especially as the world of management is far different than the world an engineer is immersed in.
Overall, I found the book interesting albeit biased in discussions towards traditional corporate management structure. Since this is often the environment enterprise development operates in, some of these generalization are useful for thinking differently when things aren't clicking.
Proposals - Introverts vs Sensors 1
From Help Your Boss Help You:
Introverts appreciate having time to prepare themselves for interpersonal interactions, even if it's just a few moments. Extraverts look for opportunities to talk to someone directly.
Likewise, an extraverted manager will want to call a meeting to resolve any issue, which gets everyone together to talk. Introverts prefer to set up a wiki, with the goal of avoiding any interpersonal contact entirely.
Again, that is an exaggeration. Most people do not fall on one extreme or another, but the extreme cases help define the difference in preferences and are intended to make the actual situations easier to diagnose.1
This means the order in which you present a new proposal is reversed.
- Sensor: You focus on the aging stack, the steps to achieve migration, and only talk through big picture if it was asked for.
- Intuitive: You'd focus on the big picture and then individual steps.
Proposals - Feeling vs Thinking
Lead with facts or a demo in general. One is impression based, and the other is more dealing with whitepapers and facts.
Proposals - Judging Vs Perceiving
Of all the Myers Brigg values, this one is furthest from the actual word definitions we expect.
If the thinking versus feeling scale involves how people make decisions, the judging versus perceiving scale measures when they prefer to make decisions. A person with a strong judging preference prefers to finish existing tasks, while a person with a strong perceiving preference enjoys starting new tasks.1
The Keirsey Temperament Sorter1
There's some interesting information about the various temperaments: Guardians, Rationals, Idealists, and Artisans.
Generalizing:
- Guardians: checklist oriented. Can ask nebelous questions, which shouldn't be disregarded, instead still make an effort (timeboxed) to resolve quickly. Until requested, consider minimizing the effort until it's recognized as worth it. (I can tend to way overthink the effort expected)
- Rationals: Systems thinkers with a strong desire for process improvement, optimization, and improving architecture.
- Idealists: values harmony with a tendency to dislike conflict.
- Artisans: tend to try and enjoy work, optimistic, spontaneous. Tend to not be as prevelant in traditional enterprise worlds due to the lack of compability outside roles like sales, marketing, etc.
The difficulty when dealing with an Idealist is that they want to feel inspired by whatever they're working on, and if they aren’t, they have a hard time staying motivated.
- A Guardian has a job to do and does it.
- A Rational likes designing and optimizing the systems that make up the job.
- An Idealist has to feel that what they're doing matters, either for themselves or for others, or they're not interested.