I also don’t like to think of things as strengths and weaknesses. If someone is ‘weak’ in some specific area, the first question is, is that fact causing harm to the team?
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Replying to @jameswrubel @aaron_turon
If someone is not as experienced in some area, your institutional controls (editorial review, pair programming, code review, etc) should cover this, and you can use those artifacts as examples to help them learn.
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Replying to @jameswrubel @aaron_turon
If someone is so weak in an area that they are harming the team, it’s a tough but honest conversation about how to build their skill in that area. Again if your team members have a sincere desire for self-improvement all you should need to do here is guide, not push.
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Replying to @jameswrubel @aaron_turon
It sounds easy in <280 characters and of course it’s not; it’s tremendously hard. Providing feedback on things that are core to a person’s identity is always delicate.
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Replying to @jameswrubel @aaron_turon
It’s where the trust you have in their desire to improve and their trust that you as a leader have their interests in mind and will do whatever you can to help them grow.
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Replying to @jameswrubel @aaron_turon
On the subject of growth, trying to map interests/disinterests against the work at hand is definitely like chess.
@timbickerton and I used to have marathon whiteboard sessions trying to match people to work. We roughly used the following criteria:1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
If someone indicates an interest in trying to grow professionally in a particular area we tried first to accommodate that request. Next, we tried to keep people with expressed disinterest in an area away from work there, assuming we had others who were willing to work on it.
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After that it comes down to projects that are of varying degrees of ‘interesting/fun/growth opportunity’, so we tried over the course of quarter-years to keep those in balance, so that everyone on the team got a chance to work on one.
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Replying to @jameswrubel @aaron_turon
Thanks for posing such an interesting question! I hope I helped.
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I'd love to get you two sharing war stories over beer someday.
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