The Bent Archive

My report is visually impaired

I recently had a new engineer join my team who is severely visually impaired. His impairment yields a number of challenges that I am having trouble sorting out.

Introducing the Good Employee Scorecard

Surprisingly, the expectations of a Good Employee don’t really change whether you’re on a team of many at a large corporation, or on a team of one working for yourself. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to achieve.

Re: cc’ing

Three questions sparked by last week’s newsletter on cc’ing etiquette — plus a bonus primer on bcc’s.

What if we all stopped cc’ing so much?

Let’s do a little test. For the rest of the month, you have to do the following exercise every time you cc someone: Write a complete sentence explaining why they are being included on that email and what they need to do.

How do I accept my team won’t always be working at work?

If it’s all getting done at quality, at scale, and on time — and no one is getting injured in the process — there’s not much room to criticize the process.

My boss told me to “speak up” in meetings

What your boss is trying to say is: “You are great. How can we expose more people more often to the way you think and act and work so it will rub off on them?”

Q4, meet flu season

This week is just about the last week you have to get “ready” for the holiday season. That means capacity planning. (Plus, three bonus rapid-fire questions just in time for Q4.)

Every strategy we can think of for managing under a toxic boss

We can brainstorm strategies with you for days — and we definitely will — but I doubt there’s a silver bullet piece of advice that will solve this problem. There are too many different players and you’re all humans: each of you is going to have different things you like and want. Ultimately, I recommend mixing and matching and making your own Thanksgiving plate with what feels right from this assortment.

Get ready: Your team will embarrass you

It took me a long time to build up the confidence to let my team’s actions stand on their own, and not let my own insecurity take over. In the meantime, it’s helpful to have a process to fall back on — a sort of program you can mindlessly rely on when you may not be thinking clearly.

Optional meeting invites

An optional meeting is a meeting where you truly do not care what the reply will be. The optional attendees can come or not come and the world will be exactly the same. Anything more or less than that? Do not mark the invitation as optional. It’s preferred, recommended, prioritized, pointless, a waste of time — some other adjective that’s not “optional.”

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