Performance Reviews_

This is the Managing Engineers podcast with Psy Jobbling and Adrian Lanzown. In this episode, we talk about performance reviews and how Si needs a haircut.

And Adrian is just here.

I do actually need a haircut. That's why I was thinking about it.

I got mine done at the weekend, man! Si got a hair cut. Adrian needs a haircut.

So what are we talking about today?

I don't know. What's it all about? What are we doing?

I don't know.

We keep talking about doing a podcast, and when the domain renewal came for a year and we still hadn't done one, I thought we'd best do something.

I think I was peer pressured into it. So that's my answer for you. That's why I'm here.

I like to a bit of peer pressure is good. A bit of healthy peer pressure is fine.

Define healthy.

Bullying is too far.

Bantering. Is bullying.

Banter's. Cool discussion about topic. I'm hoping the roady works have finished now because I was very concerned pre recording.

I think the roady works will be all right.

It should be fine. And I've had a walk. I don't know about you. Did you get out the house?

I've not had a walk. I mean, no, too hot.

You've eaten, but that you've not no. It's 25 degrees that put into one of your mini gadgets.

Yes. And so far I've done 3971 steps today.

I'm checking mine now. It hooked up an activity monitor. This is going to get interesting. Thousand 9700 steps.

9700?

Yeah.

And you've not been out the house. Oh, you did go out the house.

Oh, I have not. Twice.

Okay.

I did the morning walk and did the lunch walk.

Yeah. With the dog.

With the new dog spam.

Yeah. Always the dog spam.

Yeah. Hey, Nova. To aware of soon enough.

Dogs for life, not just for September.

You don't need to tell me that. I was trying to convince my children this. I don't think they realize. You're going back to school in college and you want a dog who's looking.

After it, then know someone who is.

Hello. That is me.

All right.

We got to digress quite a lot. We're good at this, by the way.

We are talking about going back to school. Reviews of performance. Some call them performance reviews. Yeah.

Tedious Link from schools. I get it. But yeah, performance reviews. Talk to me, Adrian. What's going on? Should we rewind to set context as to what the hell we do for a living? We could what do you do, Adrian?

So I'm an engineering manager.

Okay. And what does that entail?

So I'm an engineering manager, which covers a lot of the people side of things.

Right.

Not just focused on delivery, but is focused on the people. So that can be doing weekly catch ups. It can be performance reviews, it can be feedback, can be dealing with troubling situations that they're involved in and they need some help within work and also setting goals and objectives for them to work on.

Very nice. Guess what? I do the same. Oh, really? We work in the same organization in very close nearby teams. So yeah, hence the concept of this podcast is to compare, note and see what we can learn.

Learn and share.

Learn and share with the greater world. Every scenario we bring to the table is hypothetical. We must put that caveat out there.

Yes. And names have been changed to protect the innocent.

Exactly. Although that's exactly what we're on about.

Mainly the situations get made up because in real life they're just a bit more messy and less interesting.

Absolutely. Everything's a dramatization in these sort of situations. Yeah.

We need to make it land a little bit more exciting. You can put some tense music in the background. Performance reviews.

Performance reviews. We've just finished, I guess, the season of performance reviews. How did yours go generally as a theme?

Before we jump into that, let's look back at the aim of performance reviews.

What's the point?

What is the point? So historically going back I can remember very early days in my sort of development cycle of there being sort of a yearly one that was it, there was no other talk to your manager, never that's when they'd update you that something bad's happened and you've not been pulling your weight for a year.

You finally hear from your manager after eleven months going so you ready for your performance review.

Yeah. And that was very like anecdotal based of six months you did this, someone said this oh, I remember that this happened. It was never sort of weren't metrics in those times sound like the 14 hundreds back in the but then on from there it changed into the b. When we were people getting into the agile place a lot more started to get into impacts of agile reduced that feedback loop. You had stand ups, you had Sprint reviews and that sort of lent into, okay, we're going to do more on person to person reviews getting back more getting those but yeah, I think there was also this lean into like oh, now we'll start to look at these metrics. Let's judge you on your metrics of how many tickets you're kicking out.

This is getting dangerous territory when you start saying how many lines of code have you contributed this year? That was the worst one I ever heard.

How many commits have you done? Yeah, I was judged the best one should be how many lines of code did you delete?

Well, that's the argument reduced down and.

Then obviously different people doing it different ways. There's the old 360 degrees getting it from your peers, getting it from back.

Always works really well. Right.

Netflix it seems to work well because they have a day to do know.

They focus on a whole day what.

To focus on like a special so it forces people into seeing everyone looks.

Forward to that day and they were never off stick or booking holidays surely.

I don't know how they actually do it. That's what we should find out. I think everyone wants feedback.

Absolutely. Well, you say that everyone we assume everyone wants feedback. People like me and you generally we appreciate feedback constructive and positive. Right.

And that's where you can send into [email protected].

I tell you what, if you go into managingengineers net you could talk to us directly because it's all invested on on the open universe fediverse then that.

Will send us to our instance. Which leads into then the OKR thing came out. That was a big one at Google that got very excited. I think it's a very it's like 360 reviews, it's very buzzworthy. Everyone gets excited about doing it but I think it needs a whole excited.

Or nervous or they shout out about.

It this is what we're going to do, it's going to revolutionize things. And then I think there's now been a turn to sort of looking more at behavior based skills as well as bringing those in. It's not just kicking out code or deleting code, it's also looking at how are you going to the team, what are you giving to the team, what are you giving to the business that isn't just code. And then hopefully the future is that everyone should now be doing is they're doing their regular one to ones and catch ups. That's where they're getting their feedback, that's where they're improving, that's where they're looking at their goals, then looking at more of a holistic view.

Yeah. So that performance review should not be a big shock, it shouldn't be big bang. Try and remember what happened twelve months ago. It should just be summarize what's happened and what you've learned and struggled with over the last year and what do you want to do next?

Yeah, and I think there's been in the past, there's been too much focus on metrics.

It can be quantified, which is not dangerous.

I think that's where you get into the trouble with the OKRs and setting those objectives. If those objectives and goals aren't set correctly, you can use smart smarter, which.

I liked evaluator and review.

Okay, how does that fit in?

It's just extended but smart. Sure. You are looking at those metrics and adjusting if you need to because that's another thing smart checkers don't really allow for.

Yeah, which I think comes into it now of like things are changing rapidly. Companies want to be able to be agile and change, have that flexibility.

Buzword agile.

Yeah, I'll drop it.

Every company agile.

I'll be agile with my answer and then I think that changes. We can't now do that six month, we can't do the twelve month. It doesn't make sense anymore. We need to be looking at the person week by week, month by month, moving away from their metrics and seeing they're delivering value across the year.

And when you define value, what is that aligned to? Is it the business goals going the OKR route? Is it around personal growth areas, career aspirations?

I think that definitely gets tricky. Right. If you're doing OKRs as a business, I think that can work because you are from on high. This is the company's OKRs of what we're doing. As they get passed down, they should break down into smaller chunks, into more manageable chunks.

Manageable and relatable, which I think you can see the problem with OKRs, not all OKRs align with what individuals want to achieve or what certain teams might be working towards. They should be. But occasionally the OKRs that are defined by the business are very high level and measurable from an operational perspective, but say one team down here is like we need to just lift a shift our architecture into this new world because that's priority of the team, that's not getting measured against any of these OKRs, really. But we know it's bringing value eventually.

Yeah. And I think that's where it starts to get lost. And that's where if you don't do it properly and you don't stop to breathe and go through it, if you don't finish your breakfast first.

True. Yeah. I read a thing recently about OKR. What do they call it? OKR Universe or something like that. It's like a solar so it's like a solar system of OKRs and how they overlap and connect rather than fall into a hierarchy system. And I quite like the idea that you can sort of almost theme OKRs and connect with necessary teams and departments or whatever.

Yeah, and I think that has to come down, but I think you have to look out for the individual contributor at the bottom, that they're far away from it and it's like, okay, analogy.

By the way, at the bottom, they're the ones actually doing the work. They should be at the top. Reverse your chart for the people actually making the change, not just driving it.

But the pressure doesn't come up from the bottom, the pressure comes from the top.

Depends where you're talking. Volcanoes.

Pressure makes diamonds.

So, performance reviews anyway, holistically. That's what we're getting at, right? How people grow, how people are effectively measured about their performance in ways, but also as engineer managers or line managers, how we support them. Because that's really what our main remit is, isn't it?

And making sure that everyone's growing and progressing and moving along and is happy and comfortable, but also being pushed at the same time as they need to be.

So this time around, over the last month or so that we've been going through the reviews, I don't know if that wink was intentional, by the way.

No, it wasn't. I've got something in my eye.

Thank you. I thought you were being kind. So how have you approached the process yourself this time around? Has there been any sort of noticeable changes or observations that you've realized yeah.

So looking at how we did things and we sort of talked things through that we sort of ended up coming up with a template. I approached it as being let's have a look, well, you've done this year what you've got to where you want to be, let's talk about it, let's recap, let's do some self reflection. Are people always sort of very bad at doing. We talked about in the bad old days of it being one review a year, but it's actually the employees themselves, the individual contributors, the engineers doing that self reflection to actually think about what they have done, what they want to be doing, really. Where do their strengths lie and also where are their areas of improvement? So stealing stuff from a lot of other borrowing stuff from a lot of other people and getting influence from all of those sort of came up with a template and that's sort of sort of the format I went through.

So you define a template in your system of preference. Confluence works well for us, but there's many out there and then did you put the onus on the engineer to compile that data or did you help them with it or was it a bit of a combination?

The way I went about it is I started that as being like that's the open conversation. I asked them beforehand to sort of look at what do they feel their strengths are, where areas they want to improve, what do they feel they've achieved in the last year, what are they most proud of, of actually doing? And then to come into there to have a conversation around it, not to put more work onto them because I think it's very easy for your manager to say like, oh, you need to come prepared and fill out these answers for it to turn into an essay and for them to overthink it. And we're trying to make it easy. I don't think you need to go into too much detail on these things to overthink it and write an essay and get your chat GPT to write it all for you. It becomes a point of what was going to happen with this document afterwards, that you've written this 10,000 word dissertation on your self evaluation for the year.

But again, certain expectations. We're not expecting an essay of sorts, we just want you to think about your achievements, your main highlights, think about subjectively and objectively what your years look like, but be better prepared. I've been in situations before, though, where you kind of go into that conversation without this defined sort of agenda and people going, so what's this all about? I've not really thought about anything, I haven't made any notes or anything some notes would be useful. I don't want to sit here and pull it out of you. I'm happy to open up some questions to make you think about those things, and these areas should cover that. But if your marriage doesn't go beyond three months, then it's not really an annual review. Is it's going to be a quarterly review?

Does that reflect by maybe you don't need an annual review if you're doing it annually?

It begs the question, what's the value in an annual review when it should be more regular?

Yeah, so we went through that. I think most of mine came prepared with at least a little bit of what they'd done, a couple of bullet points. Some people came prepared for it with a big old list.

Yes.

Right, here's my reading for today. So I think it's mixed. It's trying to find it that works for every person. I think everyone is different, and we.

Need to that's another important factor. No humans are the same. As much as we'd love to clone the superstars, that's not the reality of what we're working with. We've got so many different personalities, different styles, different abilities, different skill sets. We can't tell them how to think right. We can just go, These are the areas we want to cover. Bring it.

Yeah. And I think that's the case in point.

Yeah. But a part of that review process, we do need to find some common ground. So this is why it's nice to highlight those areas. We're kind of, what have you achieved, what have you struggled with, what have been your main highlights, and what do you want to do next?

Yeah, and I think guide it gives them that framework to go from. Here's some starting points for you. Here's some starting things to think about, which seemed to go over. All right.

So in reflection now, after introducing that framework and that template across all your engineers, were there any trends or themes that you went, this worked or this didn't? Were there any questions that were really struggle? They struggled to kind of get their.

Head around sometimes, really? I think generally they were happy with their achievements. It was then trying to get them down to what they were proud of.

So did you sort of go, don't think about your proudest moments, just bring all your achievements and we can talk about them?

Yeah, because I want to just be more of a conversation piece to like, let's get in there. Really? Let's not just go, Well, I think the thing I did last week is the thing I'm most proud of, when actually they've got a whole year of stuff they should be proud of. The thing I did last week, that was the most important bit. I loved that. So have it as a conversation piece, because otherwise is they're just going to go through and sort of I thought it was being they're just going to fill it in and be like the other three things I've done. That's all I did this year.

By which, again, some people like to talk a lot. Some people don't want to talk at all. Some people are quite happy writing stuff down and just, I don't need to read this out to you. Read it first, then we'll come together. Because what I did with this, very similarly, I'd like this template for everyone got access to before their reviews, I said, have a think about it. You don't need to fill it all out, but make sure you're prepared. And most of them literally filled it out. That's fine because it gave me a chance to actually quick scan so we've both got access to this document. What I've been introducing this year as well is a concept of a hype doc to some engineers, not all. And again, it's like on that fortnightly catch up. How's your last couple of weeks been? What's been your proud moments? What have been your challenges? What are we going to do next? Because then that's your reference when you come back to that larger review. Go scan back. You got a history here of hopefully at least three months, ideally the whole year copy and paste into.

And I think it was more what did they want to achieve in the next year? Having that brief early look ahead of what they wanted to be able to achieve, bringing that into the feedback that they've got, bringing that into what they think their areas of improvement are.

So how did you identify those areas of improvements?

That was the conversation with them.

Was it like specific skills, behaviors? Was it a mixed bag?

For the most part, it was all on their side. It was stuff they'd highlighted and then bringing it in through the feedback from others. Going into that feedback section. Sure, that's when we're able to sort of, like, pull out from the two. Okay, you think your areas of improvement are this. The rest of your team, your leads, the other people that work with you think your areas of improvement are that a lot of the time it just lined up. It was the case of what you think you need to improve on is also what your team thinks you need to improve on, which is the perfect place, right? Like, that's where you want to be, that everything's aligned. I had quite a few where people had used sort of certain phrases or things when they were talking about what they think they want to improve on. And then we went through the feedback, and it was just word for word matching up, that it was just linking up. And that means they know what they need to be focusing on, I think otherwise you can get to this other place where people aren't sure what they are improving on or they think they need to improve on this particular area.

They're awesome.

Which is also yeah, you also get to that point, but I generally question, do these people really think they're awesome? Or when they actually reflect back like this and show the highlights they benefit to the team. Is there that piece there?

Did you find yourself having any of those awkward moments where you're going, Jesus, they think they're really good and they're divided.

Not really. Not actually by not really. That's just probably because I just have brilliant direct reports. I'm very fortunate and lucky that way. I've had them in the past where they think they're all they can do everything. They're important, it's everyone else that's holding them back. And then it's just a case of, where do you get that idea from? Where do you believe that? Is that an emotion you're sort of pushing there, or are you actually basing that on some feedback? Show me what you've actually coming back to. Those metrics bit. It's like, okay, well, show me that you did this. Can you see that change? Is there a visible change you've made there?

It's interesting you say, like the metrics, though, because you're probably leaning on, for example, a jira or a DevOps board of what you achieved. So I've seen one engineer literally pull a report out of ado. These are all the things I've built this year. I'm like, cool. I like the fact you've used that, but we're not looking at the numbers. But at least it gives you a nice summary of, like, are there any themes here or any areas where you feel like you didn't really get into the detail? Or if it did take a while, what happened? Was it something you needed to learn a bit more about or get some help with? But I did like the idea of jumping in back into your team board and just pulling out a filtered report for your personal delivery.

And I think that comes back to what have you achieved in that year? It comes into your Hype docket doc of, what do you want to put in there? Let's look at some I worked on this really cool feature, and I really liked working on it was really good. This is what I want to do more of, pulling those pieces.

We could do that as managers because they might come in with that angle and go, I can't remember what I've done this year. There was that one thing, actually, maybe in February time, but we can be prepared and go, well, hang on, let's pull up the board and go through. Let's pull out some key highlights for you.

Yeah, I think for the more juniors, the associate levels, that's true, but I think as you get more up, you need to be managing yourself. It's not for your manager to set you up. They can support you, but at the.

Same time, actually, you'll find the more seniors will probably be supporting other engineers more. They'll be providing the PR feedback, they'll be providing some maybe technical guidelines or something like that, but they won't actually be hands on as much. They might be paired a lot more so they won't get the opportunity to claim that piece of work.

But yeah, they have and that's where I'd never put it on. I'm like, right, you're going to do 6000 commits this year, pull out.

I remember one engineer many, many moons ago and he left, but his highlight was he raised the most amount of PRS on a single repo and he called it out on his leaving day. He went winning beat that. I'm like, well, it was a joke but I could tell it was part of him was like, yeah, I'm the main contributor to this whole repo and I'm really proud of myself here.

And that's just because they broke it down. I think that's where they were raising.

A load of PRS and just even POCs. So it did gamify it a little bit.

Yeah.

But yeah, you got to just be very careful. I think it's nice statistic to have maybe as a guide because then you can see year on year or month for month is there other dips and changes and do we need to look at that as part of your performance management?

I think they should be the conversation starters.

Totally.

To actually go through that bit.

Very serious this stuff, isn't it?

It's all very serious because a lot of this relies on because it's done such short or long term it's six months, twelve months, that's a massive period of time. What actually happens in like six months or twelve months is a really big period that can change.

Okay, let's bring us in then. How was your personal review rather than your direct reports?

My personal review was brilliant because of my line manager being so excellent and always supporting me and pushing me forwards.

Conveniently. She's also my line manager, so we were on the same page again. Yeah, I felt, just being honest with you, I felt like because I've done so many over the years it didn't really surprise at all. And I did think I've got a natural tendency to play myself down as well in many ways. I don't take the hype as much as I probably could or should. Your head shaking and nodding is definitely reassuring.

Yes, I think you definitely play it.

Down, but that's my personality, that's what I'm trying to get at and I think some personalities lead into that, some further claim. It all because it tends to align with bonuses, pay reviews, promotions, whereas we're trying to detach the two parts now what we the concept, I know not some organizations are doing similar, but there's a bit of a mentality in I'm performance reviewing so I can prove that I'm ready for the next level, as it were.

Yeah.

Do you feel like that's a thing that we have to try to I.

Still think a little bit. I still think it needs to find that balance because like you say, someone might not necessarily be the one that shouts about it themselves. It could be that they're creating new frameworks themselves. They're pushing things forwards. They're bringing whole communities forwards. But because they make that out to be it's a team effort. We're always pushing that. Everyone should make everything a team effort. Sometimes those people then play it down, oh, no, it wasn't me that did that. It was the whole team. We all did that. Even if that one person actually has been a key motivator and the person to bring that together and push this forward, if that person wasn't there, the team would probably stay the same and nothing would happen.

Yeah, I think the team might continue just to do what needs to be done rather than drive the real change. I think that that's a differentiator as well, because you can have a team of engineers that just chip away a backlog, not really trying to change anything in the background really significantly. You need a key player to come in going, why do we do things this way? Can't we make it better? And that's the kind of behavior I really love to see across all behaviors and competencies.

It helps everyone, and that's where the manager comes in to really help out that person. Being like, okay, let's really look at those bias, that bias that you think the whole team does. It actually, we're looking at it. You contribute a lot to it. You organize a lot of pieces to put it into that place so the team can do it. You're an enabler on that team, which can have a massive impact.

So that would be the sort of engineering manager's responsibility, really, to kind of go, look, off the record, between me and you, I do see you individually as a key player in that thing or that drive or that change.

Does that need to be off the record?

Don't have to be off the no. I mean, in the one to ones, but you know what I mean. I'm just like having that personal conversation first to kind of go, recognition, mate. You need to realize that you've done something really cool, and I want you to get pat on the back. You deserve the praise you deserve. And then I'm going to try and tell that public because I don't want to just come out of a shock as well because I think others need to realize that's a really cool behavior that we want to reward and recognize.

And that's where I think I definitely go into my coaching mode of getting it out of them, really trying to push it out of know, not just me bringing all these things in, being, you know, did the team do that? What did you do to that? How did that make you feel that you were involved in that? What value did you bring to the team to allow them to do that?

Yep. All open questions. Very good, coach.

Oh. Thank you.

I want to stop calling you Ted.

Thanks.

Have you watched it yet?

Yeah, I haven't seen the final episode of the final season.

Oh, you hold it off.

Yeah. I can't commit to it.

Yeah. I'm disappointed. Because it's the end.

No.

Well, they say it's the end, but I was like, no, that can't be the end of it. Come on.

Should be the end.

Ted Lasso.

For those that are following along, succession ended correctly. Ted Lasso should end correctly. And then we're all done. It's not friends special.

Let's be honest. Everyone loves Ted Lasso.

You can put a special in that's. Fine.

That Christmas special was terrible, but it was still enjoyable.

All right, what do you think the future trends are? Where do you see this going?

Performance reviews. I think going back to one of your earlier points, it should be less so, more frequent, so less big bang. I feel like monthly is too frequent, though. Although you can chip away at the conversation in those monthly conversations or fortnightly weekly whenever you do it. I think quarterly or even every two months. I don't know what that phrase should be. We came up with one bimonthly by trimonthly. Yeah, bimonthly. So it's every two months. I think that's a nice cadence, because it kind of chips into it fits three into a half year rather than it just being what's happened, and it gives enough time to make a change. So I don't think months enough. Sometimes. I think two months gives you a good opportunity to actually make a significant impact or a measurable difference. But a month is really tight. Two weeks is definitely not anyway.

Daily. Yeah. What's the dream?

Well, that's one angle. You keep mentioning feedback. But for me, that's the part that I really struggle to get. Netflix's idea of going condense a day and do it all in one go. Who wants to do that? That's horrible. That's painful. At least you get it. Great. But we experiment with the concept of just having a dedicated hour. You sit on a call, we booked it out, so you got no distractions. Here's all the feedback forms in one and do it. And you can clock off when you're done, because we can see they're done as well. It just encourages them to do it, but not rush too much. So I think we define, like, an hour for a team of, say, six or seven. It's about right. But I want to look at how we introduce that live feedback more, so it's not like periodically. It should be straight away. I've just been pairing with someone. Tell me straight away, what did you think was cool? What do you think I should try next? And just use that simple two question mechanism. What was great? How would it be even better?

Simple as yeah, I think it's getting back into that real time feedback loop. Right. All agile is reducing feedback loops. Just doing that with people really bring it in.

And I think knowing engineers don't necessarily always like to pair, but they are in a good place when they tend to do it. I think it's a great opportunity to go even on a PR pull request review. That's your feedback loop. If you're getting a theme here, have you thought about this design plan? Have you thought about that integration? Have you thought about blah, blah, blah? Okay, we've identified some common areas here that you probably need to capture as a mini objective just to kind of understand what the concepts might be, even from a behavioral perspective. If you just having a quick chat and going, it was a good conversation, actually. Thanks for the coaching. Really useful. Have you heard of this model? You're like, oh, no. Again, live feedback. Got it. That's my next action. And that's the kind of mindset I want to get into, ultimately. That's my goal, is, like, you got live feedback, more regular, more ad hoc and async, whereas not this quarterly, bimonthly, whatever cadence we've got at the place at the moment.

Yeah. And then, like, you saying, like, every eight weeks, every other month, it turns into this. Right, let's have a bit of self reflection. Do the retro. Maybe we should just call it Speedback it. You can come up with the marketing names for it. But yeah, doing that piece, getting back into it, getting them to stop and think is always my thing.

And I think we've had quite good success with the feedback concept, actually. Even if it wasn't as regular as we'd like it to be, most engineering teams can kind of go, that was a useful hour. I actually got some real feedback from my engineers, my mates and teammates. Never even spoke to some of them enough. And I was like, that was another little tick for you. Maybe reach out a bit more.

Do you think that's possible with all different personality types?

It's very good for those, but I think, yeah, ultimately, every team should be in a comfortable space, psychologically safe space to do that. I feel like maturity comes into the play as well. Knowing how to professionally have a conversation without being too subjective and also being aware of competencies and personal goals anyway, because if I came to a conversation with you and said, anything I'm doing on my objective water thing to start with, okay, let me start the conversation with these are my goals. Let's talk about it later, maybe, or in a week's time when you've had a chance to reflect and see. And I think that's something that we should really consider. Find the good relationship back on. Your point for less confident people, so they can have, like, a peer or a mentor or a buddy or someone that they can really have an honest conversation with, but then switch between objective and subjective feedback to really appreciate and respect each other. Which is where I think a lot of teams can get better at all.

Right, how do we wrap it up.

In a bow and distributed? I don't know. What are our key takeaways from this.

One, then are the key takeaways for you? Make sure you're getting feedback regularly.

How regularly?

As regularly as it needs to be. It should be quick feedback, real time, as it happens. If someone has an issue in a meeting, pull them over and say after the meeting, not halfway through. Privately. Let's talk about that. What happened there? What could you have done? What could be better?

Building that feedback as well somewhere.

Yeah. And then logging that down. Right. How are we going to work around that? How are we going to make sure it doesn't happen again? Sort of thing. And helping them and coaching them along with that. Then having your hype document. So it's got all of your good stuff in there, so you can see that. Yeah.

I use the word hype because I think it's been used before. But you should also track any challenges, and it's an area where you kind of go you're honest with yourself and suggest, well, I know that it was great to hear I was good at this. I didn't realize that was a problem. I'm tracking it. Thanks.

Yeah. And then I think it's monthly or every other month is have a meet of self reflection, assigning time. Just say, like, right, you take half an hour, an hour sometimes. Just look back like, what's going well? What's not going well? What do they want to improve on?

Would you say that would be on your own or with your manager?

I think it's going to be on your own to start with, and then that can then feed into a conversation as you're happy to do with part of it is there could be something that you don't want to discuss. Is you to be realistic with yourself about what's going well or not. Then take that into your manager, your coach, your mentor, whoever it may be, and then be like, right, this is how I'm feeling. This is what I think I want to do. And they'll help you get there.

So get loads of feedback, as much as you can, live as much feedback.

As you can, as quickly as you can, as regularly as you can.

And record it and then reflect.

Record it and log it down.

And ideally, app.

Yes.

So you adjust your next steps based.

On taste and adjust. Yes.

Nice. I agree. Good summary there, Adrian.

Thank you.

Don't know why I did that.

It's a bit weird. All right, if you found this conversation useful, please remember to like and subscribe.

Bear with us, listener. This is our first ever this and we appreciate all and any feedback. Hint. Do send in your comments and thoughts. We are on the Mastodon managingengineers net. Adrian and at Psy. Do we have an email address? I don't think we can set one up yet.

I don't think so.

We can email [email protected].

Nice. Or you can go to Sidejobbling.com or Adrienlansdown.com.

There it is. Freestyle.

I think the future is giving out your own domain. It's not about giving out mastodon or Instagram or Billybongs.com.

We would because we have got our own domains and we have a yeah.

But remember yeah, it's interesting. I was thinking about this last night that's wrapped it up. Join us next time for another episode.

Where we'll talk about something else great about managing engineers. Wink for those that are wink.

Those that are listening. Those that are watching or those that are listening.

We got both. I'm going to go both, I think, because YouTube's supporting podcasts soon. Dreadful.

About Me okay, get ready for this.

This podcast was recorded with Squadcast, edited with Descripts and hosted on Pinecast. For all other details, go to Managingengineeredpodcast.com Slash Credits, where you will find all the extra details and referral links for anything you'd like to try out.