Lara Hogan
Lara Hogan — Management coach, trainer, and author
Engineering leadership, management skills, and building resilient teams.
larahogan.meWhat we recognize is what we reward.
One of the best resources on the internet for engineering managers and tech leads. Lara writes about the unglamorous, deeply important parts of management — running effective one-on-ones, giving hard feedback, navigating reorgs — with frameworks that are practical enough to use the same day you read them. Her books Resilient Management and Demystifying Public Speaking are staples in the field.
Written by Lara Hogan.
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Creating momentum when an employee is stuck
Many of us are feeling stuck. We’re managing through crisis after crisis, and we’re watching our leaders and our teammates burn out and not be their best selves. I don’t know anybody who’s thriving right now. Day-to-day, you’re trying to make at least a tiny bit of difference. I see it! You’re working to help people get promoted, you’re running standups to make sure folks have what they need, you’re holding one-on-ones where you check in and see if your teammates are “okay”, for some definition...
Finding a buddy when you’re a team of one
I’ve been working with the rad team at Fly.io for the past few months as a fractional VPE, mainly focusing on management-y and culture stuff as the team grows. One of the things I really dig about Fly.io’s company culture is how teammates use their internal forum for sharing questions about work, project progress updates, oncall recaps, and other stuff that I’ve traditionally seen live (and die) in email inboxes. I’m finding that the internal forum helps keep conversations going async (and out...
How to make hard decisions: even/over statements
We face decisions every single day, big and small. Sometimes those decisions have tradeoffs that feel impossible to decide between, which naturally will feel particularly hard to settle on. For example, let’s say you’ve been struggling to enjoy your current role at work, and you’re ready to make a decision about how to address that. You’re feeling some stress about the volume of work you need to get done every week, but you also recognize that you don’t have relationships or strong connections...
Be a thermostat, not a thermometer
As I’ve learned more about how humans interact with one another at work, I’ve been repeatedly reminded that we are very easily influenced by the mood of those around us. It’s usually not even something we do consciously; we just see someone using a different tone of voice or shifting their body language, and something deep in our brain notices it. If you’ve ever attended a meeting where there were some “weird vibes,” you know what I’m talking about. You couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but...
Recognition and rewards at work
“What we recognize is what we reward.” I first heard someone say this in 2013. My leadership team was deep in a heated discussion about how to get more engineers to consider mobile web when building out new features. An absolute given now, it wasn’t then. At my organization, I was simultaneously trying to convince my fellow managers to think about how their new features might work on mobile devices and ideally, add UX improvements for the mobile experience to their roadmaps. Mobile wasn’t quit...
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