Team Leads: Being Intentional With Your Time
How do you get the most out of your time and your meeting participants?
Previously we talked about meetings getting a bad rap and how to evaluate or edit a meeting before canceling it. Now let’s level-set here a bit. Humans tend to want to work in simpler models, opting for black and white where they can. I’m not trying to spray paint your calendars full of meetings; I’m trying to get you to consider being more intentional about the time spent in those meetings before either conducting them or canceling them.
When I first became a team lead, my calendar started feeling the crunch. I had less time for the coding aspect of my job, but I was empowering the team to get more work done. I was much more motivated to make both categories of time count towards my goals. I found the meetings useful. Over time, that wasn’t going to be sustainable. I had to re-evaluate the who and the what every meeting.
You can’t be in two places at once.
When I became a manager, the coding expectation was gradually replaced by strategic planning and people development. More and more of my job was collaborating with other people, so my calendar started filling. Pretty quickly after that, I found myself managing managers, and I still had the same amount of work time in a week and suddenly more responsibilities to take care of. Each time my job changed, I had to take inventory of my calendar and decide what the best use of my time was. If I could no longer justify attending something, I reflected on what I got out of that time and who maybe should fill my spot instead. As an example, I was part of a weekly review with a partner team’s engineers when I was a team lead. When I became the manager, I eventually handed off to a new team lead, and it became more appropriate for him to attend instead. I let him shadow a few, and then reverse shadow, waiting for when I felt confident that I could fade into the background.
I remember showing up for a reverse shadow and when I went to say something about an important decision, he (unintentionally) cut me off. I shut up, and I was glad I did, because he took the words right out of my mouth. I was confident I no longer needed to be there; I trusted his ability to read the situation and give similar views.
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