It’s the secret to high-performing teams — and strong marriages.

The average ratio for the highest-performing teams was 5.6 (that is, nearly six positive comments for every negative one). The medium-performance teams averaged 1.9 (almost twice as many positive comments than negative ones.) But the average for the low-performing teams, at 0.36 to 1, was almost three negative comments for every positive one.

Only positive feedback can motivate people to continue doing what they’re doing well, and do it with more vigor, determination, and creativity.

Success continues for Openly, the premium homeowners insurance platform for independent agents, as it today announced an impressive 700% growth in in-force premium and 250% growth in the number of agents selling policies with the company year over year.

This growth is also supported by 113 new employees hired over the course of 2021 in all areas of the company. Openly has robust hiring plans for 2022 and expects to add over 100 additional employees this year.

Mistake-proofing or Poka-Yoke is a process analysis tools that either makes it impossible for an error to occur or makes the error immediately obvious once it has occurred.

More broadly, the term can refer to any behavior-shaping constraint designed into a process to prevent incorrect operation by the user.

"Idiot-proof"

You were hired to write code. Many developers make the mistake and think that their job stops there. That’s not true. In fact, you have two jobs:

1) Write good code.

2) Be easy to work with.

“Easy to work with” means that you act professionally at all times. You disagree respectfully. You seek to understand before looking to be understood. You communicate clearly. You value your commitments.

Mostly, it means that you understand the value of relationships, and build them as carefully and intentionally as you build frameworks and libraries

During the pandemic, I didn’t do a ton of actual writing. I barely blogged. I don’t think I did more than 1 or 2 publication, popular or academic. Even worse, I didn’t do a ton of actual reading. At first, I thought it was the pandemic itself. This is stressful stuff, my work life had been through into complete chaos, and my daily living routine was in tatters.

Over the past year or so, however, I slowly realized it was something bigger: I was having trouble concentrating, especially for the 3 or 4 hour blocks of time it took to write well. Or to blow through a book. Or to really study bridge defense. At first I thought I was just getting old. Doesn’t this happen to everyone when they hit their mid-40s? But the more I examined it, the more I started to believe it was a function of how I was consuming information. I was massively multi-tasking, almost full-time. And the two biggest culprits were my email inbox and my twitter feed.

Workers now inherently multitask, because they build their work world around their inbox, which is constantly delivering them different streams of work.

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As a software engineer manager, I’ve reflected on the unique behaviors I prioritize. This post will cover the gestalt of my successful onboarding experiences within the first 90 days.

Starting with Having Good Tact

Good tact is the ability to deal with others to maintain good relations and avoid offense. To say and do the right things at the right time, to behave in a way that promotes cooperation and reciprocity.

My go-to’s are to make myself available, never criticize a previous decision, and avoid being standoff-ish.

Be Explicit About Change

I have been known to repeat an expectation numerous times in front of the team. In a room of ten people, I say the “thing” ten times for one person to “get it.” Being specific about change means being explicit. One of the lessons I’ve learned as an engineer manager is being implicit or nuanced is considered cruel to the team.

Change Means Documenting

Around 4 million employees left their jobs in July 2021. Most of them are senior developers. If pandemic didn't cause it, who did?

One reason is the ridiculous entry barriers put by tech companies — even in the smaller and mid-sized firms.

• All companies (regardless of size and paycheck) make competent developers go through grueling 4–7 rounds of interviews.
• A verifiable track record is overlooked, while CVs filled with adjectives top the stack.
• The whiteboard interviews test reproducibility of the solutions, not the actual understanding.
• The verbal interviews (+personality tests) are formulaic, and one can rarely get past them without lying about their careers.
• Instead of one competent developer, companies hire 3 inexperienced programmers who are ready to jump the ship within 2 years, leaving huge tech debt for the next troubleshooter (mostly senior) guy.
  There is also rampant ageism in tech. And age-discriminated programmers are those without any representation. Their only way to raise their voice is to revolt, and quit.

As a result, senior and competent developers (age group 30–45) no longer want to join another company. They want to roll out their own business.

The Formula

This is the formula making real money in almost any profession, doing almost anything, for almost anyone. Here it is:

Your income is directly dependent on your ability to produce value at scale with ownership.

• “Value is the gap between what clients can do for themselves and what we can do for them.”

Scale

1. Eliminate any and all superfluous action on your part.
2. Automate anything and everything that can be automated.
3. Delegate anything that cannot be automated.
4. Do anything that cannot be delegated.

Ownership

If you have no equity, no real ownership, the first two pieces of this formula DO NOT MATTER. YOU MUST HAVE OWNERSHIP OF YOUR VALUE!

Top startup leaders share their best tips for managing up, including communication tactics, building trust, and goal setting with your manager.

1. Always align on these two questions.
   1) What is success for me personally? 2) What is success for my manager’s team?

2. Show your work with what matters most.
   “To effectively manage up, you’ve got to understand what your boss wants and needs. This is an exercise in radical empathy and motivation,”

3. Communicate early and often to avoid surprises.
   They think they’re bugging others with constant, timely communication, but this isn’t true at all. When you communicate proactively, you’re giving your leaders up the chain of command the gift of choice: To act on that information, to store that information as notes, or just not do anything with it,”

4. Don’t bury your requests.
   “Writing regular email updates has by far been one of the most effective ways of managing up. These could be project updates, team wins, or personal progress. The emails don’t need to be overly formal — in fact, many recipients typically appreciate a more familiar tone as long as it doesn’t get in the way of the content,” he says.

5. Create a doc to hit the most important points.
   “In my 1:1s with my manager, I make sure our shared agenda and notes are populated ahead of time with the topics I want to discuss, as well as providing any context necessary — like linking to relevant documents. Some of the most productive and effective 1:1s are when our agenda and notes are well-organized ahead of the meeting,”

• FYIs that don’t need a discussion
• Updates from the report
• Updates from the manager
• Follow-ups on action items from the previous weeks
• Discussion topics

27. Create a State of the Union report.
    To simplify managing up and to hold yourself accountable, he suggests sending a weekly “State of Me” email to your boss. “Regularly share what you’re doing, what you plan to do, and what you’ve done with your manager. This weekly email should include your current priorities, things on your mind, and blockers you need help with.

• Tell me about a time a team member changed your mind?
• Tell me about someone you are proud of.
• Do you fully disconnect during holidays and vacations?
• Describe a recent success or win.
• Tell me about a disagreement or conflict on the team.
• How did you start your last team meeting?
• What is your ideal person for this role?
• Who have you promoted and why?
• Tell me about the last person you recognized.
• How do you focus on your own growth and development?

In these two books, the authors of four dozen open source applications explain how their software is structured, and why. What are each program's major components? How do they interact? And what did their builders learn during their development? In answering these questions, the contributors to these books provide unique insights into how they think.

If you are a junior developer, and want to learn how your more experienced colleagues think, these books are the place to start. If you are an intermediate or senior developer, and want to see how your peers have solved hard design problems, these books can help you too.

The stereotypes that lump IT professionals together are misguided. It's actually the conditions that surround the IT pros that are stereotypical, and the geeks are just reacting to those conditions the way they always react -- logically.

It's all about respect

Few people notice this, but for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm. Those whom they do not believe are worthy of their respect might instead be treated to professional courtesy, a friendly demeanor or the acceptance of authority. The amount of respect an IT pro pays someone is a measure of how tolerable that person is when it comes to getting things done, including the elegance and practicality of his solutions and suggestions. IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.

This self-ordering behavior occurs naturally in the IT world because it is populated by people skilled in creative analysis and ordered reasoning.

While everyone would like to work for a nice person who is always right, IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong. Wrong creates unnecessary work, impossible situations and major failures. Wrong is evil, and it must be defeated. Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors, period.

Foundational (bottom-up) respect is not only the largest single determining factor in the success of an IT team, but the most ignored. I believe you can predict success or failure of an IT group simply by assessing the amount of mutual respect within it.

7. The Shopify App

With recent trends in drop shipping, lifestyle businesses, and a push for independent retail-based outlets to move online, Shopify has opened up another wonderful opportunity for us developers.

8. Build an API as a Service

We live in a data-driven age where information, attention, and content are king — to give you some perspective, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created each day.

However, when he inserted the words — “You will probably refuse” — before continuing on to ask for a donation, the compliance rate jumped to 39 percent.

That’s why the words, “You will probably refuse,” are so effective: they give people an out. The words make people feel like they are acting out of their own free will and that they’re the ones who are in control of their decision.

What’s your favorite interview question and why?

So if you’re a highly competent and aggressive individual, it’s best you find yourself a job in a startup, be an entrepreneur, or work in a company that needs turning around.

Stable corporations favor individuals who play the popularity game well. Because when it doesn’t take much effort to deliver results, supervisors prefer subordinates who are nonthreatening and likable.

You do not demand the bud blossoms at a certain hour. You plant a seed deeply, you water it and give it light, and then you let it do what it was created to do. You are the exact same way. If you show up each day and do the work, the desired results will come on their own, in due time.

Trying too hard makes you instantly ineffective.

When someone tries too hard to get you to like them, you are more disinclined to give them a chance. When someone tries too hard to make you think they’re attractive, you usually don’t. When someone tries too hard to convince people that you are intelligent, they start to seem unintelligent. When you try too hard to sell your business, it tends to push people away. When you try too hard to seem cool, you do not seem cool.

In every single thing that brings us success in life, there is an element of effortlessness at work.

Welcome to the ebook on Building Micro-SaaS Businesses. What’s Micro-SaaS? It is a software as a service business owned and operated by one person or a small team. These businesses are location-independent, high margin, low-risk with predictable recurring revenue. They are the lifestyle business of the future. I scrapped and scrambled my way to building and ultimately selling a profitable SaaS business.

1. Develop a daily writing habit
2. Watch popular speeches and learn how to critique them
3. Observe the strong communicators in your own life
4. Record yourself every day talking into a camera for 3 minutes
5. Reach out to one person a week whose work you admire
6. Volunteer to teach whatever you can whenever you can