The best work is done by teams who, frankly, give a shit about what they’re doing. If your team is showing up just to get paid, you aren’t getting the optimal results, period.

That doesn’t mean you need teams of single-minded idealists who exalt the team and company’s mission and would walk over hot coals without question if asked. Rather, it means you, their manager, need to connect their work to a purpose greater than them.

In today’s issue: how do you do that?

In part 1, I looked at simple methods of delegating or prioritizing decisions, and one option for making decisions quickly based on “operating principles.”

This part will dive deeper into more complex methods for wayfinding within decision-making scenarios and processes that create confidence and alignment within your surrounding team or teams.

Long ago, I read this piece of advice, which has lived rent-free in my brain ever since:

First make the bug easy to fix, then fix it.

What I think it meant was to approach a bug as an opportunity not only to improve the software by removing the bug, but also to make it harder for the software to become buggy later (by adding tests and consequently improving the architecture).

As leaders, one of our primary exports is decisions. We all make them, every day, and sometimes those decisions have far-reaching downstream consequences.

I know, I know, you’ve probably heard enough about “quiet quitting” by now, but, if you’ll indulge me, I think you could be looking at a huge opportunity.

First off, quiet quitting isn’t new. It’s a term freshly birthed from the roiling cultural phenomenon called TikTok, but it means the same thing as “disengagement,” or “coasting,” or even the Silicon Valley-famed “resting and vesting.”

What they’re not talking about on TikTok is that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores¹. If you’re reading this, that’s probably you.

Are people on your teams “quietly quitting?” Does it matter? What can you do to ensure that your teams are engaged, whether they are “quiet quitters” or not?

I will cover all of that, and more, right here!

It should go without saying that one of the most important—and most challenging—responsibilities of an engineering manager is hiring.

In a recent survey of 581 tech founders and executives¹:

• 62% say it takes 4 months or more to hire top product and engineering talent on average.

• 67% agree that the “traditional recruitment process” is broken, taking too long and costing too much.

At the same time, tech workers are more restless than ever before, changing jobs at a staggering rate.

What should you do if you want to succeed in hiring the engineers you need for your team today? As we say in most engineering matters, “it depends,” but these are my earnestly held beliefs about what matters most:

1. Attract (enough of) the right people,
2. Conduct an exceptional interview, and
3. Sell what’s important.

This is going to be a long one because there is a lot to say and it’s all important.