You got to where you are by very precisely instructing the computer to do something quite complicated and often nuanced. Maybe you spent years in school, or years of self-directed study to learn how to do this. You have been rewarded for demonstrating things like:

• Ingenuity
• Resourcefulness
• Grit, or persistence

Then you entered management. Did anyone teach you how to manage? Did anyone tell you what “great management” should look like?

All your years of software experience barely help you to excel at management.

In fact, some of the habits you were rewarded for as a programmer are actually hurting you. Today I’ll share some habits you should strongly consider un-learning.

It’s that question many managers hunger to be asked: “Can you give me some advice?” There is nothing we love more than when our experience is valued. We want to help people by offering anecdotes, observations, and direction. Almost all advice is well-intentioned, and most of it is probably good.

But when is advice not helpful? What if advice does more harm than good?

Whether you lead one team or 100 teams, you no doubt want to create and reinforce an excellent culture. When companies are competing for the top talent, and when they all offer compensation and perks that would make your parents blush, culture may be the last true differentiator.

But building a culture, and preserving it through years of growth and change, is incredibly hard. I know, because I’ve worked at start-ups that failed to build a coherent culture at all, and I’ve worked at scale-ups who had a great culture and lost it.

So, what’s the secret to creating and defending an awesome culture?

Over the last year or so working at my corporate job, I’d often get up in the morning and look at my work calendar with a sense of dread. I spent hours and hours every week doing “important” and “necessary” activities that, to me, created no value at all for the world. I’d end the day feeling mentally and emotionally drained.

It’s clear to me from my work with engineering leaders that a feeling of contentment or joy in a senior management role is far from guaranteed. In fact, it’s typical for a rise in seniority to be accompanied by an apparent decrease in contentment.

There is no single reason for why this happens that applies to everyone, but there is one key factor that predicts how happy you’ll be in your job overall, regardless of seniority.

If you understand this one incredibly simple thing, you can guarantee job satisfaction forever.

As a member of the “leadership team” at the various companies I’ve worked for, a lot of my job was talking to people. Leads of other teams, engineers, “senior management,” and so forth.

Most of the time, those conversations went just fine, but occasionally we’d get stuck. There are two important ways in which a conversation can get stuck, and I call them “the logjam” and “the loop.”

It’s frustrating for anyone to feel like the conversation isn’t going anywhere, and sometimes that leads to conflict and distraction from solving the problem everyone came to solve, so here are my coaching-inspired tips for moving any conversation forward.