Learn concepts like management skills, working with different people, and working out who our team is and what they do.

Become an Effective Engineering Manager

The technology industry is facing a skills crisis. It’s because we don’t know how to manage people. This module aims at improving our managing skills. In this module, we’ll start with learning concepts like managing ourselves, interacting with humans, having one-on-one meetings with managers, and choosing the right person for the job. Next, we’ll learn how to deal with different people and projects. In the end, we'll touch upon the modern workspace concepts and life cycle of startups.

Become an Effective Software Engineering Manager



If the primary forms of communication between workers physically sharing an office is spoken and synchronous, the opposite is true for distributed teams. The primary forms of communication are:

* Written: The majority of communication occurs via emails, chat, direct messaging applications, and pull requests.
* Asynchronous: Staff may not necessarily be available to talk at a given time or even in overlapping time zones.

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For particular individuals, notably extroverts, shifting to this remote mode of communication can be a challenge. Writing succinctly doesn't come naturally to everyone and can take practice. However, there are ways to begin practicing this within your team right away:

* Encourage your team to work in the open by regularly sharing what they've been doing to a team chat channel. This can be pointers to tickets, pull requests, or ideas that they've written up for distribution.
* Adopt a culture of documenting thought processes. For example, when working on a ticket, document the steps that you are going through via the comments so that others can see how you explored and solved the problem.
* Take the time to write up decisions, priorities, and actions for sharing with the team using written communication. Sharing these via email is archival and gives staff equal access to information regardless of their location. This is especially important when conversations happen informally and without the whole team present.

# Challenges of written communication

Using more written communication solves some of the issues with asynchronous communication, but not all of them. Two of the main challenges it brings are:

* Some distributed staff have minimal overlap between their time zones. This can be challenging when there are dependencies between two distributed staff, such as needing specialist knowledge or waiting for a prior piece of work to be completed before starting another.
* The feeling of anxiety when you or one of your staff gets blocked and needs help from others who are not immediately available. You may also feel this anxiety as a manager because it's harder for you to see what others are up to at any given time.

The solution to these challenges, other than it becoming more bearable with time and experience, is to encourage all staff to take complete ownership of unblocking themselves, thus not requiring you to be the center of all communication, and also to have multiple items that they can work on at a given time. This way if they are blocked, they can simply pause that piece of work and start on another. Again, this may be uncomfortable at first if you or your staff have been used to being able to reach the rest of the team immediately by swiveling around on your chair.

Learn what good communication practices for the teams working remotely are.

Communication Practices for Distributed Teams

Primary forms of communication