Building effective relationships

Working as a staff+ engineer can be a lonely or confusing experience. In a leadership role, it’s often impossible to directly emulate the behaviour of other coworkers and unclear whom to go to to get feedback and provide or receive mentorship and coaching. As a result, many staff+ engineers can end up relatively siloed while the business requires them to have a broad outlook and provide feedback on areas they are not directly working on.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the following:
- the three types of relationships critical to cultivate: mentor, mentee and peer
- how to decide which relationships to invest in vs move on from
- how to use these relationships to improve your career, your success and work and build up everyone surrounding you
- how to still do this when remote or timezone separated from your coworkers

Transcript

1. Building Effective Relationships 👵 🏁🏅🌏 @MikeMcQuaid
2. me 👋
3. Project Leader of Homebrew (Homebrew Maintainer 2009 – Present)
4. Principal Engineer at GitHub (GitHub Engineer 2013 – 2023)
5. CTO/Cofounder at Raise.dev (2023)
6. 👵 mentors 👶 mentees 👯 peers
7. 😬 can I have a mentor?
8. 😬 can I have a mentee?
9. The Mentorship Diamond (mmq.lol/mentor)
10. 🎬 start 🏁 stop 💬 continue
11. 👭 new team 📽 new project 🌏 new location
12. 👭 old team 📽 old project 🌏 old location
13. 🔁 old chat 📥 too busy ✅ job done
14. 🥑 fresh chat ⏳ have time ▶ in progress
15. 🏗 career 🏅 success 🥰 build up
16. 🚠 internal move 🧑🏫 learning 📲 networking
17. 🗓 other plans 🧐 outside eyes 🛒 get buy in
18. 🥳 congratulate 😭 commisserate 😊 closeness
19. 💑 in-person 🎥 remote 🌏 distributed
20. 🐕🦺 dog walk 🍲 lunch 🏖 visiting
21. 👩💻 pairing ☎ audio calls 📹 video calls
22. 👀 async review 📡 async chat 🫶 share tasks
23. questions? 🙋 @mike@mastodon.mikemcquaid.com @MikeMcQuaid mike@mikemcquaid.com