Articles

• Lessons learned from CIA sabotage field manual

  How to combat operational friction brought about by (unintentional) self-sabotage, using insight from a cold war era espionage guide.

• Psychological safety anti-patterns

  Four common ways we can accidentally sabotage our psychological safety efforts, and what to do about it

• Stop wasting your professional development budget

  Training budgets are going unspent, because staff feel they don't learn anything, and organisations often don't see the benefit. Find out why, what you can do, and build a culture of learning and growth.

• Overtime is harmful — confirmed by science

  Consistently working more than 40 hours per week is not just hazardous to your health, but can actually make your entire team less productive. Find out why, and get on the path to a better approach.

• The power of personal branding and visibility

  Let's explore the concept of personal branding, its importance, and practical steps to build your unique branding.

• Conflict conversations — beyond the words

  Managing conflict is a common everyday situation. Even so, conflicts are hard. As a leader, you’re where the responsibility falls to hold those tough conversations. Whether the impact is day to day, or more significant, you do your best to prepare and aim for the best outcome.

• Role congruity theory of prejudice towards female leaders

  About the challenges women face when striving for promotions and senior leadership roles, gender differences in executive positions, and what can be done about it.

• Signs of a healthy culture

  It’s worthwhile investing effort into your organisational culture, because of the impact it has on the business.

• Supporting your people leaders

  How to effectively support people leaders at scale

• Onboarding is for promotions too

  Onboarding new leaders is just as important to help them adjust to their new responsibilities and set them up for success

• What's in a name?

  Blackmill's name originated from the White Bay Power Station in Rozelle, which provided power to Sydney for over 66 years.

• Managing up

  Management is a two-way relationship that both the manager and the report should foster and invest in

• Lead with authority vs influence

  Know the difference between leading by authority and leading by influence and learn which to use when.

• Monthly free office hours

  Monthly free product, engineering, or business office hours with Elle and Lachlan

• Earn trust and lead inclusively

  A great leader does everything a good leader does and also leads with equity and diversity in mind. The process of earning trust involves a series of conscious investments over time.

• How do we heal polarisation?

  A disagreement in opinions can be a healthy debate. Instead of fearing the differences, we should be curious.

• On Imposter Syndrome

  Many people in the dev community experience or have experienced imposter syndrome at some point, including me. Self-doubt keeps us from seeing ourselves as we truly are. However, we can control our perceptions and reframe our thinking.

• What's in a toxic culture?

  A toxic work culture can have profound long term negative impacts on individuals as well as the business. Healthy culture needs work to grow and flourish. It requires clearly defined values, creating a psychologically safe work environment, and implementing sound DEI policies.

• Transformational or empowering leadership styles create better leaders in the Internet Age

  Geographically dispersed teams are becoming a necessity as the trend of remote working continues. Leaders need to adapt their approach to take this into account.

• Providing valuable feedback

  As a leader, giving feedback is part of your job and doing it well is a skill you need to develop and exercise regularly. We should focus on improving our communication efforts to achieve positive outcomes for all, and on developing a high performance environment where respect for each other is the norm by practising actionable, specific, and kind feedback.

• Increase your Emotional Intelligence to drive business performance

  The benefits of EI include better team engagement, improved company culture, decrease in employee turnover, and high performance driven results. Here are some suggestions on how to develop and practise emotional intelligence in your organisation.

• Speed vs quality and technical debt

  We cannot have everything we want at once, so how do we reconcile speed of delivery with quality of code?

• Productivity, prioritisation, and progress

  On how to move things forward in a way that works for sustainability and scale

• Effective one:ones

  How to run effective one-ones meetings with your reports

• Mentoring, coaching, and sponsoring

  There are different ways to help our teammates, with each requiring different approaches and a different focus

• Handling difficult conversations and confrontations

  A framework on how to approach difficult conversations and confrontations

• Giving feedback

  Feedback is necessary for learning but it needs to be effective to so as to not threaten relationship and for creating a productive work environment

• Asynchronous work and remote teams

  How to efficiently work with remote teams

• Growing team culture

  Team culture is a living thing. Healthy team culture is difficult and requires active attention and work

• Growing your leadership style

  Introducing different ways to lead and motivate your team by choosing a leadership style that best addresses the demands of a particular situation. Also suggesting a few things for you to try at home

• Common issues we see tech leaders face

  After decades of working in tech communities while studying and practising leadership, we still don’t have all the answers, but at least we've learned to recognise many of the problems.

• The five levels of pay transparency

  Gender and racial pay gaps are still a common problem in the workplace. Having any structure around salaries is a positive thing, even if it is not all full disclosure.

• Why belonging is crucial in team culture and organisational performance

  What does it mean to belong to a group, a team, or an organisation? Belonging is a sense of fitting in or feeling like you are an important member of a group.

• SendGrid on Heroku in 2021

  A quick write up on getting SendGrid to play nicely on Heroku

• Let's focus our attention

  When was the last time you felt absorbed in a task or in a state of flow? These days we all feel busier than ever, but at the same time are much less productive. Instead give yourself more space and time

• Organisational culture to foster creativity and innovation

  Organisations should implement a flatter hierarchy structure, with broadly defined roles, and low power distance culture. Furthermore, organisations should encourage risk tolerance within limitations, psychological safety, availability of resources, flexibility with time, freedom, and autonomy

• Why you should build distributed teams

  There are many benefits to why you should build a distributed team, and with the increasing online tools to enable us to do so, we should embrace the new future of work and increase our overall productivity and happiness

• Introducing new services

  We have been working on a few new offerings, which we would like to introduce today. Mainly, we have been working on technical leadership coaching, culture and technical workshops, an Associate Developer onboarding program, and codebase reviews.

• Benefits of workshops

  Workshops provide a fun, interactive, open, and collaborative environment for continuous learning and to meet like minded people.

• Hiring for the Engineering Academy

  The hiring process for Qantas Hotels engineering academy in detail

• So you want to get into web development

  Suggested online resources to check out when starting with web programming

• Start your own apprenticeship program

  Complementary writeup for a talk about how to develop your apprenticeship program

• Blackmill Rebranding

  A rebranding exercise and a reveal of our new logo

• Blackmill Book Club

  Friendly conversations about concepts and topics we are interested in that intersect with our work

• First pilot of an engineering academy notes and after thoughts

  An overview of the Qantas Hotels engineering academy programme