A few months ago, in an effort to inject a little bit of calm and normalcy at the beginning of our work week, my leadership team adopted a Monday morning “coffee hour” on Zoom. We've always been a distributed team – primarily out of Kansas City, Birmingham and Washington D.C. – but it wasn't until the pandemic was well underway that we began this weekly ritual.
As an engineer, I am always looking to leverage tools and processes to make my life more efficient. I have been managing people for a good part of my career, but when I made the leap to leading a larger organization most of the tips/tricks I have learned didn't necessarily scale. Your goal must be to optimize your time to solve problems where technology can accelerate the business and product.
In Washington, during the peak of Hurricane Sandy, my power went out. The wind outside was howling, the UPS that my MacBook was connected to began to scream, and my Comcast Internet was hosed. We were in the middle of manually failing over our application servers to our New Jersey datacenter, and now I had to continue on my T-mobile tethered cellphone.