Diversity Impact

Best Practices for Managing Diverse Talent in Engineering Teams

In today's engineering landscape, managing diverse talent in teams is crucial for achieving common goals. Embracing diversity brings a wealth of perspectives and skills to the table, fostering a culture of inclusion. Effective communication ensures everyone understands their roles and responsibilities, while building trust creates a supportive environment for sharing ideas. Leveraging individual strengths maximizes team performance, and encouraging collaboration fosters unity and shared purpose. By implementing these best practices, an inclusive and high-performing engineering team can be created.

Building Teams While Maintaining Consistent Company Culture

This article discusses the challenges of growing a team while maintaining a common sense of culture within the organization. It outlines the actions taken to address cultural differences between the US-based offices and the Spanish-speaking office in Mexico, such as providing Spanish lessons, bringing people onsite for onboarding, and having regular coffees. It also highlights the importance of cultural differences and the need for active and continual effort to address them.

How Work Visa Uncertainty Made Me More Successful at Work

This article is about the challenges of working on a work visa in the US and UK for eight years. It discusses how the author used the uncertainty of their situation to their advantage, pushing themselves to work harder and reinvent themselves every year. It also discusses how the author had to build relationships in a new environment and culture, and learn a different language. The article concludes with the lessons the author learned, such as going out of their comfort zone, taking risks, and being confident and assertive.

How To Manage Toxic Employees

A team leader at Health Decisions had to manage a team member who was academically gifted but cocky and caused tension in the team. The leader had to address the issues as they arose and explain to the team member what was expected of him. After several attempts to help the team member, the leader had to let him go. The leader learned the importance of being persistent in addressing employee issues and understanding cultural differences.

Health and Emotions Should Not Come with Targets and Goals

In order to understand the emotions of employees in the age of data and OKRs, a cultural identity exercise was conducted with three basic questions. It was found that self-awareness and deprecation are key to understanding people's thoughts and how to make situations better. Additionally, it was found that quantified and direct interviewing misses out on the impact of people who bring excitement to the conversation.

Never Delay Decisions

In 2012, the Director of Engineering for mobile platforms at Netflix faced a difficult situation with their iOS manager not performing and deadlines being missed. After eight weeks of firing the manager, hiring three iOS engineers, and taking over the iOS project, they managed to make their deadlines and ship on time. This experience taught the Director that delaying important decisions can have negative impacts and it is important to think of the collateral damage.