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**Lara Hogan:** I also didn't know. I learned it from Switch. I'm gonna butcher this story, so apologies to everybody involved... Go read the book to get the real story. But at the end of the day, there was too much littering. There was a bunch of littering happening in Texas, and so the government tried to brainstorm,... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. |
**Lara Hogan:** So again, it's all influence. It's all a lot of psychology that you mention, it's a lot of neuroscience-backed stuff... It's fascinating. How do we influence change to happen, positive influence where we don't have complete control on the situation? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Well, I think that may have worked - I'm gonna assume a lot, because I haven't read the book - because Texas seems to be very prideful about their land. The size of things, everything's bigger in Texas, things like that... And I think that probably -- and a cowboy is like a significant... |
**Lara Hogan:** He's a model. |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. The ethos. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...a model for a lot of people in this space. The cowboy hat, we have the rodeo here every single year, it's massive... I'm not from Texas originally, so I can't claim these things as native for me. I came here \[unintelligible 00:45:24.02\] which is a common phrase to a transplant to Texas... But I... |
**Lara Hogan:** Oh, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...because they took this common model and the pride of the land and the respect for the space and the desire for it to be the best it can be and attached that to something that really matters, which is "Stop littering", right? |
**Lara Hogan:** Yeah. And that comes back to the BICEPS core needs list. The B stands for Belonging. We are a part of the community. We identify with this role model, we wanna support each other as the community of Texas... And Significance is the S. So in the hierarchy, we have a lot of pride in our land, in our state... |
**Break**: \[46:22\] |
**Jerod Santo:** So Lara, a lot of our audience are engineers, or were engineers and now are managers and leaders... And it's always a difficult thing deciding if that's a move for you. Once you've decided that it is, making the transition, like what does success look like in that case? You've done the transition a whi... |
**Lara Hogan:** \[48:13\] I love this question. I talk to and work with a lot of people that have made the transition multiple times. One of my former colleagues, Dan, has written a bunch about how do you choose, how do you make a decision, how do you know when to go back and forth, when is it right... There's just so ... |
If you're optimizing for gaining more power, for example, and you're thinking about becoming a manager, you may not actually get more power. It will be really important for you to do some research, talk to some other managers to ask about what they have influence on, what they have authority over etc. because it's ofte... |
If you're optimizing for making a new team charter, a new vision, giving the team purpose - maybe that's a possibility at your company. If you're optimizing for a change of pace, guarantee your management will give you a change of pace, and they will ask what are optimizing for with change of pace and that could also b... |
So getting clear about what you're optimizing for will allow you to figure out whether or not you can have success in the other role, in either direction. People who skip this step have asked themselves "What am I optimizing for when I'm thinking about changing roles?" often change roles and then hate it... Because the... |
When I was experimenting with leadership and management and thinking about that, I just really wanted to support the people that I was working with day-to-day... I was working at a really small startup, and we were basically UI/UX frontend site performance developers, and we didn't have a manager that knew any of that ... |
So for me it was about providing team environment where we could self-identify as this frontend/UX group... And so for that reason, becoming a manager worked. I was able to achieve the thing I was optimizing for with that role change. |
There have certainly been times when I've thought about other kinds of role changes and I wanted to figure out "Could I be successful in that new role based on what I was optimizing for?" and the answer has always been different. So yeah, I would definitely suggest thinking to yourself and getting really clear with you... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Something that I learned while doing the show Brain Science which I've mentioned before, with Dr. Mireille Reece, was -- a thing she had said was "Try it on." So any new big decision, anything really in particular, so in this case this transition - try the thing on. How could you sort of get a... |
**Lara Hogan:** Totally. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How does my relationship change at home, beyond just simply working -- sometimes we make work decisions or professional decisions and kind of forget that we have other constraints that don't map to that opportunity. And like you had said, if you don't consider what you're optimizing for. |
\[51:56\] In our case, for us running this business, Jerod and I - we have certain personal constraints that help us navigate choices we make in the business. Things we just definitely probably will never do... And I have a hard time saying absolutes; Jerod, you probably know me to do that, so that's why I say "probabl... |
**Lara Hogan:** Yeah, absolutely. You go to the grocery store, and try to decide between two different apples... What are you optimizing for? \[laughter\] \[unintelligible 00:52:37.24\] Yeah, absolutely. |
**Jerod Santo:** Price, freshness, bulk... |
**Lara Hogan:** \[laughs\] But back to that point of trying it on - Camille Fournier's book "The Manager's Path" is just so brilliant in so many different ways, and one of the ways is that her first few chapters are all about before becoming a manager, what are the different ways you might try on some of those responsi... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Very cool. |
**Lara Hogan:** So in what way can I be a mentor, in what way can I be a tech lead...? Trying it on before you actually go in. So if folks are trying to figure out how they could try it on, definitely check out Camille Fournier's book, "The Manager's Path." It's great. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We're a fan of Camille, and she also wrote the intro to your book, the foreword for your book... |
**Lara Hogan:** She did. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And then she also obviously wrote her own book, The Manager's Path, and I think as part of her story too, a blog post you had written while she was writing that book was so influential to her, she had to kind of incorporate some of your ideas... So I definitely wanna give a shout-out to Camille. She... |
**Lara Hogan:** Hey, Camille! \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Do you find -- and I'm asking you to generalize here... Do you find that engineers make good managers? |
**Lara Hogan:** That is an impossible question to answer. I like it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** Give it a shot. |
**Lara Hogan:** People of any ilk make great managers and terrible managers. I find that one of the hardest parts about transitioning to management from any individual contributor worker work is the lack of measurable progress. So in engineering you're shipping things, you've got code reviews, you see things launch. Yo... |
One of the ways that I coach managers struggling with this is just start to think about celebrating tiny, tiny wins that might have to be confidential with a supportive group that you trust to keep those wins confidential. Someone can be like "Alright, that rework - it's done. I can't tell if it's good yet, but it's do... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, I like celebrating the wins, too. We say that a lot around here. Even one time I think we were in a call - I can't remember how far back, but Jerod was just sort of like down a little bit and he's like "I just need a win. I just need to ship something and get it out there and just know it's do... |
**Lara Hogan:** I feel that. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's a different context, but celebrating the wins is something that I like to say a lot too, for us even, because I think too often you just forget to -- like, if you waited to celebrate, it's almost like process over goals. If you only celebrate the goal and not the process - that's kind of ... |
**Lara Hogan:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It may have been the goal too, but if you don't celebrate the little parts of those processes happening, getting done, and you wait till the goal, the goal is always moving. Almost always moving. It's always sort of changing, and you sort of camp out in this process land and just celebrate those win... |
**Lara Hogan:** Yeah. I wrote an article for Increment on this exact topic. For anybody that has invisible work, how do you start to identify where you can measure or even just mark those wins? I borrowed a lot of research about microtasks and how our brain gets that sweet, sweet dopamine hit from the act of checking s... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[56:10\] Yeah, it is. It's all for the dopamine. Dopamine is a -- I'm sure everybody knows what it is, but it's basically this chemical in your brain that you love to get, that is a reward factor. I'm paraphrasing terribly, of course, but it's this thing in your brain that occurs when you do things... |
**Lara Hogan:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's feedback to say "That was good. I'd like to do more of it, basically." So to paraphrase -- |
**Lara Hogan:** Your brain even releases it in anticipation of checking something off of your list. It's great, it's awesome. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** And then what happens if you don't get the thing checked off? Does it go back? |
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