Nurture.Team

We surely have seen a lot of folks who get caught up with fancy job titles and then there are others who do not care about what their title says - they just love what they do. There is merit to having a title but when do you recognize that your job title isn’t fulfilling enough? What criteria you pick to may be “step down a level from your current role” and still stay happy in your next role? Is it alright for an individual to move from a VP to may be a Director Role to even just a manager role? Does it affect their future prospects? On this episode I spoke to Zeesha who had a very interesting journey from a VP at Evernote to a Director at Branch Metrics and then to Senior Manager at LinkedIn.

The "pipeline excuse" is the most common term heard in building a diverse team. In this episode, I speak to Michelle Gluaser (CEO of Techtonica) and we discuss What is diversity?How to measure it and what’s a realistic timeline/ metric to improvise on it?How to deal with "I am not finding candidates for the open roles to build a diverse team" excuse - and how can this be fixed? Finally I want to know the role of a hiring manager, HR organization and company’s leadership in fixing the pipeline excuse problem. About Techtonica and Michelle: Techtonica was started to break down the barriers into tech for the people who are most underrepresented in tech and most in danger of displacement by tech. Techtonica is a non-profit that provides tuition-free tech training to low-income women and non-binary adults and places them in positions at sponsoring companies that are ready to support more diverse teams. Support the cause to #BridgeTheTechGap? You can donate by going to https://techtonica.org/donate Prior to founding Techtonica, she was a Community Developer at Twilio and held software engineering roles at Zana, Get Satisfaction and various other companies.

In this episode we explore: What does it take to build a high functioning team? How do you build a team which transforms itself at every stage of the company? What are the pitfalls to avoid when hiring and scaling in the growth stage? About the guest? Vishal Sankhla is currently a Director Of Engineering at Facebook. Earlier he has been a Product leader at Uber. Prior to Uber he was a Co-founder of ViralHeat which was backed by Mayfield and had a successful exit to Cision. He lives in the Bay area, California.

What does alignment in a company mean? Why it’s important and how can it be achieved? Who are the actors who play a critical role in getting this accomplished. This episode will resonate with almost everyone. Doesn’t matter what size of their company, or the vertical they work in or the geography they are part of.

I have been in an age several years ago where there were dedicated DBA, Database developers, server-side developers and so on. Lately, we hear more about “we are hiring Full-stack developer” and an engineer should be able to maneuver across any stack/ technology. I want to learn from Diane why an organization needs front-end engineers and the value they brings to the table. In this episode we talk about:

How to retain the culture of the company during Hyper growth phase. When a company goes through high growth spurts, we hear this a lot - “When we were small, we had a great culture. But it’s all lost now. Our culture has changed. It doesn’t feel like the way it use to”. Right? I bet some of us have been part of this journey and have felt the same - or perhaps you could have heard this from the early employees. I wanted to learn "What can an individual and the management teams of the fast growing startup do to retain the culture during its growth phase." Guest for this episode: Our guest today is Jim Miller. Jim needs no introduction. But still let me name few accomplishment he has achieved so far. A summary of this episode and several other such pearls of wisdom on creating a great team can be found at https://podcast.nurture.team

As the name suggests the objective of this episode is to help connect and bridge gaps between the tech and the non-tech teams and team members. In a diverse team setting comprising of both technical and non-technical team members, how do you ensure that each understands the other and that communication is seamless? Not only that but also the work environment should be conducive to growth; both for the individual and the organization and most importantly it should be fun. Team Nurture today with the help of its guest, Amisha will give you same valuable pointers on how non-geeks, if we may so put it can survive in a world of geeks and vice-versa.

Today's exploration is : "How to manage Millennials" - also known as Generation Y. As an organization or as a manager - "How to you manage millennials"? As per Wikipedia - Demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and the mid-1990s to early 2000s as ending birth years for Gen Y. I think today’s topic is controversial, informational and required to be discussed - the reason I say that is because anything which span "Generations" is important and shouldn’t be taken for granted. With Avinash, today I want to discuss what does manage mean for Gen Y, work life balance, flat corporate culture expected by Gen Y and why everyone feels that Millennials are the most difficult generation so far to manage at workplace.

In this episode we explore: Interviews are stressful especially for the interviewee and time suck for the interviewer. So, what can the interviewers (and to certain extent organizations) do to make them fun? What’s the right way to treat an interviewees so that they feel at ease from the get-go? I will ask Nick his playbook where both interviewer and interviewee feel equal partners in those 45 min they spend together. He has hired so many talented individuals in the past and delivered several successful products, so I feel there is no better person to help us understand our today’s topic - "How to make interviews fun?"

In this episode we explore : How to let your manager know that you are ready to step into a higher role?What signals you can generate as an individual to let your organization and team know about it?As a manager what you should be looking out while managing a team and trying to identify next set of leaders?Career development is very essential for both the individual and the organization, but how can these two entities work together so that it works out for both of them.

On today’s episode of Nurture.Team, the exploration we are going to have is: How does an Individual contributor transitions into a managerial role? How does that journey look like? What does it mean for the other team members? I welcome your feedback and suggestions for any specific guest or a particular topic. Drop me a line at sujay@nurture.team.