Happy Monday, fellow managers and leaders! 👋

We’re back with more stories and best practices to help you in your journey of becoming a great leader. 

Personally, I’m excited to share that for the first time in Supermanagers history…we have a very special ✨ Fellow guest ✨on the show.  🎙 👀

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First, a few reminders:

• If you didn’t get a chance to attend the Fellow 4.0 launch event on November 1st, you can access the recording here 🍿
• Last but not least, you can still get access to our exclusive Supermanagers slack community by emailing supermanagers@fellow.app 🙌

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🎙 What’s new on the Supermanagers podcast

1. Lessons from a 5x CTO: How to Retain Talent and Run Skip Level 1:1s Through Rapid Growth with Rob Zuber (Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI).
2. How Retrospectives, Public Channels, and Asynchronous Meetings Foster Inclusive & Culturally-Diverse Teams with Alexandra Sunderland (Senior Engineering Manager at Fellow).

Scroll down to read our top takeaway ⬇⬇⬇

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🤩 Popular posts in the Fellow blog

1. How often should engineers have 1:1s? 
2. Take time off from work (without feeling guilty!)
3. How to run successful innovation meetings
4. 6 common internal communication barriers and tips to overcome them
5. How to write meeting minutes (+ a SaaS Board Meeting template curated by David Sacks

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🎙 Takeaways from the Supermanagers podcast

Episode 123: Rob Zuber (Chief Technology Officer at CircleCI)

TLDR: Achieving team alignment is crucial, especially for fast-growing companies. When there is an increase in new employees, how can you ensure they are all working towards the same mission? Rob Zuber uses the power of skip-level meetings to ensure there is team alignment and mutual understanding. He leverages these meetings by asking “What matters to you right now?”. If everyone has a different answer, then something may be off. 

Here are 4 tips Rob shares when trying to achieve organizational alignment: 

1. Everyone on the team knows what matters.
2. They should also understand what is not a priority.
3. Knowing that shifting tasks can impact priorities.
4. Sharing the why behind the decision is crucial.

Episode 124: Alexandra Sunderland (Senior Engineering Manager at Fellow.app) 

TLDR: Everyone should be having retrospective meetings, not just engineers. Having retros is important because it offers space and time for your team to discuss issues that don’t come up day-to-day. Alexandra Sunderland only has one rule during her retros: complain about things, not people. These meetings aren’t supposed to be super structured, but rather a dedicated space to mention anything that is on your mind.

Here’s how Alexandra runs her retrospectives, and how you can too: 

1. Schedule a retrospective every 6 months.
2. Have your team write their thoughts in an agenda by a certain date. This can be done asynchronously. 
3. Choose a date that everyone on the team must comment and/or react to the initial thoughts in the first agenda. This can be done asynchronously, as well. 
4. Schedule a synchronous meeting to discuss the things that were not resolved during the asynchronous commenting timeline. 

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… and that’s a wrap! We hope that the content we curated inspires you to continue growing as a leader. 

If you enjoyed this issue, please share the newsletter with a colleague or friend –they can subscribe here!

Thanks for being part of our community,

Manuela & the Fellow.app team