Hi, I'm Zara and I'm excited to be working with you! This readme gives some background on my management style so you have a bit of background before we start working together.
Connection
I connect people to the best version of their future and find ways to support their career paths even when they differ from the immediate goals of my team
Empathy
I use my skill for empathizing with people, their personalities, and their stories to understand the motivations behind their behaviors
Transparency
I make expectations clear and give candid, timely feedback
I'm here to unblock you, provide opportunities for you to expand your methodological toolkit, and learn more about GitHub as a product and community.
I care about where you want to be in your career long-term, and will help you acquire experiences while we work together that take you closer to those goals. I commit to weekly 1:1s so I can learn more about how to help you achieve your goals.
I care about you as a human outside of work as well, and support whatever you need to do to keep yourself happy and healthy.
I am a mom to two kids in addition to working so time is precious. I make an effort to shove as much as I can into regular working hours in order to keep my family schedule. That said, I do sometimes work at night or on the weekend but have NO expectations for you to reply to me outside of regular business hours.
I expect everyone on my team to act just like that - a team. When someone is having a hard time, we help them out. We treat all of our colleagues at GitHub with respect and put in our best effort, always.
1:1s are your time, and I expect you to come prepared with topics you'd like to chat about. This can be in-flight work, a problem you're having with a colleague, a future goal, anything you'd like to get input and feedback on.
I encourage you to use tools to prevent burn out, such as snoozing Slack notifications during nighttime hours, taking regular PTO, and volunteering to connect to your local community.
PTO
Please let me know about PTO you're planning to take so we can dicuss how it will fit in with the team's workload and other PTO plans. Make sure to create a calendar invite on our team calendar so we can all remember when people will be out.
Travel
I'm still figuring out how this will work, but for now please discuss any travel plans (Slack is fine) before booking in.
Reimbursements
I expect you'll use good judgement and rely on GitHub's guides for travel/office setup/phone/other reimbursements. If you're expecting reimbursement for something not covered in an established guideline, let's chat about it before you lay down the plastic.
(aka things I'm working on)
Despite the words under the "transparency" principle up above, I do struggle with being direct when it comes to relaying difficult feedback.
I can tend to take on too many projects/causes/etc (because they're all so interesting!) which can lead to burn out.
I'm an "active procrastinator" and like to work under the pressure of a looming deadline. I've found that I've gotten better at setting earlier deadlines and committing to them because we document everything at GitHub, and if someone else can see that deadline then I'd better meet it :)