Chapter 8 Flashcards — Good Influence at Scale
flashcards tsep influence teaching mentoring sponsorship guardrails
What are the three tiers and four mechanisms of influence in the Chapter 8 framework?
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Three tiers (increasing reach):
- Individual — one-on-one interactions
- Group — reaching a team or organization
- Catalyst — culture-level change
Four mechanisms:
- Advice — sharing knowledge and judgment
- Teaching — developing capability in others
- Guardrails — preventing mistakes, creating safe defaults
- Opportunities — opening doors for others to grow
What is the sponsorship ABCDs framework?
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Four ways to sponsor someone using your social capital:
- A — Amplify: Make their work visible to people they don’t have access to (“I wanted to share this analysis from [name]”)
- B — Boost: Speak up for their skills and leadership in rooms where they’re not present
- C — Connect: Introduce them to people who can help them grow
- D — Defend: Protect them from unfair criticism or being passed over
Sponsorship is distinct from mentoring: mentoring uses your time to share knowledge; sponsorship uses your social capital to open doors.
What is “give away your Legos” (Molly Graham) and why is it important?
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As your scope grows, you need to hand off pieces of work you care about to others, rather than holding on. “Giving away your Legos” means transferring ownership of tasks where another engineer would grow from taking them on. Why it matters: holding on creates single points of failure, blocks others’ growth, and prevents you from taking on the higher-scope work your role requires.
What is the difference between mentoring and coaching?
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Mentoring shares knowledge and experience: “Here’s what I know and what I’d do in your situation.” The mentor has the answers.
Coaching develops the person’s own thinking through questions: “What have you tried?” “What’s stopping you?” The coach facilitates the coachee reaching their own conclusions. Key coaching practices: open-ended questions, active listening (not formulating your next point while they’re still talking), making space for silence after questions.
Both are valuable; the choice depends on whether the person needs information (mentor) or needs to develop their own judgment (coaching).
What is a “paved road” and how does it work as a guardrail?
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A paved road is a well-supported, well-documented approach that most projects should follow — not a mandate, but the path of least resistance. It provides: a working example, documentation, tooling support, and organizational endorsement. Teams can always go off-road, but the cost of doing so is higher, which nudges most work toward the supported approach. Paved roads scale quality standards without requiring human review of every decision.
What is the difference between individual-level and group-level guardrails? Give an example of each.
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Individual-level guardrails operate through direct human review: code review catches bugs before they reach production; design review catches architectural mistakes before code is written; a staff engineer reviewing a project plan catches risks early.
Group-level guardrails operate without per-transaction human review: linters enforce style automatically; PR templates prompt for missing information; style guides define conventions; written decision records prevent relitigating settled questions. Group-level guardrails scale without consuming reviewer time.
What is the most important thing to understand about answering questions to scale your advice?
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The most valuable response often isn’t just the answer — it’s helping the person build the capability to find answers themselves. Ask what they’ve already tried. Explain how you’d approach finding the answer. Show the search process, not just the result. The goal is to reduce how often they need to come back for the same kind of question, which multiplies your impact over time.
What makes “teaching others to teach” (catalyst-level teaching) the highest-leverage teaching investment?
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Teaching one person teaches one person. Teaching one person to teach multiplies your reach: they’ll teach others, who may teach others further. Catalyst-level teaching investments include: writing review guidelines that help reviewers write better reviews, documenting your coaching approach so others can use it, training people to run the codelabs you designed. Compounding effect — each generation of teachers multiplies the investment.