This year, Canada Day is Wednesday, and the 4th of July - the USA Independence Day is on Saturday, but most companies give people Friday off. That immediately creates a vacation scheduling issue. This time of year is always the same challenge - everyone wants time off at the same time, and you can't just say yes to everyone. Customers still need support, projects don't pause, and someone has to be available. So you build a schedule and you try to be fair, but it is never perfect. What's your approach to managing vacation coverage during peak season - and how do you handle it when someone really needs time off but the timing is terrible?

I volunteer at a car club and part of my role is working with sponsors. What I've learned i that when you're talking to successful people, price is never the real objection. Value is. If the value is clear, the conversation is easy. If it's not, no price will fix that. I had to earn those sponsors. I had no authority over them, no leverage. Just a clear case for why working together was worth their time and money. Some of them now come back and bring prizes for our events. That's influence. Not a title, not authority. Just making the value obvious. What's a situation where you had to influence someone who had no reason to listen to you?

I built a Claude Code skill that uses subagents to make updating Jira as easy as possible. Each team member basically just needs to confirm what the agent already drafted for them. And yet, some people still don't do it. Which got me thinking -> it was never really about how hard it was. If someone doesn't update their tasks when the tool does most of the work for them, that's not a tooling problem. That's a diligence problem. How do you hold your team accountable to keeping collaboration tools up to date - and what actually worked?

Came in this morning to an outage that started over the weekend. Most of it could have been avoided if people had read the memo that was sent out. This is not the first time this has happened and I doubt it will be the last. So I'm genuinely asking - how do you get people to actually read and act on important communications before something goes wrong?

This is the topic you voted for, help me find a time that works. While you vote also I have a question for us to get started Who is the most influential person you've worked with, and what made them effective?