The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man - George Bernard Shaw
Do one thing every day that scares you - Eleanor Roosevelt
Get rejected at least once a day - Rejection Therapy
by Roy Osherove
Please purchase the book like I did and support the author.
Elastic leadership is a framework and philosophy to help create self-organizing teams and realizing that leadership needs to change based on which phase your team is in.
Book is based on author personal experience of what worked and what didn't leading software teams.
We need to become better adjusted to the current reality and needs of our team, business and ourselves.
This book can help if you feel clueless about what your future team should be doing, if you feel helpless in leading your team to do the right things, you are broken and scared because of having no idea how to get out of a bad situation at work and you want to keep your head above water.
Team leaders around the world all suffer from some of the same basic bad experiences as most of weren't taught how to do this type of work. We want to not only create real value but also happy teams, both fulfilled and loyal.
Management done right is a very tough job.
A good leader will challenge the team and people around them to solve their own problems and as people learn to solve their own problems, your time frees up more and more to do things you care more about.
It takes time to challenge people and most teams don't have time in abundance. Making slack time to grow the team's skill will be necessary.
You and your team should always be getting out of your comfort zone to learn new things, nothing beats gaining new skills.
You can experiment with goals, constraints and the different leadership style described in this book.
Experimentation is one of the most enjoyable and interesting things about being a leader.
Sometimes you must be the person who gets up and does something, 90% of success is stepping up to the plate.
Learning something truly new is neither easy nor simple, many times it's scary, annoying or discouraging to make you give up half way through the challenge.
A great challenge can be taken either gravely ("I'm facing an awful great challenge") or enthusiastically ("Wow, great challenge")
LEADERSHIP MANIFESTO
The way to measure our success is through the overall growth in skills of self-organization & self-maintenance in each member of our team as well as the team as a whole.
We accept that what the team needs from us changes continuously based on their skills for handling the reality of work
We believe in challenging ourselves and our teams to always improve so:
- We create slack time for the team to learn and be challenged
- We embrace taking risks for our team over staying safe
- We embrace fear and discomfort while learning new skills over keeping people within their comfort zone
- We embrace experimentation (with people, tools, processes, work environment) over maitaining the status quo
- We believe our core practice is leading people so we welcome spending more time with our team than in meetings, treating software problems as people problems, learning people skills and communication techniques
It is hard to make positive changes in the work environment without the leadership skills and practiced outlined below.
There are three team phases and each phase requires a certain leadership type:
- Survival mode
- Learning mode
- Self-organization
Note that the words Mode and phase are almost used interchangeably:
Phase: where you think your team is Mode: how you react to which phase you are in e.g. in learning phase you go into learning mode
When we recognize we are in survival phase then we initiate survival mode.
What team leader is NOT: someone who provides everything their team needs and get out of their way as then you become their guy for everything. Are you a bottleneck now? If team has to wait for you to solve problems, you're the bottleneck and you'll never have time to do the things that matter the most.
What team leader is: helps develop quality people on the team and delivering value flows naturally from developing your team skills. When you develop valuable working individuals, you generate internal value for them personally.
To grow people at work means to help them acquire new skills and in order to do that you need to challenge them and coach them to solve problems on their own.
Three style of leadership that are good at different point in time:
- Coaching/Challenging (challenging to encourage growth isn't always a good idea)
- Command & Control
- Facilitating (self-organizing teams)
Coaching If your team don't have enough free time to practice or learn then this style of leadership won't work. If team is putting out fire all the time they don't have time to refactor or do test-driven development.
Command & Control: sometimes a good idea because at times a team leader must be able to direct their team down a path such as when fighting many fires and team has no time to learn new skills.
If you're team expect to learn new things and be challenged to become better then Command & Control leadership style won't work.
Facilitation: A good idea when team already knows how to do the work and solve their own problems. Agile methdologies called this a SELF-ORGANIZING team.
It won't work if the team doesn't have sufficient skills to solve their own problems.
It is very important to know when NOT to use a certain leadership style. They all belong to a different phase of the team and that question should be asked frequently as team can get in & out of these phases:
- Learning mode requires Coach/Dictator style
- Survival mode requires Command & Control style
- Self-organizing mode requires Facilitator style
SURVIVAL PHASE
- your team does not have enough time to learn
- constantly putting out fires
- late and overcomitted
LEARNING PHASE
- your team has enough time to learn and experiment
- learning new skills, removing technical debt or both
- implementing test-driven development (with people who have no experience in it)
- enhancing/building continuous integration cycle (with people who have no experience in it)
- enhancing test coverage (with people who have no experience in it)
- refactoring code (with people who have no experience in it)
- do anything constructive (with people who have no experience in it)
In short grow the team to be self-organizing by teaching & challenging them to solve their own problems
SELF ORGANIZING
- if you can leave work for few days, switch off your phone and have no fear you are in this phase
- goal is to keep things as they are by being a facilitator and keeping an eye on team to handle current reality
- choose a leadership style based on when team dynamics change
- in this phase you get to do things that matter most and execute your vision
- 80% of the software teams are probably in survival mode and keep putting out fire and never have time to do "the right thing"
Team has two important assets and any event (new team members, changing deadlines/goals) that can shift balance of the following assets would require a new type of leadership:
- knowledge and skill to solve their own problems
- slack time
Survival mode -> (making slack time, removing overcommitment, re-estimating with slack time) -> Learning mode -> (teaching people to solve their own problems) -> (team requirements change, company dynamics change) -> Survival mode
Move between the states rapidly based on the current situation and makeup of team.