leadership

leadership

How to be a leader

TODO: a lot of this needs to be broken out into separate pages: management, change, etc

About

General landing page for leadership and managing people.

See also: coaching mentoring management

Elastic Leadership

The central concept is matching leadership styles to team phases

1. Survival mode (putting out fires; no time to learn): Command-and-control leadership
2. Learning mode: Coaching/challenging
3. Self-organizing mode: Facilitator.

One progesses down the mode chain by creating slack in phase 1, and using slack in phase 2 to learn and try new things. Phase 3 is nirvana, a utopia where no leaders are needed and teams self govern, company dynamics change.

Mapped to Tuckman's Stages of Development (see below) these stages look like this:

1. Forming
2. Storming and Norming
3. Performing

src: Elastic Leadership

Biceps

A human's core needs in the workplace. Kind of an adaptation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

1. Belonging
2. Improvement/Progress
3. Choice
4. Equality/Fairness
5. Predictability
6. Significance

src: Resilient Management

Management

Responsibilities of a manager:

1. Mentoring
2. Coaching
3. Sponsorship
4. Feedback

Team roles and responsibilities

Here are some tools for that

RACI

a respsonsibility assignment matrix:

1. Responsible: who does the work
2. Accountable: which one person is on the hook
3. Consulted: people with opinions and a little say-so
4. Informed: who's updated on milestones, etc

Venn diagram

literally draw it out

src: Resilient Management

Templates

Manager pro-tip: if you do something 3 times, create a template.

src: https://twitter.com/jewelia/status/1039316126600060928

How to manage people

1. Do not criticize or complain
2. Give honest and sincere appreciation: do not flatter
3. The only way to get someone to do something is to make them want to do it

src: How to win friends and influence people

Tuckman's Stages of Group Development

1. Forming: coordinating behaviors
2. Storming: coaching behaviors
3. Norming: empowering behaviors
4. Performing: supporting behaviors
5. Adjourning: disbandment

Not listed: rootin', tootin', shootin'

src: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development src: Resilient Management

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

1. Absence of trust: unwilling to be vulnerable within the group

2. Fear of conflict: seeking artificial harmony over constructive passionate debate

3. Lack of commitment: feigning buy-in for group decisions creates ambiguity throughout the organization

4. Avoidance of accountability: ducking the responsibility to call peers on counterproductive behavior which sets low standards

5. Inattention to results: focusing on personal success, status and ego before team success

Trust allows for healthy conflict, which allows for commitment to a thoroughly debated decision, to which the whole team holds each other accountable, which focuses the attention of the whole team on the outcomes of the decision.

src: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

changing behavior

This framework relies on the metaphor of a rider riding an elephant. The rider is one's thinking, rational mind. The elephant is one's emotional mind. And the path is the situation, the environment.

Given this metaphor, there are three things you must do to effect change in behavior:

1. Direct the Rider: provide clear instructions. Find the bright spots, script the critical moves, point to the destination.
2. Motivate the Elephant: make an emotional appeal. Find the feeling, shrink the change, grow your people
3. Shape the Path: change the situation. Tweak the environment, build habits, rally the herd.

src: Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard

Change

Three Surprises about change

1. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.
2. What looks like laziness is often exhaustion.
3. What looks like resistance is often a lack of clarity.

src: Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard