Elastic Leadership

Summary

Elastic leadership is a framework and philosophy that can help you as you manage day-to-day and long-term challenges and strive to create the elusive self-organizing team. It is about understanding that your leadership needs to change based on which phase you discover that your team is in. This book provides you with a set of values, techniques, and practices to use in your leadership role.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

Your team looks to you for guidance. You have to mediate heated debates. The team is constantly putting out fires instead of doing the right things, the right way. Everyone seems to want to do things correctly, but nobody seems to be doing so. This is where leaders get stuck. It's time to get unstuck! Elastic leadership is a novel approach that helps you adapt your leadership style to the phase your team is in, so you can stay in step as things change.

About the Book

Elastic Leadership is a practical, experience-driven guide to team leadership. In it, you'll discover a set of values, techniques, and practices to lead your team to success. First, you'll learn what elastic leadership is and explore the phases of this results-oriented framework. Then, you'll see it in practice through stories, anecdotes, and advice provided by successful leaders in a variety of disciplines, all annotated by author and experienced team leader, Roy Osherove.

What's Inside

• Understanding why people do what they do
• Effective coaching
• Influencing team members and managers
• Advice from industry leaders

About the Reader

This book is for anyone with a year or more of experience working on a team as a lead or team member.

About the Author

Roy Osherove is the DevOps process lead for the West Coast at EMC, based in California. He is also the author of The Art of Unit Testing (Manning, 2013) and Enterprise DevOps. He consults and trains teams worldwide on the gentle art of leadership, unit testing, test-driven development, and continuous-delivery automation. He frequently speaks at international conferences on these topics and others.

Table of Contents

PART 1 - UNDERSTANDING ELASTIC LEADERSHIP

• Striving toward a Team Leader Manifesto
• Matching leadership styles to team phases
• Dealing with bus factors

PART 2 - SURVIVAL MODE

• Dealing with survival mode

PART 3 - LEARNING MODE

• Learning to learn
• Commitment language
• Growing people

PART 4 - SELF-ORGANIZATION MODE

• Using clearing meetings to advance self-organization
• Influence patterns
• The Line Manager Manifesto

PART 5 - NOTES TO A SOFTWARE TEAM LEADER

• Feeding back
• Channel conflict into learning
• It's probably not a technical problem
• Review the code
• Document your air, food, and water
• Appraisals and agile don't play nicely
• Leading through learning: the responsibilities of a team leader
• Introduction to the Core Protocols
• Change your mind: your product is your team
• Leadership and the mature team
• Spread your workload
• Making your team manage their own work
• Go see, ask why, show respect
• Keep developers happy, reap high-quality work
• Stop doing their work
• Write code, but not too much
• Evolving from manager to leader
• Affecting the pace of change
• Proximity management
• Babel Fish
• You're the lead, not the know-it-all
• Actions speak louder than words