These are my notes on Gerald Weinberg's Becoming a technical leader.
This is the first book that I read about leadership, so even if I found it insightful, I do not have any other reference to compare against.
Key Insights
- Leadership is a skill and as with any skill it can be learn.
- Leadership is not an instinct.
- Leadership is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.
- Organic leadership leads the process, not the people.
- An environment must have MOI:
- Motivation - why.
- Organisation - to move ideas to practice.
- Ideas or Innovation - seeds, vision.
- Motivational leadership is just one type of leadership.
- Technical leaders emphasise innovation. A problem-solving leadership style consist on:
- Understanding the problem.
- Manage flow of ideas.
- Maintain quality.
- All problem-solving leadership leaders have faith that there is always a better way.
- Manager != Leader. Manager is an appointed leader.
- Best working groups, leadership comes from everybody.
- The paradox of the appointed leader:
- We think the appointed leader is the essential part of an organisation, so
- When there is trouble, everybody turns to the appointed leader, so
- This increases the load on her, so she either:
- Breaks, or
- If she does not break, she has been the most active during the crisis, so
- The paradox if reinforced, as she is seen as the essential part during the crisis.
- This is why appointed leaders are replaced when a team does not perform. This is a fallacy. Systems are not linear.
- Will I lose my technical skills if I become a leader?
- Yes.
-
Obstacles for innovation:
- No-problem syndrome.
- Self-blindness.
- Single solution belief.
- Becoming a leader means shifting the focus from your ideas to ideas of others.
- People without vision cannot influence others.
- Find a vision: child-like, but not childish.
- Clear communication, tell:
- What you perceive.
- How you feel about what you perceive.
- How you feel about the feeling.
- If you are a leader, the people are your work. There is no other work worth doing.
- Offer to help only if you would want to be helped in the same situation and do it in the way you would want to be helped.
- You cannot care for others if you don’t care for yourself.
- Everybody wants to feel useful.
- Mature patterns of behaviour
- Consensus in organizations
-
Obstacles for organizing:
- Not using people's judgement.
- The more precise your orders, the more frustration when they are not understood, and the less creativity for the one ordered.
- Doing the work yourself
- A leaders job is not to solve a single problem, but to create an environment in which many problems will be solved, not just for today, but for the future.
- Everybody is doing their best, under the current circumstances. Hence if you think they there are not, it is because you don't understand the circumstances.
- The person at the top makes the rules, which is another way of saying it breaks the old rules.
- If you don't fail, you are not testing yourself thoroughly.
- Take responsibility for your own education.
- Make the most of your organisation's learning opportunities.
- Make time: Don’t redo work you have assigned to others. Allow if you must make them mistakes.
- Seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness.
- Do not obsess to become a manager or leader. Ask yourself:
- Why do I want to do this?
- What assets do I have to contribute?
- What liabilities do I bring?
TOC
- Part one: Definition
- Part 2: Innovation
- Part 3 - Motivation
- Part 4 - Organization
- Part 5 - Transformation
- Epilogue
Part one: Definition
Chapter 1 - What is Leadership, Anyway?
- Leadership is a skill and as with any skill it can be learn.
- Leadership is not an instinct.
- You maybe a reluctant leader, because leading is conceived as "telling people what to do", which feels wrong.
- You are a leader if people comes to ask for advice, and you like that.
- Who is the leader of a team? You cannot ask the team or the observers of a team.
- Leadership means influence.
- Many model of leadership:
- Linear:
- one effect, one cause.
- Example: thread/reward.
- You feel stupid if it doesn't work.
- Person:
- Place individual into categories.
- “Growth” == how well you fit into a category.
- Relationship:
- Good for large scale.
- Your position == your authority.
- Change:
- Expect change to be orderly, one thing at a time.
- Organic:
- close to system thinking.
- One effect, hundreds of causes, including the passage of time.
- Good for complex situations.
- Bad if we become paralysed until we fully understand the problem.
- Person:
- Are unique.
- Find common ground.
- Help find inner harmony.
- Relationship:
- Everybody is equal.
- Everybody benefits of problem solving.
- Joy of discovery.
- Change:
- Expect change to be messy, ambiguity.
- Change is an opportunity to grow.
- Linear:
- Definition of Leadership:
- Is the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.
- Organic leadership leads to the process, not the people.
- Organic model is important for innovation.
Chapter 2 - Models of Leadership Style
- For change to happen, an environment must have MOI:
- Motivation - why.
- Organisation - to move ideas to practice.
- Ideas or Innovation - seeds, vision.
- Leadership style is how much of the above you use.
- Examples:
- Pure "M": Politician able to sell any idea.
- Pure "O": Supper efficient office manager, for last year problems.
- Pure "I": Genius that cannot work with others neither can organise the work for his ideas.
- Technical leaders emphasise innovation. A problem-solving leadership style consist on:
- Understanding the problem.
- Manage flow of ideas.
- Maintain quality.
- The above is accomplished with MOI strategies.
- To improve leadership, we ADD strategies, do not remove.
- All problem-solving leadership leaders have faith that there is always a better way.
Chapter 3 - A Problem-Solving Style
- Understand the problem:
- Read the spec.
- Encourage others to read the spec.
- Resolve arguments by referring back to the original spec.
- Seek clarification from customer.
- Refer back to the spec after some work has been done.
- Manage flow of ideas:
- Contribute with a clever idea.
- Encourage copying of useful idea.
- Elaborate on an idea that a teammate contributed.
- Drop one's idea in favour of an idea the team want to develop.
- Refuse to let an idea drop until everybody understands it.
- Resist time pressure and take time to listen when other people explain their ideas.
- Test ideas contributed by other people (outside teams or company).
- Withhold quick criticism of teammates ideas, in order to keep ideas flowing.
- Criticise an idea, not the person behind the idea.
- Test your own ideas before offering them.
- When time and labor are running short, stop working in new ideas and just pitch in.
- Encourage the team to drop ideas that succeeded earlier, but cannot be extended to the new situation.
- Revive a dropped idea later, when it has value for other part of the problem or different context.
- Control quality:
- Measure quality as the project proceeds.
- Design tools and processes to measure quality as you build a solution.
- Measure the speed of implementation. Compare it to the schedule and be prepared to change the solution procedure.
- Step back from the project to refresh your perspective and assess its viability.
- Check ideas with the customer before implementing them.
- Restore morale when an idea collapses.
Chapter 4 - How Leaders Develop
- Practice makes perfect.
- Learning is like:
- Huge jumps in productivity.
- Ravine before breakthrough.
- Plateau with little improvement.
- How do you know there is something after the ravine?
- Metacycle: learning to learn.
Chapter 5 - But I can't because …
- I am not a manager
- Manager != Leader.
- Manager is an appointed leader.
- We tend to forget things that do not work, things that do not fit our models.
- Best working groups, leadership comes from everybody.
- The paradox of the appointed leader:
- We think the appointed leader is the essential part of an organisation, so
- When there is trouble, everybody turns to the appointed leader, so
- This increases the load on her, so she either:
- Breaks, or
- If she does not break, she has been the most active during the crisis, so
- The paradox if reinforced, as she is seen as the essential part during the crisis.
- This is why appointed leaders are replaced when a team does not perform. This is a fallacy. Systems are not linear.
- I am not the leader type
- Motivational leadership is just one type of leadership.
- Problem-solving leadership is more appropriate for me.
- I will lose my technical skills
- Yes you will.
- I am in danger of growing
- Yes.
- But you can chose when.
- Again, manager != leader != boss.
- I don’t want that much power
- What BS is the author talking about?
Part 2: Innovation
Chapter 6 - Obstacles to Innovation
- Self-blindness:
- The only way we can see ourselves is through other people, so
- Find somebody to watch over you and give you honest feedback. Keep it mutual.
- No-problem syndrome:
- What:
- Finding a solution before understanding the problem.
- You know the answer to all problems.
- Test to find out:
- Ask the problem solver to repeat back the problem to be solved.
- If she replies with a solution, then she has the problem solver syndrome.
- What:
- Single solution belief:
- Just one solution.
Chapter 7 - Improve self-awareness
- Test if you want to change: start writing a personal journey for the next 3 months.
- When? Whenever fits you.
- What? About yourself.
- Maybe follow: facts, feelings, findings.
- Maybe: work ideas and fixed bugs.
Chapter 8 - Developing Idea Power
- You must believe that any real problem has one more solution, which nobody has found yet.
- New ideas:
- Every mistake is a new idea.
- Steal ideas:
- Plagiarising.
- Research.
- Talks to others to be able to do this!
- Misunderstand stolen ideas.
- Copulation:
- Mix two ideas into a better one.
- Coupling of ideas.
- Best way to solve arguments between two parties.
- Error, theft and copulation: all things that we learn not to do since school.
- Relation with 3 obstacles to innovations:
- Error == self-awareness: we do not error.
- Theft == no-problem syndrome: we are so clever that we do not need others ideas.
- Copulation == single-solution belief: if there is only one solution, there is no point on mixing.
Chapter 9 - Vision
- Becoming a leader means shifting the focus from your ideas to ideas of others.
- Success can lead to failure.
- People become leaders because the way they react to failure:
- Not only overcome adversity, but turn it to their advantage.
- How? Special kind of vision, one that combines:
- "Ordinary" mission in life.
- And personalising the vision.
- In other words, something worth doing, but must have a unique part that only I can contribute.
- People without vision cannot influence others.
- Find a vision: child-like, but not childish .
Part 3 - Motivation
Chapter 10 - First Great Obstacle to Motivation - clear communication
- Inability to see yourself as others see you.
- Top problem solvers tend to believe that they had success without other people help. When they become leaders, they act more like a chief surgeon than an athletic coach. Basically, they think teammates cannot solve problems
- Testing question: Are you willing to appear fooling in front of other peoples?
- An Satir’s interaction model:
- Inner me steps:
- Sensory input.
- Interpretation.
- Feelings.
- Feeling about feelings.
- Defense.
- Rules for commenting.
- Outcome.
- This is just the receiving part, the sending part goes through something similar, so the opportunity of misunderstanding is big.
- Reasons why communications go awry:
- Perception.
- Wrong time.
- Wrong place.
- Wrong person.
- Self-worth.
- Satir says that 90% of communications are incongruent.
- Incongruent comms are deadly for motivation.
- Clear communication, tell:
- What you perceive.
- How you feel about what you perceive.
- How you feel about the feeling.
- By telling all of these, you may look as a fool, that why the testing question.
Chapter 11 - Second great obstacle to motivation - Putting task over people
- Pretend/Think that there is a conflict between people and a tasks. (Conflict == that you have to chose one over the other).
- People and tasks are indivisible. They cannot be separated.
- Every task derives from people.
- Lessons of task vs people oriented leaders:
- When survivals is concerned, there is no choice but to put people first.
- If the job is not highly technical, the leader need not to be competent, but can lead by fear.
- People with strong technical background can convert any task into a technical task, thus avoiding work they don't want to do.
- Leaders who don’t care about people don’t have anyone to lead, unless their followers don’t have a choice.
- No amount of caring for people will hold your audience if you have nothing to offer.
- Task-oriented leaders tend to overestimate their own accomplishments.
- Very little work we do is really so important that it justifies sacrificing the future possibilities of the people doing the work.
- When the work is complex, no leader can be absolutely sure that plans won’t "gang aft agley".
- To be a successful problem-solving leader, you must keep everybody’s humanness at the forefront.
- If you are a leader, the people are your work. There is no other work worth doing.
Chapter 12 - The Problem of Helping Others
- You cannot help if people don't want to be helped.
- Start by agreeing what is the problem.
- You can stop helping if it doesn't work.
- In every offer to help, the helper expect to get something, even if he is not conscious.
- No matter how strange it may look, most people are actually trying to be helpful.
- Golden rule regarding help: > Offer to help only if you would want to be helped in the same situation and do it in the way you would want to be helped
- If you don't care about people whom you lead, you will never succeed as they leader.
- You cannot care for others if you don't care for yourself.
Chapter 13 - Learning to Be a Motivator
- Chapter about self-esteem: each of us have survival rules.
- Survival rules do not allow to be effective leader.
- We can change survival rules to guidelines.
- We also have meta-rules (rules about our survival rules) that govern how we can change our survival rules.
- So when your leadership is not working, maybe you need to find if there is a survival rule interfering.
Chapter 14 - Where Power Come From
- You don’t "possess" power. Power is a relationship.
- Example: Technical expertise is "power" in a team of junior people, while not so much in a team of senior.
- You need to understand what you want power for.
- When changing role, your old power will banish and a new one will emerge. This is because your relationship with others has changed.
- Personal power: when you have a clear understanding of what you really want.
Chapter 15 - Power, Imperfection and Congruence
- Everybody wants to feel useful.
- Mechanical problems: one that seem complex but turns out to be solved by a technical solution with no emotional or psychological turmoil.
- Some mechanical problems are hard to handle because of the reaction to the event.
-
List of mature patterns of behaviour, to help fixing a problem:
- Be clear when dealing with others.
- Be aware of your own thoughts and feelings.
- Be able to see and hear what is outside yourself.
- Behave towards other people as separate from yourself and unique.
- Treat differentness as an opportunity to learn and explore rather than a threat or signal for conflict.
- Deal with persons and situations in their context, in terms of how it is rather how you wish it were or expect it to be.
- Accept responsibility for what you feel, think, hear and see, rather than denying it or attributing it to others.
- Have open techniques for giving, receiving and checking meaning with others.
- These are all social and communication skills.
- Be congruent.
- Be open with others about what you perceive, how you feel and be open to learn.
Part 4 - Organization
Chapter 16 - Gaining organisation power
- Organisation power: to obtain resources (money, training, office space, tools) for your team.
- Power conversion: convert other kinds of power into organisational power.
Chapter 17 - Effective organisation of problem-solving teams
- Possible organisations:
- Individual: no org, everybody works on its own.
- Voting: Vote without previous discussion.
- Strong leader: one person makes all decisions, privately consulting the team.
- Consensus: everybody agrees after the discussion:
- Everybody agrees in principle.
- Everybody backs up the decision with logic and facts.
- Avoid changing your mind only to avoid conflict.
- Avoid techniques to reduce conflict (like voting, averaging, …)
- Facts and only facts.
- Consider other opinions helpful, as long as they are supported by facts and logic.
- Do not withhold information just to be nice.
- Can use intuition, but make it clear that is intuition.
- Voting:
- Better than individual.
- Require less time.
- No information exchange.
- Better than consensus, if consensus breaks down.
- Better than strong leader, if leader is bad.
- Strong leader:
- Depends a lot on the leadership style and knowledge of the leader.
- Consensus:
- At first, time consuming and frustrating.
- Usually highest quality decisions.
- Can be harmful if consensus process breaks down.
- Whole team feels responsible for the decision, so more productive.
- Best one?
- Depends on the organisation context.
- Remember that organisation context can change.
- To check if it is working, see if the organisation is providing an environment for people to understand the problem, manage the flow of ideas and maintain quality (== problem-solving org).
Chapter 18 - Obstacles to Effective Organising
- First Obstacle: Believe that you just have two choices: order or be ordered.
- Second Obstacle: Think that people can take and interpret orders as computer.
- People have judgement and you want them to use it.
- Communication is never perfect.
- The more precise your orders, the more frustration when they are not understood, and the less creativity for the one ordered.
- Third: doing the work yourself.
- A leaders job is not to solve a single problem, but to create an environment in which many problems will be solved, not just for today, but for the future.
- Forth: Reward ineffective organising:
- Reward heroics.
- Organizing is not about solving “crisis”/problems, but avoiding them.
- Giving and taking orders are means to an end, not an end in themselves.
Chapter 19 - Learning to Be an Organiser
- Practice: at work and outside work.
- Observe how people organise and experiment (introduce little changes to observe what happens).
- Look for incongruences:
- What things are vs the way they look. Example:
- org chart vs real org.
- Official channels vs informal channels.
- (Seed model) Everybody is doing their best, under the current circumstances. Hence if you think they there are not, it is because you don’t understand the circumstances.
- What things are vs the way they look. Example:
- Look for cross wires:
- If everybody is motivated, and
- If everybody is agrees on the problem
- Then look for a mistake/misunderstanding in the organisation.
- Legitimize differences:
- Sometimes the cross wires happen because orgs do not account for people being different.
- Look at the Myers-Briggs model. Read “Please understand me”.
- Use yourself as a model of the team.
- You can see your own internal conflicts as a model of people conflicts.
- For example, conflict of wanting to finish now vs wanting to do a perfect job.
Part 5 - Transformation
Chapter 20 - How You Will Be Graded as a Leader
- Grading is multiplicative. If you have a 80% in tech and 60% people’s skill your score is 0.8 * 0.6 = 0.48.
- This is because as a leader, people expects a lot more.
- To make things even harder, as a technical leader, you are going to be graded in more dimensions.
- Improving an are with the least grade has more impact.
- From the previous example, if we can improve 10 points:
- (0.8+0.1) * 0.6 = 0.8 * 0.6 + 0.1 * 0.6 = 0.54
- 0.8 * (0.6+0.1) = 0.8 * 0.6 + 0.1 * 0.8 = 0.56
- From the previous example, if we can improve 10 points:
- Until some trust is build, tech leaders are scored by the minimum of the grades.
- Try to delay the area that you are weak at.
- You don’t need to answer any question immediately.
Chapter 21 - Passing Your Own Leadership Tests
- The person at the top makes the rules, which is another way of saying it breaks the old rules.
- A leadership trait is withstand testing, because you are going to be tested all the time.
- To pass a leadership test, you either use:
- Motivation, also called personality style.
- Organisation, also called planning style.
- Tech people are usually better at the planning style.
- Paradox: to avoid your weakest style, you have to strengthen it.
- Both style are important.
- If you don’t fail, you are not testing yourself thoroughly.
- If you are not testing yourself thoroughly, you will learn little.
- If you learn little, you can be good but not exceptional. You cannot jump to your next plateau.
Chapter 22 - A Personal Plan for Change
- When trying something new:
- We are in a special state of alertness.
- When we stop paying attention, we go back to the old, safe behaviour.
- A series of small, ordinary changes can put you on the brink of a large and extraordinary one. You have to have the courage to take the plunge.
- You need a plan.
- Take responsibility for your own education.
- Make the most of your organisation’s learning opportunities.
- Learn your learning style.
Chapter 23 - Finding Time to Change
- Make time:
- Don’t redo work you have assigned to others. Allow if you must make them mistakes.
- Avoid trivial technical arguments to prove your technical superiority.
- Choose your own priorities and don’t wait for a crisis to organise your activities.
- Avoid administration.
- Pay attention to what you do when there is nothing to do.
- Listen to what other people has already learned.
- Do two things at once:
- Find activities where you get multiple benefits.
- Kill two birds with one stone.
Chapter 24 - Finding Support for Change
- Seeking support is a sign of strength, not weakness.
- Nurture relationships for:
- Technical support.
- Services you cannot perform (like criticism of your own writing).
- Growth: people that give you things you didn’t know you did want to know.
- Recovery, emotional and spiritual support.
- There are three types of supporters:
- Conservatives: they don’t want you to change.
- Radicals: they want you to change.
- Friends: “Do whatever you really want to do”.
Epilogue
- Do not obsess to become a manager or leader.
- Whenever you want to do something, ask yourself:
- Why do I want to do this?
- What assets do I have to contribute?
- What liabilities do I bring?
Top comments (2)
wow this is great!
Probably good if we have a story about Gerald Weinberg