Elastic Leadership

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A book by Roy Osherove

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Growing Self-Organizing Teams

My Role in Mamikos

1. Three years in Front-end division
2. One year old Tech Lead, front-end

Where I’ve Been So Far

Source

What will be discussed

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02

03

Team Leader Manifesto

Matching Leadership styles to team phases

Dealing with bus factors

Expectation

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👌

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Just what I got from the book so far

Understanding the meaning of Elastic Leadership

Open to discussion

Team Leader Manifesto

01

What does it mean to become a

Team Leader?

Tbh, I’m afraid to become a management guy

Afraid that my time will be sucked up by meetings

Won’t have time to do the things you love the most (like coding)

Might lose friendships with people I currently work with

— Mas Roy

“Don’t be afraid to become management”

You can make time for the things you care about

A good leader will challenge the team and the people around them to solve their own problems, instead of solving everyone’s problems for them.

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As people gradually learn to solve their own problems, your time frees up more and more to do the things you care more about, and the things that matter more.

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It also takes time to challenge people. Making slack time to grow the team’s skills will be necessary.

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Don’t be afraid to become management

Take the opportunity to learn things every day

Nothing beats gaining new skills. You and your team should always be getting better and going out of your comfort zone to learn new things. This is essential to what a team leader does. Becoming a team leader requires personal growth

Don’t be afraid to become management

Experiment with human beings

You have a team, and you can experiment with goals, constraints, and different leadership styles. Experimenting is one of the most enjoyable and interesting things I love about being a leader.

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Don’t be afraid to become management

Be more than one thing

You’re not only a developer; you’re also a leader. You can change things that bother you and do things that you think are right.

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If you choose not to become a manager, you’ll have far less influence.

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Sometimes you must be the person who gets up and does something.

Don’t be afraid to become management

The Team Leader Manifesto

— Mas Roy

“Great teams are grown, not hired”

The Team Leader Manifesto

The goal of a team leader is to continuously grow the skills of the people in their team to the point of self-organization.

The role of the team leader

In the past, one of my biggest mistakes as a team leader was that I didn’t recognize that my style of leadership was oblivious to the needs of my team.

Initially, my idea of what a team leader should do went something like this: a team leader should provide their team everything the team needs and then get out of their way.

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Boy, did I think I was stellar! When people needed some- thing—working code, infrastructure, a faster machine, or an answer to something—I was their guy. By my own definition back then, I was doing a great job. But that meant that I had little time for myself and was mostly in meetings or coding all day. I didn’t allow myself to take even a couple of days to go on a vacation. I was always at work because people needed me. And it felt great to be needed.

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Looking back, I can see lots of room for improvement, because the role of a team leader is vastly different from solving problems and getting out of the way.

Growth through challenge

For them to acquire skills, you must challenge them. Therefore, you have to stop solving all their problems for them and coach them to solve problems on their own (with your guidance).

When you solve all your team’s problems, you’re the bottleneck, and they’ll find themselves unable to manage without you.

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If the team has to wait for you to be available to solve problems, you’re the bottle- neck, and you’ll never have time to do the things that matter most.

Challenge

You’re the bottleneck

Challenging our teams to become better

• We create slack time for the team to learn and be challenged
• We embrace taking risks for our team over staying safe.
• We embrace experimentation as a constant practice over maintaining the status quo (With people, tools, processes , and work environment)

The Team Leader Manifesto

Challenge Them, so you’re not a bottleneck!

When you solve all your team’s problems, you’re the bottleneck, and they’ll find themselves unable to manage without you.

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If the team has to wait for you to be available to solve problems, you’re the bottle- neck, and you’ll never have time to do the things that matter most.

The Team Leader Manifesto

A just-in-time adaptive leadership style

We accept that what the team needs from us changes continuously based on their skills for handling the reality of work, and we embrace a continuously changing leadership style over a one-style-fits-all approach.

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The Team Leader Manifesto

Participating in human interaction

• We embrace spending more time with our team than in meetings.
• We embrace treating software problems as people problems.
• We learn people skills and communication techniques.

The Team Leader Manifesto

Matching Leadership styles to team phases

02

“Well, that makes no sense. We’re in crunch time! The release is late, and now I’m supposed to take what little time we have left to teach people new things?”

Challenging people is one style of leadership

Challenging /coaching leader

Command-and-control leader

Facilitating leader

“Which leadership style should you choose?”

Coach

The coach is great at teaching others to make decisions while letting them make the wrong decisions as long as there’s an important lesson to be learned.

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Time is not an issue for a coach, because learning requires time. It’s like teaching your kid to put on their shoes and tie their shoelaces—it takes time, but it’s an important skill.

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The coaching approach won’t work if you and your team don’t have enough free time to practice and do any learning.

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Command and control

With a controlling leader, there’s little room for people to learn, take sole ownership, or take initiative that might go against the rules. The consequences are too undesirable.

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The command-and-control approach won’t work if your team already knows what they’re doing or if they expect to learn new things and be challenged to become better.

Facilitator

The facilitator stays out of everyone’s way. The facilitator makes sure that the current environment, conditions, goals, and constraints are such that they will drive the team to get things done.

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The facilitator approach won’t work if the team doesn’t have sufficient skills to solve their own problems.

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Leadership styles and team phases

The three team phases

Survival phase (no time to learn)

Short definition: Your team not having enough time to learn.

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In order to accomplish your goal as a leader (coaching people to grow), you need to make time to learn, and your main strategy, or instinct during this phase, is to get the team out of the survival phase by creating slack time.

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In order to get slack time, you’ll most likely need to use a command-and-control style of leadership.

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Learning phase (learning to solve your own problems)

Short definition: Your team has enough slack time to learn and experiment.

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In short, use slack time to do anything constructive, and tack on the phrase “with people who have no experience” at the end of the sentence.

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Self-organizing phase (facilitate, experiment)

You’re in the self-organizing phase if you can leave work for a few days without being afraid to turn off your cell phone and laptop.

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If you can do that, come back, and find that things are going well, your team is in the unique position of solving their own problems without your help.

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Your goal in the self-organizing phase is to keep things as they are by being a facilitator, and keep a close eye on the team’s ability to handle the current reality.

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“When does a team move between phases?”

Dealing with Bus Factors

03

A bus factor of one is the riskiest

They’re a single point of failure

Bus Factors

Company X

1 Build Consultant

50 Developers

Lesson:

The fewer people you have who know an important part of your business, the more you will pay when they move on

I’m Yanto and I build & releasing the software

They discourage team growth

Bus factors are knowledge silos by definition, and knowledge silos that aren’t broken can lead to the “not my job” mentality.

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People who want to learn and be challenged will have a hard time finding new challenges because they’re expected to stay in their own little cube.

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That, in turn, makes for a team of specialists, or, to put it more bluntly, a team of bus factors.

Bus Factors

Removing Bus Factors

Ask the bus factor to pair up for at least 30 minutes a day with one other person in the team.

Put the bus factor in charge of a project that requires multiple people to accomplish tasks relating to the bus factor’s area of knowledge.

Pairing and coaching

Bus factor as teacher

Avoid creating bus factors

The more pairing your team does, the less likely that only one person knows how something works.

It’s almost as good as pairing: each code check-in gets personally reviewed locally or via remote call (for example, Skype) with at least audio.

Pairing

1-1 code reviews

Set a daily, weekly, or biweekly rotation on tasks that are bus factors, or with new tasks to prevent them from becoming bus factors.

Rotation

It’s a good practice to document anything that only you know how to do something.

Document the Only-You-Know-How

Bus factors are among the most prominent problems that can lead an organization or team into survival mode.

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Detecting, avoiding, and dismantling bus factors are huge parts of being a leader who grows their team.

Thank you