Chapter 1. Striving toward a Team Leader Manifesto

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, Man and Superman

This chapter covers

• Principles of leadership
• How to become and remain a good leader
• Developing other leaders from your peers—growing people

This chapter outlines the principles for becoming, and remaining, a good leader, and also developing other leaders from among your peers.

Leadership in general—and team leadership in the software business in particular, where little training, if any, is provided—isn’t easy to accomplish, or indeed to measure. We can begin with the assumption that most people in software—like you—have no idea what they’re doing or what they should be looking at when leading their software teams. Yes, that was me too.

This book springs from my personal experience of what worked for me and what didn’t work for me when I was leading software teams.

One thing is certain: the way we work with our teams must improve. We must become better adjusted to the current reality and needs of our team, our business, and ourselves.

A few years ago, I was speaking at a programming conference. The person who introduced me also mentioned that I was looking for a job. At the end of the talk, a woman came up to me and said, “We want to hire you as a developer.” Boy, was I proud of myself that day. I began working there, and the woman became my team leader.

My first job was to write code that uses the local network and searches for specific data on remote hard drives (no, it was not a virus). I worked on it alone. As the day went on, I struggled and struggled. It was harder than I thought. Another day came and went, and I was still at it. My ego wouldn’t let me ask for help. They had hired me off a conference stage because I was supposed to be an expert. How bad would I look if I said I didn’t know how to solve this problem—the first problem I had been given at that job? No. I was determined to work on it until I figured it out.

To add to my grief, there were no daily stand-ups, and every few days my team leader would pass by me and ask lightly how things were going. I would deliberately say it was “in progress” and move on with a solemn face. A week went by and I began avoiding people’s eyes in the hallways. I pretended to be busy and pensive, but I was drowning inside. Every day that went by, it became harder to admit I was stuck. Every day that went by made it harder to ask for help; I would look more stupid with the little progress I had made during all that time.

At some point, I took sick leave for a few days. I couldn’t handle the silent pressure. When I came back from the leave, my team leader approached me and said, “Hey, by the way, that thing you were working on? One of the devs and I sat on it and made it work in a few hours.” They had found a simple way out of my mess, and I felt both betrayed and foolish. I was fired from that company shortly after with a budget-cut excuse, but I knew better.

There were many things that could have prevented this Greek tragedy:

• I could have been a bit more courageous and said, “I don’t know how to fix this,” early on.
• We could have had daily stand-ups where my predicament would have been discovered early.
• We could have had a rule whereby no one was allowed to work on something on their own for more than a day.
• My team leader could have approached me and done one-on-one meetings weekly or biweekly to discover what was up.

But nothing happened, until the worst happened.

The values I introduce here, and throughout this book, can help prevent such tragedies from transpiring, or at least make them very unlikely. I hope they can help spark a desire in you, the reader, to become better at what you do.

Why should you care

You might feel helpless in leading your team to do the things you believe to be “right.” This book can help.

You might feel like you want to keep your head above water. This book will help you accomplish much more. You might feel clueless as to what it is you’re supposed to be doing with your (future) team. We’ll tackle that too. You might be broken and scared because you have no idea how you’re going to get out of a bad situation at work. Welcome to the club. I hope I can help. I hope I can because I’ve been there—clueless and scared. I was lucky enough to have some good mentors along the way who challenged me to do the things that I was afraid to do, to get out of my comfort zone, and to learn things I didn’t even know I didn’t know.

I think team leaders around the world all suffer from some of the same basic bad experiences. Most of us weren’t taught how to do this type of work, and most of us are never going to get mentors to help us through it. Maybe what we’re all missing are some good, old-fashioned people skills. Maybe we’re missing some direction, some overall purpose for our leadership role. I feel that if we go uninformed into a leadership role in software, without a sense of purpose and strategy, we’ve already lost the battle to create real teams. Yes, our head might be above water, but are we there to slog through another day? Are we supposed to be this helpless? We want to be leaders who create not only real value but also happy teams, both fulfilled and loyal.

Don’t be afraid to become management

A lot of developers who are promoted to leaders, or who are offered the opportunity to become team leaders, seem to be resistant to becoming management. I can understand some of the reasoning, but I don’t accept it. You might be afraid that your time will be sucked up by meetings, that you won’t have time to do the things you love the most (like coding), and that you might lose friendships with people you currently work with. I agree that there’s a basis for those fears. We’ve all seen (or been) that person who doesn’t have time to do what they love, or fumbles a friendship because they’ve turned into a boss from hell, and so on.

Paraphrasing Jerry Weinberg in his book Managing Teams Congruently (Weinberg & Weinberg, 2011): Management, done wrong, can make these fears manifest into reality. But management done right negates them. Management, done right, is a very tough job. That’s why you get paid more.

I’ll return to this concept later in this book.

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. 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 (sitting down with people, coding to keep in sync with what’s going on in the team and the code). Doing your job as a leader and challenging or asking people to accomplish tasks may indeed feel weird, but in my experience, doing it will garner more respect for you, not less. Yes, some things will change, but change is inevitable. You might as well own and control how things change.

It also takes time to challenge people, time that most teams don’t have in abundance. Making slack time to grow the team’s skills will be necessary.

Take the opportunity to learn new, exciting 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, rising to the challenge of knowing your team and what you can expect from them.

Experiment with human beings

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

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. How many times have you said to yourself, “I wish I could change X?” As a leader, you can do something about it. If you choose not to become a manager, you’ll have far less influence. As my friend Jeremy Miller said,

There are no experts. There is only us.

As you may have noticed in the preface to this book, I think that statement is spot on. Sometimes you must be the person who gets up and does something. You’ll be surprised by how many people will follow you. Remember that 90% of success is stepping up to the plate.

Challenge yourself and your team

I’ve heard this basic idea expressed in a couple of different ways:

• Do one thing every day that scares you. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
• Get rejected at least once a day (also known as “Rejection Therapy”).

These ideas are powerful and good ways to make sure you’re learning something. I believe that learning something truly new is neither easy nor simple. In fact, many times it’s scary, annoying, or discouraging enough to make you want to give up halfway through the challenge. Leadership, done right, can be difficult to learn. But as you make progress, you’ll be amazed by your growth. You won’t be the same person you were before embarking on this journey.

When you read the words great challenge, what comes to mind?

Depending on your state of mind, great challenge can be taken either gravely (“I’m facing an awful great challenge”) or enthusiastically (“Wow, great challenge!”). Choose the second option.

The following section may present a great challenge to you.

The Team Leader Manifesto

This manifesto is continuously being developed and refined. You can find the latest version of it at http://5whys.com/manifesto. The high aspirations of the manifesto can be seen in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1. The Team Leader Manifesto

Here’s a breakdown of the manifesto, line by line.

For us as team leaders, the goal and the way we measure our success is through the overall growth in skills of self-organization and self-maintenance in each member of our team, and in the team as a whole.

To that end:

• 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.
• We believe in challenging ourselves and our teams to always improve; therefore:
  • 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 as a constant practice over maintaining the status quo
    • With people
    • With tools
    • With processes
    • With the work environment
• We believe our core practice is leading people, not wielding machines; therefore:
  • 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.

Next up

The most important thing you’ll need to know before you plan how to lead is the three team phases: survival mode, learning mode, and self-organization, which the next chapter discusses.

Summary

Leadership is a challenging thing to accept. If we don’t accept it, there are others who will, who might not do justice to the power they wield.

There are many benefits to becoming a leader, including learning a new set of skills, becoming more valuable to the organization, and experiencing a greater feeling of accomplishment.

Sadly, many people take on a leadership role and don’t know what to do with it, and they feel overwhelmed. This book is my way of contributing to help prevent that from happening.

Team leaders are the first line of defense (or attack) in making things work from the ground up. Without their help, an organization will be stuck spinning its wheels in neutral forever, no matter how hard upper management presses on the gas.

Without the leadership skills and practices outlined in the chapters that follow, it’s hard to make positive changes in the work environment.