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 to 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.
• For 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?

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.
• 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
• 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.
• Single solution belief:
  • There is 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.
• 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
• 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?