Category: management

Push your own flywheel

Today marks my 20 years working in the software industry. I was going to write a post about what I’ve done over that time and my takeaways from all the weird and beautiful things I’ve done. I might still do, but below is something that’s taken me nearly 20 years to realise. I don’t know why it’s taking me so long. Perhaps it’s age, getting things wrong (a lot), reflecting more on what I’m doing or all of the above. Whatever it is, I wish I understood this when I was younger. Who knows what I might have accomplished otherwise?

Either way, I know it now, so let’s see what the next 20 years hold now that I’m pushing myself and worrying a lot less about what happens.

Push your own flywheel.

There are many opportunities out there, but the vast majority won’t look like opportunities. It will only do so after the fact. The best thing you can do is push yourself forward and try different things. There’s no guarantee that the things you try will work or even be successful long-term. But the more you do, the more opportunities you’ll find yourself in. It starts becoming a flywheel, but to get it moving, you’ve got to push it first. One of the most complex parts of this approach is how long and hard you’ll have to push. Most people (me included!) give up too soon, usually at the first attempt, as it didn’t work out as you expected. 

The more comfortable you get with pushing yourself, the easier it becomes to move your flywheel. But suppose you’re constantly looking for external sources to push you or waiting for the right opportunity. In that case, you’ll either be waiting for a long time or worse, when the opportunity comes, you’re nowhere near ready to take full advantage of it. 

But when you are proactive, people begin to spot that you’re the person who can do things. They will start pushing opportunities forward to you – the flywheel starts moving from external sources. People often need to see you are ready (or close enough to be ready) before they likely push you forward for that opportunity. You can try faking it until you make it, but people often spot that you’re faking. Why? Because they’ve never seen you do anything else. So why would you suddenly be able to do it now?

Pushing my own flywheel 

About ten years ago, I started talking at conferences as it terrified me, so what better way to try and get over it than by doing it more? Luckily, it worked. However, I often questioned why I put so much effort into overcoming this fear. It was costing me more (lots of personal time and anxiety) than I was getting out of it (any recognition that anyone got anything from it). But I found things I enjoyed and kept at, slowly becoming more comfortable and better. 

Over the last two years, I’ve also been doing a lot of work around psychological safety for reasons I’ll not go into here. Still, I’m happy to talk more (message me). I have put together a talk on fostering more psychological safety in our teams. However, I was still determining what to do with it. 

Then, in late September 2022, I heard the organisation I work for would have a whole-day in-person internal-only engineering conference. So I approached the organisers to see if I could get a slot. I did, but it was only 10 minutes, so I had to cut back and focus on the message. 

At this conference, I might have given my best talk to date. It’s also one of my shortest but has taken the most effort to put together. It took almost 18 months to develop my understanding of the subject matter to know what I wanted to talk about. Then, getting feedback (massive thank you to all that did) and iterating on it months before to come in under ten minutes. Plus, the ten years honing my presentation skills. 

Jit Gosai standing on stage at the Old Trafford cricket ground for BBC Platform Engineering Conference 2022.

It was not until weeks after the talk that I realised this was one of my most significant opportunities to push forward the work I’m trying to do. There was no way I could have done that talk the way I wanted in the space of 2 weeks between asking to be able to speak and getting on that stage and delivering it. 

This one 10-minute talk led to two other more significant opportunities. My past speaking gigs got me on the radar of a track host at QCon. So when they asked if I had anything suitable, my psych safety work was perfect. But I only had 4 weeks to turn it around while still doing my day job. Luckily, I’d already done much of the hard work and just needed to pull it all together. Speaking on the Staff+ track at QCon in March 2023 was an opportunity that very rarely comes around. Especially for an engineering conference that doesn’t usually have testers (for a 3-day 6-track conference, I may have been the only one); in addition to that, most speakers are invited rather than the usual calls for speakers, making it much harder to secure a slot. 

Jit Gosai standing on stage at QCon London 2023 on the Staff+ track stage.

The second opportunity didn’t come around until another 5 months later and, at first, didn’t look like much. An internal team had seen my 10-minute psych safety talk and asked if I could do one for their upcoming away day. I now had my much longer QCon talk, so I offered them that, which they agreed to. It was a remote talk, so I didn’t get to meet the team on the day, but I got some nice comments after and didn’t think much more about it. 

It turned out that the room was full of HR representatives from all over the other parts of my organisation. Who all went back to their teams and told them this was the talk to see. Let’s just say I’ve run more workshops and talks in the last few months than I’ve done in the last few years! Massively accelerating my work with psychological safety throughout my department and across the organisation. And all because I could react so quickly to the opportunities, it allowed me to take maximum advantage of them. But to be able to do so was taking the gamble months, sometimes years before, without knowing how they would help in the future.

Connecting the dots

This reminds me of a quote from Steve Jobs during his 2015 Stanford Commence speech:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something–your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

Steve Jobs 2015 Stanford Commence speech

It’s only with hindsight that I can now look back and see how things have connected to where I am today. I had to push myself in the present moment because whenever you look into the future, it’s almost always full of uncertainty and failure. And that’s the thing: there are always more ways for things to go wrong than right, but if you wait for certainty on the outcome, there is a good chance you will be too late and unable to exploit whatever opportunities come your way. 

This is why there are many opportunities out there, but often, they only look like it after the fact. Sometimes, you have to take a risk and see where it gets you. 

This is not to say you shouldn’t bother planning as you can’t control the outcomes, but recognise that your plans may not always go the way you intended. So, being adaptable and having a willingness to change can be advantageous. And more so if you’re willing to push through unknowns and failures. So far, the best way I’ve found to do this is to have a direction you want to head in and follow where the road in front leads you. As long as you look up occasionally to check your heading in the right direction, you will eventually get there. 

The other point to mention is that a lot of things that happen to you are chance. We live in a complex world, often doing quite complicated things. The best way to ensure nothing bad happens to you is to do nothing, but that also means nothing good will happen, either. Sometimes, you’ll get lucky and be in the right place at the right time. But you can improve your odds by doing more, which allows you to see more and be in the right place at the right time more often than not.

So find a way to push your own flywheel, and don’t worry too much about how things will connect. As long as you look up occasionally to ensure you’re still heading in the right direction, you’ll be alright. And you never know; those opportunities you’re chasing might start chasing you instead.

3 traits of Self-leadership

A colleague of mine Qambar Raza recently shared this great Ted talk with me on self-leadership 👏

🎥 🍿🥤 Great leadership starts with self-leadership | Lars Sudmann

In it Lars describes three behaviour traits to improve your self-leadership:

1. Self awareness
2. Self reflection
3. Self regulation

This is a brilliant way to change any personal trait that you would like to be different.

The key to it is Step 1 by recognising what you do want, how that differs to what you do now and then identifying the incremental steps towards it.

The difficulty comes in Step 2 being honest with yourself everyday about how you are progressing towards your goal and what feedback mechanisms you are using.

Finally Step 3 is recognising that situations outside of your control will still occur where you might default back to your existing behaviour. So instead of trying to repress your response reframe how you look at the situation instead that enables you to look at the situation in a different more positive mindset .

Don’t know where to start yourself improvement journey then start by identifying some of the default behaviours you might exhibit.

Scales of Collaboration

Reading time: 3 minutes 

Idea in brief: The scales of collaboration can help you and your teams to work more effectively by improve your collaboration. It allows you to measure how you are currently collaborating and what you can do to improve its effectiveness. But what’s wrong with our current approach and how do you use the scale?

Issues with existing collaboration

Whenever I talk with people who work in teams one of the things I hear quite often is how much they are collaborating. But when we start digging into what they are doing you begin to notice that everyone has a different idea of what collaboration means.

This results in behaviours between team members that puzzles them when they think they’ve done everything right but the other people don’t respond in the way they anticipated. 

Examples I’ve heard of collaboration :  

  1. ‘They should know where to find all the information’
  2. ‘I sent them an email with all the details, they just never did anything with it’
  3. ‘I gave them an opportunity to feedback anything they wanted, they didn’t so it must be fine’

In all three cases the people involved believed they where attempting to collaborate but in reality all they where doing was making information available. It was up to the recipient to decide what to do with the information if anything. 

Scales of collaboration

If this isn’t collaborating then what is it and for that matter what is collaborating? This is where the scales of collaboration could come in useful. Taken from the work of Bruce B. Frey et al 2004,  Measuring Change in Collaboration Among School Safety Partners . Which was originally developed from Levels of Community Linkage Model (Hogue, 1993)*. It was developed as a questionnaire to measure how well groups of people collaborated. 

*Which unfortunately I’ve been unable to find the original paper only references to it

This works on 0 to 5 scale with each level having a defined set of characteristics. Where 0 is no interaction at all and 5 being collaboration. With each level building on top of the previous one.  

Scales of collaboration
Scales of collaboration developed from Levels of Community Linkage Model (Hogue, 1993)

When applied to the collaboration examples above you can see that example 1 is just making the information available which would indicate level 1 – Networking. Example 2 while is providing the information isn’t asking them to do anything which is level 2 Cooperation. Example 3 would welcome feedback but isn’t explicitly asking or providing them with a mechanism to do so therefore it would also be level 2 Cooperation.

Following the scale up towards level 5 begins to highlight what else each example would need to do to improve their collaboration.

Characteristics of collaboration

I have further augmented the scale with a few extra characteristics. This will also help you work out where you are on that scale and what you trying to achieve. This includes 

  • How you make information available to others 
  • Consumer/provider interaction model of this information 
  • Speed of decision making
  • Engagement levels of the people involved 
  • Examples of what each level of collaboration could look like 

I’ve also left off level 0 on this diagram as that would indicate no interactions and possibly not even awareness of one another.  

How to us it?

  1. Establish where you are on the scale  
    • You could do this by seeing if what you are doing fits onto the scale based on its characteristics or if it looks similar to the examples on the scale provided 
    • Once you’ve established where you are on the scale then
  2. Where do you want to be on the scale? 
    • The best way to do this is to identify the aim you are trying to achieve based on: 
      • The information: 
        • Is it just information providing, an opportunity to get feedback or to change opinions/direction?  
      • Decision Speed:
        • How quickly does a decision needs to be made
      • Engagement: 
        • If something needs to change due to that information and/or decision then there will be a greater need for engagement 
  3. How will you move up (or down) the scale? 
    • Use the characteristics on the scale as possible things you could do to move to this level
    • What do you need to do to move in the direction you want to go in?
  4. Share the scale with the people you are trying to collaborate with
    • This would create a shared understanding of what collaboration means to this group
    • Which helps everyone involved understand what is going to be expected of them and what overall outcomes everyone is trying to achieve

If you have already started to work with people then I would also avoid trying to jump straight to where you want to be. The risk being that it doesn’t lead to the collaboration you anticipated. Which could make it much harder to convince those people of your collaborative efforts in the future. 

My personal preference is to use each stage of the scale as a stepping stone to the next. This way you iteratively build up your skills and approaches towards getting more of what you want and less of what you don’t. This also allows more room to tweak approaches as you get feedback and are therefore more likely to be successfully in the long run.

What do you think?

  • What do you think of the scales of collaboration?
  • Where do your teams sit on the scale?
  • Would this help you and your teams to collaborate more or less?

Let me know in the comments section below.

Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams?

4 minute read

Update: Scroll to the bottom for a video of what is Psychological safety and why should you care in under 10 minutes.

Before you can answer this question you need to know what psychological safety is. Amy Edmondson in her book The Fearless Organisation describes it as: 


The belief that the work environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking

The Fearless Organisation

The best way to understand what this means is to break down the three key areas.


Interpersonal risk

Interpersonal is defined as relating to relationships or communication between people therefore interpersonal risks are issues that could affect relationships or communication. This can be thought of as others perceiving you to be: 

  • ignorant – when you share you don’t know something
  • incompetent – when you make a mistake as you don’t know how to do something
  • negative – when you highlight mistakes, issues or potential problems
  • disruptive – when you make suggestions that are different to others or generally asking questions that no one else is

The most effective way to counteract these risks? Staying silent or limiting what you do say to just the bare minimum.

The problem here is that those very risks are some of the best ways we can learn from each other. By not taking those risks we slow or even limit the innovation opportunities for ourselves and others.

Work environment 

This can vary from situation to situation but typically the group of people you find yourself working with to accomplish some goal.  For software teams this is usually the team in which you work in day to day. But other working groups could also exist such as your peers across the department or the leadership team you are a part of. 

Belief 

This relates to the individual within a work environment and is what they think about taking interpersonal risks.

What does a psychologically safe environment look like? 

Based on the above definition a work environment would be one that allows individuals to speak up and take interpersonal risks by asking questions, saying they don’t know something, pointing out problems, admitting to making mistakes or make alternative suggestions without other people thinking less of them for it. In fact it is actively encouraged and rewarded to speak up in this way. 

A point to note is that psychologically safe environments don’t mean that there can never be any conflict. In fact it’s quite the opposite and that conflict is almost a characteristic of psychologically safe environments. In an environment like this individuals can have different views but, importantly, can work through them productively without resorting to stalemate.  

Complexity in the work environment 

A lot of work done by software engineering teams can be thought of as complex. Complexity arises from a number of factors such as uncertainty in what needs to be done, how best to do it and if the outcome is even obtainable. On top of that no one person can understands all the intricacies involved with the work due to most systems being larger than any one person can fully understand. This leads to high levels of interdependence between team members while they carry out the work and learn more about the system as they go.  This all needs highly effective collaboration between teams members to work out what needs to be done, how they will do it and how they will know it’s been successful.

These are some of the core reasons why software teams adopt agile delivery methods as they take into account this complexity and allow the people involved to learn as they deliver the system. 

Effective collaboration for group learning 

Effective collaboration between team members isn’t simply each person completing their part of the work and then handing this off to the next person like a production line. All this requires is effective cooperation between team members and coordination to fit all the pieces together*. The problems with this production line framing of the work is that it misses the interdependence that exists between team members due to the complexity in the work environment. 

With effective collaboration individuals are able to learn from each other much more effectively as they are able to speak up and take the interpersonal risks without needing to second guess if their fellow team mates will think less of them for it.

*learn more about cooperation, coordination and effective collaboration using the scales of collaboration

Why is psychological safety important to software engineering teams? 

Creating software systems needs people to share information due to the complexity involved with the work. One of the best ways to make sure that information can flow freely as possible is for the people involved to feel it is safe for them to take interpersonal risks. While this does not guarantee success, teams that do are more likely to identify issues, come up with solutions and implement them much quicker than teams that don’t.

Psychological safety is a characteristic of highly performing teams and is a prerequisite for effective collaboration which is fundamental within software teams. 

Video: What is Psychological safety and why should you care?

What do you think?

Do teams need psychological safety?

What else can they do to help smooth the flow of information in teams?

How have your teams addressed collaboration?

Three things of 2020

3 minute read

Below are three things that when I reflect back on 2020 that stand out to me. I’ve purposely not mentioned COVID because I think this is one thing that all of us would have on our list so didn’t think there was anything more I can say on this that no one else is already thinking. I’ve also included my three things from 2019 at the end which I still think are important. 

🌳 You can’t stick your apples on other people’s trees

  • Something that Sarah has been trying to tell me for some time but it never really clicked until this year 💡
  • I’ve learned a lot this year about how we learn and what we can do to enable more or it
    • My apples…
  • But there is one thing that keeps coming back
  • It doesn’t matter how many different ways you find to engage people with the content
    • Unless they really care about it they may never have the insights that you think they should have 
    • They may never see the benefits you do or incorporate that that information into their ways of working 
    • This is all about trying to stick your apples on other people’s trees…
  • Usually they are just too busy to even be able to give it the time 
  • The best approach is for them to find ways to incorporate into their own learning 
    • To encourage them grow their own apples…  
  • This takes a lot more time than simply forwarding a link to read or even sending them on workshops/training courses… 

Speaking of apples…

🍎 Informal Relationships

Informal Relationships between team members is the key foundation for high performing engineering teams

  • Most teams members can work with each other quite efficiently but the level with which we do makes the difference between low and high performing teams 
  • We can cooperate and coordinate quite well as can be seen by how well teams can slice up work into tickets and hand them off to the next stage (cooperating). Some teams take this further and begin coordinating their actions using information from their step in the process to inform the next stages (coordinating)
  • But coordinating with teams members isn’t enough we need to be able to collaborate because of the level of complexity we work in means no one person can ever know it all. This essential and often forgotten detail makes team members interdependent 
  • It’s the level of how well we can collaborate and work through problems that gets teams towards higher levels of performance. This performance can be measured by how sustainably the team can deliver end user value (throughput)
  • Psychological safety plays a big part in this interdependence and collaboration and can be characterised by how well people in the team can “just talk to each other” 
    • Psychological safety being the belief of individual team members that it is safe within their work environment to take interpersonal risk 

🎓 Learn more: Fundations of great teams? Start with relationships

🍏 Manager or Leader? 

Understanding the difference between the two can be really helpful  

  • One of the things that has really stood out for me this year has been the difference between management and leadership
  • I always conflated the two and never really appreciated the difference
  • Since then I’ve not looked at software engineering teams the same again
  • Do other make the same mistake? 
    • Leading to confusion on when we should be leading our teams and when we should shift to a more management style 
  • A Hybrid model may also be workable 
    • especially the closer you get to where the work is happening 
    • With a heavy slant towards leadership then management 
    • But the further you get from it the more a leadership style works best 
  • A simple heuristic: 
    • the less experienced a member of staff then a more hybrid approach 
    • but the more experienced they are then a more leadership style is appropriate  

Three things 2019

Teams

  • Working as a team will accomplish more than just working alone 
  • I’ve tried and accomplished some things with some good results 
  • But nothing compared to what I’ve contributed to as a team
  • But it starts with trust… 

Trust 

  • that people really do know what the best course of action is
  • They just sometimes need help thinking things through 
  • Which needs people to listen…  

Listen

  • And I mean really listening
  • This has by far been the most important thing I’ve done this year
  • Just asking very open questions and listening to what people say 
  • I’ve learned more about people and what is happening in our teams from this than any other way 
  • The interesting thing is the people I’ve listened to seem to get so much more out of it 
    • I think this is because not many of our team members get a chance to be listened to… 

What are your three things for 2020?

Let me know in the comments below

Foundations of great teams? Start with relationships

4 mins reading time

tl;dr: check out my miro model to get the key points.

Model of who do we prefer working with https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_khGWgWc=/
Good informal relationships are they key to better collaboration https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_khGWgWc=/

Over the last couple of years I’ve started to see that relationships between people appears to play a big role in how successful their teams are. The better the relationship the more willing those people are to share ideas and learn from each other. Which generally leads to much better results for those teams in the long run. Not only that they get those results a lot faster and are typically happier too.

But this is work so shouldn’t we be leaving our personal feelings at the door when it comes to getting things done? What do relationships have to do with anything?

Who do we prefer to work with?

One thing I have seen is that when people like each other they tend to be more likely to work together then people who don’t like each other. Generally for people who don’t get along their interactions tend to be the bare minimum usually resorting to asynchronous methods of communications like email or other group message systems (Slack, Teams etc). They pretty much do anything they can to avoid face-to-face contact.

The problem here is that this can leave messages more open to interpretation and further exacerbate poor relationships. Not only that sharing information this way can at times be slower than simply speaking face-to-face.

But how much do people have to like each other to work together successfully and is there anything we can do to make sure people who do have to work together can get along? 

How much do people have to like each other?

The amount tends to be quite subjective but these types of relationships are usually characterised as work colleagues or sometimes work friends.  They are essentially informal relationships between people who work together where they are very likely to say that the like each other. Multiple informal relationships lead to informal networks which can make working in teams much more productive and enjoyable for the people involved. 

The benefit of informal networks is that they are more likely to lead to collaborative behaviour that enables learning from each other. This in turn can lead to new ideas and innovations. Which all successful teams need.

What can we do to help people get along more? 

By helping people to find more common ground with each other tends to lead people to think of each other as we rather then us and them. This common ground can help people to see that they are similar to each other which can lead to familiarity. Both of which can help towards more positive reciprocal behaviours towards each other. All three of these (similarity, familiarity and positive reciprocal behaviours) benefit us psychologically by making us feel good.

Feeling good to think and collaborate

When we feel good we are more likely to think freely rather than when we feel threatened and are looking to protect ourselves. When we are threatened our brains actively limits resources from working memory. Working memory is a key component for analytical thinking which you need for creative insight and problem solving.  

The level of collaboration is also improved as when we feel good we are also more accepting of people’s differences and more willing to take interpersonal risks with other people.  Interpersonal risks are very personal to the individual but can typically be classified as:

  • Looking incompetent because you don’t know something when you think you should 
  • Thinking you are being disruptive by wasting someones time by asking questions or needing things to be explained in more detail
  • Looking ignorant because you don’t know something  

All three of which can have perceived negative consequences to your reputation.

All these risks need people to be vulnerable in front of others so that they can learn from each other and therefore collaborate more effectively. But if they are unwilling to do this then they are not going to share what they do and don’t know which leads to less effective teams. Essentailly everyone has to figure things out forthemsevles instead of learning it quickly from someone else.

Feeling good means better innovations?

Better team member relationships, feeling good, collaboration and learning from each other doesn’t guarantee that the team will come up with best and most efficient solution to a problem. What it does do is create the right conditions for those solutions to found and implemented.  

Not only that a team that enjoys working together and is able to work through their differences is more likely to keep doing this repeatedly and get better at it every time they do. Therefore leading to more ideas and increased likelihood of the team finding alternative solutions to problems. One of which might just be that innovation your organisation has been looking for to give them the edge over their rivals.

What are the trade-offs to all this harmony?

There is a risks of overly harmonious teams though. This is that they are less likely to challenge each other and are more likely to go with the flow. Which could actually lead to less innovation and creativity. As they are more willing to just accept the first idea rather than challenging it which could risk the team harmony. So some level of “creative abrasion” is needed to help people productively challenge ideas.

But again good working relationships will help stop challenging situations from causing so much tension that people begin to refuse to work with each other.

Is there data that back this up?

Research by Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo for their 2005 paper Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks backs up a lot of the ideas above. Their data was based on surveying 4 large organisation and collecting over 10,000 data points on work relationships.

You can find my notes in this model.

Why do we respond the way we do in social situations?

A colleague recently shared an article with me called Managing with the brain in mind. It argues that the workplace is experienced by employees as social structure first then a workplace and that keeping this mind might lead to better employee engagement.

It uses (some) neuroscience research to help explain how people are likely to respond in certain social situations and identifies that people’s brains tend to view situations in terms of threats and rewards* .

It then goes on to detail 5 social qualities abbreviated to SCARF (status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness) that you could use to help you understand how you could apply some of the research to yourself and your teams.

I found some of the ideas quite compelling and wondered if it would be easier to consume modelled as a mind map.

People perceive social interaction in different ways. The research carried out over the years suggests that they may view it as a threat or reward. If the threat response is too serve then this is likely to limit their brain’s ability to function and therefore limit behaviours that can lead to rational outcomes. If it is a mild threat response then it might be enough to provoke curiosity, free up brain resources and motivate them towards rational behaviours. A reward response is the most likely to lead towards a rational behaviours as they have more brain capacity to take on additional information.

The key point is you will never know fully to what extent someone is experiencing a situation – they may not even be able to articulate how they are feeling themselves. Unless they are responding in a way that is very clear e.g. angry/fearful most likely a threat response, happy/joyful most likely reward response, but most work situations are likely to cause a neutral response with no obvious outward emotion.

Therefore approaching a situation that is more likely to cause a reward response in an individual is most likely to produce behaviours that can lead to better outcomes.

What do you think about the ideas behind the SCARF model?

How would you use the model?

Is there another way in which we can can help people in social situations?

Let me know what you think in the comments below.

*I have to admit this point is a little tenuous as they make this connection by viewing brain scans of how people respond to pain and how they respond to social situations. They found that similar pathways in the brain where invoked whether it was a negative social situation or physical discomfort. But a lot of the ideas expressed in the article fitted in with what I’ve seen.

The difference between leaders and managers

3 minute read

Tl;dr: Hybrid Leader-managers could be one of the keys to successful software teams but first you need to understand the difference between the two. 

A higher quality version of the model can be found on my Miro board.

The default style for most leadership within the software teams is towards a management style which caters for managing complexity through process and routines.  But by understanding the differences between management and leadership we can better create hybrid leader-managers. This approach is beneficial for software teams as the work they do can at time be highly complex. 

Complex work can be described as work that has an uncertain outcome due to the many variables that can affect it. These variables can be known or unknown either before, during and after the work is completed.

Leader-managers styles are best suited for leads that work closely to where the work is happening as the hybrid model takes into account that some work is routine, and therefore a management style is suitable and some work is innovative and therefore leadership approach is more appropriate. The further up the hierarchy you go the more a leadership style is suited as this enables the organisation to better handle change. 

Being able to adapt to change is a now a feature of almost all software teams and ones that a better equipped to adapt to it are more likely to succeed on more dimensions of success other than just delivering what the users want. Successful dimensions could be sustainable team performance, team member satisfaction and delivering end user value consistently. 

What does this model illustrate? 

Based on a HBR article what do leaders really do by John P. Kotter it shows that management is about reducing complexity through standardisation and making work efficient. This heads organisations towards certainty. Leadership on the other hand is all about creating change within the organisations and embracing the complexity that exists. They do this through communication and motivating the organisation towards that change.

Management

On the left are the management styles for handling complexity within organisations through three distinct approaches. Managers communicate what needs to be done through planning and budgeting. Create networks of people and relationships to do the work by hiring and organising them. Finally making sure the work happens by managing complexity and solving problems.

Leadership

On the right are the leadership approaches for creating change within organisations. Leaders communicate what needs to be done by setting the direction the organisation is heading in and letting the employees figure out how they get there. They create networks of people and relationships to do the work not by telling them to collaborate but by aligning them through that direction. Leaders make sure that the work happens by motivating those people to solve problems for themselves instead of handing them solutions.

Which is better?

As is clear from the model management and leadership do have their differences but it’s not about one approach being better than the other but that they are complementary to each other. It is almost like they balance each other from the extremes of just following one approach.

Do you see a difference between management and leadership?

How have you been led or managed in the past?

Does this model change your approach to leadership and management?

Let me know in the comment below