Micromanagement leads to mistrust, lack of autonomy, demotivation. Undermanagement leads to isolation, bewilderment, cluelessness. Just-right management (“Goldilocks”) leads to increase in engagement.
-
The 48 Laws of Power - by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers. A history of power, condensed into 48 laws. Book notes by Joe Goldberg here.
-
Applying the Universal Scalability Law to organisations - by Adrian Colyer. Takeaways: "a) It’s really important you learn to delegate effectively and to choose carefully the things that you do get involved in. b) As the organisation grows, strive to keep the number of stakeholders that need to be involved in any decision down to a minimum. c) You need to keep a strict handle on how many things you’re involved in concurrently. d) Working at or close to 100% utilization will slow to a crawl everything that depends on you."
-
Delegate Outcomes, Not Activities - by Claire Lew. Takeaway: "When you delegate the outcomes and not the activities, you help employees not just execute for the task at hand, but equip them for every future task after that. You’re giving true ownership to your team."
-
How to Decide Which Tasks to Delegate - by Jenny Blake. Takeaway: "Conduct an audit using the six T’s to determine what tasks make the most sense to offload"—tiny, tedious, time-consuming, teachable, terrible at, and time-sensitive. Includes a delegation template you can use as a model for offloading tasks.
-
How to Delegate Better with the 7 Delegation Levels (video) - by Jürgen Appelo of M 3.0. Takeaway: a quick and clear video outlining seven levels of delegation: tell, sell, consult, agree, advise, inquire and delegate. "By distributing control and delegating decision making in an organization, we empower both workers and managers, enabling resilience and agility. This makes delegation truly an investment and an achievement." This accompanying article links to tips and exercises your team case use to reinforce delegation levels.
-
How to “Get out of the Way” - by Phil Sarin. Takeaways: Remove mechanisms of control: examples include estimation, meetings, sprints; increase focus (eliminate projects and reduce the number of priorities to 1-2); give authority to choose any approach that would lead to success. Need strong agreement on the goals of the project. If your managing principle is trust and not control, then people matter more than processes do.
-
How to Handle “The Situation” - by Michael Lopp. Takeaways: a) Do I understand the complete context, b) am I the right person to handle it, c) do I trust my information, d) are there any inconsistencies and do I understand them, e) do I understand my biases, f) do I understand my emotional state relative to the issue, and g) can I coherently explain multiple perspectives of it?
-
Identify Leaders By Giving People Assignments - by Brad Feld. Takeaway: categorize the responses in one of three ways: 50% vanish; 25% do the assignment; and 25% make shit happen well beyond what the assignment was—these are the leaders.
-
Lazy Leadership - by MetaLab founder Andrew Wilkinson. Takeaway: "I now think of my companies as machines. I determine the result that I want, design a machine that will produce the result, then figure out what sort of people I need as part of it. If I’m part of the machine, I think about my strengths and weaknesses, and if necessary replace myself with someone better suited to the role."
-
Managing for Progress and the Loss-Aversion Principle - by Tom Tunguz. Takeaway: "The best managers craft roles and assign projects that position their teammates to see and feel the result of their work directly."
-
Renovating Teams - by Ranganathan Balashanmugam. Takeaway: provides a framework for diagnosing and supporting dysfunctional teams through retrospectives, observation, and careful diagnosis.
-
“Screaming Monkey” analogy - by William Oncken, Jr. and Donald L. Wass. Takeaway: Think of each work item as a screaming monkey, and ask these questions to identify the important ones: Should we even fed the monkey?; Who should feed the monkey?
-
Situational Leadership Theory - Wikipedia entry. Takeaways: Proficiency depends on knowledge, ability, and aptitude; commitment describes motivation, interest, enthusiasm, and confidence; different levels of proficiency/commitment need different amounts of direction/support.
-Succession Planning. - by Will Larson. Takeaway: "Succession planning is thinking through how the organization would function without you, documenting those gaps, and starting to fill them in. It's awkward enough to talk about that it doesn't get much discussion, but it's a foundational skill for building an enduring organization."
-
Turn the Ship Around! How to Create Leadership at Every Level - by Stan Skrabut. Review of David Marquet's book, which is divided into four sections: Starting Over, Control, Competence, and Clarity. More notes by Joe Goldberg here.
-
Why Delegate? - by Margaret Gould Stewart. Takeaway: “If there isn’t something going off the rails on your team, then I know you’re micro-managing them. You’re good at what you do, and if you stay in the weeds on everything, you’ll keep things going perfectly, for a while. But eventually two things will happen. One, you’ll burn out. And two, you’ll eventually start to seriously piss off your team. So I better see some things going sideways, on a fairly regular basis.”
-
Do You Feel Pressure or Do You Apply Pressure? - by Ben Horowitz. About using “pressure” as an analogy for delegation.
-
How to Put the Right Amount of Pressure on Your Team - by Liane Davey. Takeaway: There’s an ideal level of stress; be mindful of it and modulate.
-
Management Is Not About Asking People to do Stuff - by Steven Sinofsky. Takeaway: "[M]anagers should not ask people on the team to do yucky work that the manager doesn’t want to do. Or said another way, if there’s something yucky to be done then managers should join in. That’s all well and good, but is also just basic civility I think."