Homework due for today
Legend: : Participation | : Early | : PDF | : Team | : Zipped
- Read: 14 Ways to become a better Technical Manager and Leader (5 minutes)
- Read How to make the most of a tiny tech team (5 minutes)
- Read Later (10 minutes)
- Read Twenty Questions to ask Before Joining a Startup (5 minutes)
- Read The Lean Startup is an unproductive legend (5 minutes)
Continuing Work
- Continue work on Stage 3: Should be completed on December 6. Look at the Term Project Outline. Now we are into the business issues. You will have talked and discussed this along the way. Who is your competition? How will you be different? How are you going to price and what is your financial analysis look like? And how will you plan to drive growth?
Interesting, but not required reading
- Watch Chaos Monkeys Interview (20 minutes)
Leadership
Discussion: Bad news: I can't teach you how to manage or lead in one class. Not in more than one class. What is a Leader anyway? Have you ever had a good leader? A bad leader? Discuss what you remember about the traits or behaviors that each had. Can I be a leader without becoming like those other people? How can I be a leader and keep up my technical skills at the same time? Is there a place for a leader in high-tech society who never had any technical skills to begin with? If I’m a leader, will I have to boss people around? Can I learn leadership from reading books? Why do people see me as a leader, when I don’t feel that way? Why don’t people see me as a leader, when I feel quite capable? What if I don’t want to assume leadership responsibility? What is leadership, anyway?
Becoming a manager
- How does it happen? Think about how someone’s responsibility grows
- Do you want to be a manager?
- “I’m not a manager!”
- “I’m not a leader type”
- “I’ll lose my technical skills”
- “I dont want that much power”
- “I don’t want to boss anyone around”
- How did I (Pito) learn to be a leader?
- Who says you/I are/am?
- On the ground experience
- Cliché: Making lots of mistakes
- Reading lots of things. The best book on this topic that I ever read:Becoming a Technical Leader
What is leadership?
- Different, much more than, management
- Except in a few contexts (military?) the leader can’t
make people do anything
- Leadership: “of what?” and “to what end?”
- Of what: the team, the available resources, the stake holders
- To what end: the goal, the problem, the mission, the objective
- Is it as simple as: You are a leader because people listen to you and want to support you?
Lead by example
- Be Proactive
- Be willing to make and meet commitments
- Begin with the end in mind:
What's your outcome?
- Prioritize: quadrants of urgent/not-urgent/important/not-important
- Be willing to trust so you are trusted
- Focus on, and reserve time, to learn and improve
Motivation
- Help the team embrace the goal
- Be in their shoes, and try to undertstand what makes them tick
- Re-articulate the goal over and over again
- Each member should understand why the goal is important and how their bit of it matters
Delegation is hard
- If I did it myself, I could do it faster, or better, or at least I know it will get done
- Delegation means taking a risk and putting yourself out there
- It’s not required that you know how to do the work you are delegating!
- Make sure you can explain clearly what is needed
- Catch someone doing something right
Management Mechanics
- Strategy
- Identify, understand and communicate the goal
- True at every level
- Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize
- Project Management
- What are your resources: time, money, people
- Be very clear in your objectives and communicate those
- Allocate your resources in the best possible way
- Monitor and improvise
- People Management
- Hiring and firing
- Communicationn and feedback
- Paying attention to what’s going on
- Negotiation
- Delegation
Communication
- 90% of management problems are related to communication
- You have to be willing to have uncomfortable conversations
- Everyone is doing the best they can, given their circumstances
- Don’t think you can read someone’s mind
- It’s good to ask for someone to say back to you what they heard, or to write it down
- Force yourself to talk face to face!!!
- It is very easy to have misunderstandings, hurt feelings or worse, over email
- Satir’s interaction model (basterdized:)
- ear hears
- brain parses
- brain understands,
- feelings arise
- brain formumlates response
- brain generates words
- mouth speaks
Ideas / Imagination / Innovation
- Figure out and understand the essence of the goal
- Seek and communicate clarifications as needed
- See the bigger picture, put the goal into context
- Contribute valuable ideas to the team
- Articulate or re-articulate this