Dan Lebrero

Posted on Dec 10, 2019 • Edited on Sep 15, 2020 • Originally published at danlebrero.com

Book notes: Becoming a Technical Leader

#books #leadership #management #career

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 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.
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
- Yes you will.
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:
- 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?