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Precious silliness. Let us re-examine our conception of leadership because of ... our delight in ballet. File under "forwards from your non-profit grandma."

For a more practical take on leader-follower, check out David Marquet's "Turn The Ship Around".

"Turn the Ship Around!" has been awesome resource for our team, most definitely recommend

"Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders". I am reading it now, very entertaining and you'll learn thing about management styles.

TBH I’m not sure of its relevance to postmortems specifically but I’d highly recommend the book. Turn the Ship Around, Marquet. Great audiobook too.

They should get Captain Marquet of "Turn the Ship Around!" to go get them ship shape. The book has some really good lessons on how shifting leadership style and culture can produce dramatically better results.

My favorites so far: High Output Management, Turn the Ship Around, Radical Candor, and the Five Dysfunctions of a Team.

Distributed decision-making works just fine without AI. As Marquet puts it: “move the authority to the information” (as opposed to the converse more typical of the hierarchical organisation). Read “Turn the ship around!”, also a great audiobook.

This is fascinating, thanks! Turn The Ship Around is on my reading list.

Here's the "Non-Bullshit Book on Culture" book this post discusses:

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet

Also here's a great speech given by the David Marquet (with drawings!) on the same topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8

A nontrivial part of this blog post is essentially saying "Silicon Valley practices leader-leader management more than most industries", in the sense of David Marquet's "Turn The Ship Around!". Points 1, 2, and 5 are precisely aspects of leader-leader management.

I was only familiar with "Turn the Ship Around", so I just looked it up. Apparently there are 2 books on this topic from different captains.

"It's Your Ship", Captain D. Michael Abrashoff
"Turn the Ship Around", (Captain) L. David Marquet

I'd actually be curious how much the advice overlaps.

You (well, at least I) can't actually down vote immediate replies to your own comments.

I wonder what our leadership would make of the book "Turn the ship around". I'm not sure how they'd go about defining responsibility - it seems to be all about passing the buck and CMA.

It's like a macro version of the story told in Capt. David Marquet's book Turn the Ship Around! Huge piles of bureaucracy, complexity, and waste build up in an organization risk avoidance is allowed to become the primary goal.

Yes, good tip from "Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet is to use the "I intend to" model. For every action you are going to undertake that is critical, first announce your intentions and give enough time for reactions from others before following through.

I have been a team lead for four years now in different companies / teams.

I think empathy and radical candor are the most important skills ! There’s a book called radical candor that I really recommend.

Other than those I recommend reading how very effective leaders did their job, Eleven Rings by the NBA coach Phil is absolutely amazing on how to build a winning team as is Leading from Ferguson (soccer). Turn the ship around is another great book by someone’s experience in the navy.

Creating a safe space where people know the goals clearly, communicate effectively and helping to unblock them are part of the goal !

There is a nice compilation of articles in a github repo, divided by topic. https://github.com/charlax/engineering-management
Leadership is an expansive topic and I don't think it's possible to nail it. "Turn the Ship Around" I think really nails the strategy of Functional Leadership, plus it's a true story.
Keep in mind that Leadership and Management are two very different topics that people often conflate.

This depends a bit on the scale of your startup and where you want to focus. As the startup develops, if you will be building, growing, and directly managing the technical team then a focus on people books is appropriate (e.g. "Peopleware" and my personal favorite "Turn the Ship Around").

If you are also leading product, then "The Principals of Product Development" is an excellent book.

If you are tasked with research and innovation then "The Innovator's Dilemma" is a must read.

Happy to share more recommendations if you get in touch.

[I’m the author but not the OP]

I agree team skills are important and I discuss them extensively elsewhere, for instance in this talk (https://youtu.be/lvs7VEsQzKY), but that is orthogonal to what I’m talking about in this article. Those skills are valuablein any case!

Your comment about “how people function in... a company” is key, however. That’s why I talk about building a leader-leader organisation of the kind David Marquet describes in “Turn the Ship Around”.

As you say, you can’t just rely on getting the right people round the table or having charismatic individuals who are “good people people”. You have to build resilience into the organisational structures so you can federate decision-making away from the bottleneck of senior management, and give people the autonomy to make good local decisions.

"Turn the ship around" is one of my favorite books too; most leadership books follow the same formula- everything is broken, the consultant arrives with a magic fix, and voila! Unicorns start flying.

"Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked the approach.

A very honest, no BS book. Highly recommended

Leadership is key to everything you do. Everyone has to show it from the lowest rank to the highest. It is the most important characteristic of the US services.

This is the meaning of leadership:

http://msl-cdn.radiantforestllc.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/up...

Also I can highly recommend Turn The Ship Around! by L. David Marquest

http://www.davidmarquet.com

Great feedback.
Looking at my own experience and qualities as a leader then re-reading the title I agree. In my current position I'm very rarely the smartest person in the room.

I've softened the title and added emphasis in the closing paragraph to 'leadership at every level' from "Turn the Ship Around!"[0] . One of the best books I've found on this topic)

Further reflecting there's an opportunity here for an article that dives deeper on this topic as to how one can build a culture of self sufficiency, initiative and independent decision making into organizations.

Thanks again for the thoughtful feedback!

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Turn-Ship-Around-Turning-Followers/dp...

I'm currently nearing the end of David Marquet's "Turn The Ship Around" [1]. The author talks about this same point in his book. One of the points he makes is that different people will get the message at different stages. So repeating it and being consistent are important. As far as I remember, Simon Sinek goes through the same idea in his "Start With Why".

By the way, "Turn the Ship Around" is a great book, and pretty easy to read.

[1] http://www.davidmarquet.com/

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

This book is about the lessons learned on leadership by two Navy Seal Officers and how they are applied in business. It learned me to take ownership on what is happening, always work together, keep it simple, focus on a single priority, and give ownership.

Turn the ship around! by L. David Marquet

This book tells the story of a submarine captain that turns his subordinates into leaders and his submarine goes on becoming the best submarine in the US Navy. It learned me to move authority to information, train competence, and the power of clear communication.

You can find more good books at https://www.norberhuis.nl/books/

I have been recommended the book "Turning the Ship Around" for an account of how to grow a new good culture in a decisively bad one. It's probably not an exact recipe for being able to hold blameless postmortems, but I suspect it could contain some valuable information.

If anyone knows how well it applies to this situation, please do tell me!

Podcasts:

Coaching for Leaders (Gold mine with hundreds of great episodes, as an example https://coachingforleaders.com/podcast/maximize-team-perform...)

Manager Tools (They even have a section for new managers: https://www.manager-tools.com/podcasts/important-topic-feeds...)

Books:

The Effective Manager

The Speed of Trust

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Turn The Ship Around

If you want to look further than traditional command and control structures, I recommend looking into Deming, Sociocracy, teal organizations or the aforementioned book "Turn The Ship Around".

Also, look into norming, storming, forming performing and team operating guidelines.

It's years since I read it but Gerald Weinberg's Becoming a Technical Leader. The best general book on leadership I've read for a while is Marquet's Turn the Ship Around – great also as an audiobook. I referenced the latter in my own Right to Left: The digital leader's guide to Lean and Agile (arguably a leadership book too)

This is great and applies equally well as advice for managers (and especially executives) of how to work with their employees. For a more job-oriented set of similar advice, I highly recommend "Turn the Ship Around" by Capt David Marquet.

The core premise of both of these is not letting responsibility gravitate by default to those in power above you. It prevents a mentality of "I just take orders" or "I just do what I'm told." Granted, it requires the support of those above you (as seen with the parent in the article being very supportive of this way of thinking) and it also requires people to be open to learning to work in this way (some people have gotten so rigid in how they work they won't be able to make the leap).

I give these three books out to new managers in my org:

* High Output Management by Andy Grove https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679762884/

* Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591846404/

* The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591843472/

For interns I give out these two books:

* The Pragmatic Programmer https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-Journeyman-Maste...

* The Passionate Programmer https://pragprog.com/book/cfcar2/the-passionate-programmer

For those interested, here's the Marine Corps reading list. (Edit: that's actually already in the list of links you posted, missed it). There are a lot of good books on leadership; I'd stick to the Officer lists.

http://guides.grc.usmcu.edu/usmcreadinglist

It's not on the list, but the best book I've ever read was One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick; current CEO of Endgame Inc.

Turn the Ship Around! is also a great book about leadership and empowering your subordinates.

My current box of books that I recommend to new managers on my teams:

Technology Specific:

* An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management (Will Larson)

* Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Teams (Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim)

* Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow (Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais)

* Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products (Marty Cagan)

* The Phoenix Project (Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford)

General:

* The Goal (Eliyahu Goldratt)

* Turn the Ship Around! (L David Marquet)

* Just Culture (Sidney Dekker)

* Leadership on the Line (Ronald Heifetz, Marty Linsky)

* Emotional Intelligence (Daniel Goleman)

Some that have impacted my mindset considerable in the last few years:

- Factfulness by Hans Rosling: In the advent of information flowing from everywhere, it changed the way I look that the world and process it. It is fascinating how much influenced we are just by our hardwired biases and the media.

- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl: Everyone goes through their highs and lows, this account will teach you how to stay put and proceed forward.

- Turn the Ship Around by L. David Marquet: In a world where we are constantly trying to innovate, it is not possible without unlocking the true potential of the workforce. This is not possible without appropiate accountability and autonomy. The book goes through how to achieve enough of both. You do not have to manage anyone to gain its benefits.

Blindsight (Watts)

Between the World and Me (Coates)

Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt)

Corporate Confidential: 50 Secrets Your Company Doesn't Want You to Know---and What to Do About Them (Shapiro)

Los últimos españoles de Mauthausen (Hernández de Miguel)

Distributed Systems for Fun and Profit (Takada)

The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Civilization in the Aftermath of a Cataclysm (Dartnell)

Historia mínima de España (Fusi)

Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (Marquet)

What I Learned Losing A Million Dollars (Moynihan)

Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems (Google)

Adventures in Human Being: A Grand Tour from the Cranium to the Calcaneum (Francis)

Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces (Arpaci-Dusseau)

I keep a list of all the resources that have inspired and helped me here: https://github.com/charlax/engineering-management

It starts with a few high-level book recommendations, and blog articles for more specific topics.

My favorite book, which has not been listed in this thread, is: Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders. David Marquet, who used to command a nuclear submarine, explains how he achieved high levels of motivation and output thanks to empowering his team.

I really like question 12:

> What might I put in place to allow me to go off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks, with no phone or email?

This echoes a sentiment I recently read in Turn the Ship Around: managers are frequently recognised and praised for things that happen while they are actively leading a team.

This sounds obvious, but it skews their leadership toward shorttermism. We should be better at recognising great leaders by how smoothly things run when they aren't present.

It's definitely worth keeping in mind for individual contributors without direct reports too. Would something grind to a halt or progress very slowly if you unexpectedly go offline? At least for me, probably more than I'd like.

It doesn't matter where you are in the org chart. Being a good leader is about prestige and respect, not dictatorial power.

With prestige comes attention to what you say and do, and ability to influence decisions.

If you feel like the middle manager is powerless, these are exactly the types of books to read. Other recommendations include High Output Management, Drive, How To Talk So Kids Will Listen (I'm serious), Turn the Ship Around, Out of the Crisis, and more.

Recently, I am unsatisfied about spending a lot of time on consuming knowledge, rather then producing. As soon as I get to some level of expertise in some area, the benefit of passive reading approaches zero. So I plan to write more and code more (mastering Julia for mathematics and CS) in 2020.

A few titles I enjoyed this year:

"An Invitation to Applied Category Theory" by Brendan Fong, David I. Spivak.
It was fun to dig deeper into categories and read how you can apply thinking in them to different domains: databases, signal processing, circuits. Some mathematical background is probably required. It is available for free as a PDF:
http://math.mit.edu/~dspivak/teaching/sp18/ or if you are, like me, love collecting good titles in paper, a hardcover copy is nice with good paper and colour pictures:
https://www.amazon.com/Invitation-Applied-Category-Theory-Co...

"Can't Hurt Me" by David Goggins. https://davidgoggins.com/book/ It helped me to start running, and I keep doing it. It improved my mindset about overcoming physical discomfort, inspired to cultivate a savage mindset within. I lost a few kgs as well. There is an audio version of it.

"Turn the Ship Around" by David Marquet http://davidmarquet-com.3dcartstores.com/Autographed-Book-Ha... A book on leadership, told as a story of transforming the team on the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe. Not that boring like usual leadership titles.

I think the book is called "Turn the Ship Around"

Cool! I actually work at a company that adopted Holacracy roughly 3 years ago. In many ways it's probably much less loose and more formal than most people think (I mean there is a written constitution written in Legalese).

There are still roles that resemble the classical management role, i.e. there is a role that is responsible for setting strategies and assigning people into roles and monitoring role fit within their 'circle' (think team or business unit), called the circle's lead link. Yet there is a process for any role holder to propose putting those accountabilities into a new role or into a process. Role holders can also propose the creation of new roles or policies if they feel a tension. Then there is a structured process to deal with these proposals, and people need to demonstrate that the proposal would cause harm and reduce the capacity for the circle to achieve its purpose in order to have a valid objection. People in roles ultimately have ultimate autonomy on how they want to achieve their role's purpose. The lead link role can give relative prioritization if there are conflicts, but the lead link can't say 'you have to work on this right now and this is how you gonna do it'.

What ultimately happens is that the traditional accountabilities of a manger end up being distributed across multiple roles, so people might have software developer role, but might also be responsible for defining the hiring standards, or do people development etc.

It's kinda similar to the book "Turn the Ship around" where you don't have to ask for permission to do something and there is a process to address any tensions that arise from this power to act autonomously.

> You (well, at least I) can't actually down vote immediate replies to your own comments.

Yeah good point. Was just unusual that that comment was downvoted (twice?) long after the submission had left the front page, but not the adjacent one where I say basically the same thing. Seemed targeted.

> I wonder what our leadership would make of the book "Turn the ship around". I'm not sure how they'd go about defining responsibility - it seems to be all about passing the buck and CMA.

Not aware of the book, but leaders of democracies are as accountable as much as their citizenry makes them.

+1 Turn the ship around! by L. David Marquet

I'm guessing it has more to do with culture.

A lot of big long-standing organizations develop an internal culture of being more focused on not fucking up than on achieving success. Paradoxically, this leads to more problems, and more of the costs associated with them. People stay in their swim lanes, and nobody has each other's backs. The more you keep your head down and try not to get involved, the less you can be blamed for.

L. David Marquet digs pretty deep into this phenomenon in his book Turn the Ship Around! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16158601-turn-the-ship-a...

related to company structure, I recently read "Turn the ship around!" and found it to be a great book on leadership (its Harvard business school meets the red october, if you're not familiar)

Anyone have any experience with Leader-Leader at a company? I feel like it would mostly work, but there are some variables I think that might need attention.

It’s been mentioned on Hacker News a few times, but the book “Turn The Ship Around” is essentially about this very question. It’s about a different kind of organisation (a military submarine), but I differently recognised a lot of the same dysfunctions and failed attempts at fixing things that I’ve seen whilst working in numerous tech companies.

The answer seems to be that, yes, you really can turn a dysfunctional team into a high performing one (literally worst to best in the case of the book), and in much less time than you’d have thought (most of the changes happen within 45 days of the author taking command). My main takeaway from the book has not been new ideas about what good looks or feels like, but tools about how to fix it if it’s broken. Highly recommended.

More on the Navy usage can be found in David Marquet's book: "Turn the Ship Around" about his time improving training / operations on a submarine he commanded. Every one had to announce their intention to do an action before actually doing it, this gave others the chance to identify when someone was going to take an incorrect action before it happened.

It's a really great, short read that I'd highly recommend.

Plug for David Marquet's book "Turn the Ship Around" about his time improving training / operations on a submarine he commanded. Every one had to announce their intention to do an action before actually doing it, this gave others the chance to identify when someone was going to take an incorrect action before it happened.

It's a really great, short read that I'd highly recommend and gives some more background into the operational issues with the Navy.

Thanks.

Pretty much all books gives you something or the other to learn. I started writing about the books I read, each year, since 2018. For this year, here are few, in no particular order that I feel happy and fulfilled reading them. I will be digging deeper and doing a retrospective, and write a blog post by early 2021.

- Cant't hurt me by David Goggins.

- Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.

- Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. (Re-read)

- Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford. A very un-assuming book that taught me lot about leadership.

- How to influence and win friends (re-read 3rd or 4th time).

- Humble Inquiry by Edgar Schein.

- I am Malala (daughter like it and so I read it)

- Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Issacson. (I'm taking this real slow, still reading after 6+ months.)

- Range (the one mentioned by Bill Gates)

- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.

- The Future is Asian by Parag Khanna.

- Turn the Ship Around.

- Under Pressure by Lisa Damour (I have a daughter, turning teenager in another year.)

- Venture Deals (still valid in today's fund raising scenes)

- Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. Still reading but learning a lot already.

I finished Keynes, Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics (Nicholas Wapshott), started in 2015.

I read:

* Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders (David Marquet)

* Joy at Work: A Revolutionary Approach To Fun on the Job (Dennis Bakke)

* Ne vous résignez pas ! (Bruno Le Maire - French politician)

* Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (Michael Hiltzik)

* Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble (Dan Lyons)

* Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management (Scott Berkun)

* Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy (Thomas Sowell)

* The Success of Open Source (Steve Weber)

* Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (Cathy O'Neil)

* Programming in Lua (fourth edition - I read every edition)

I started reading (and will probably finish by the end of the year) Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension (Samuel Arbesman).

As for what I recommend, it depends what you are into, but I would say I really enjoyed Making Things Happen, which is a must if you have any kind of project management to do, and Basic Economics.