One of my personal favorites is Tribal Leadership: https://www.amazon.com/Tribal-Leadership-Leveraging-Thriving...
Also a really good book. +1
Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
71–80 of 220 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#72Just so you know, leadership is completely different for middle managers and founders. A lot of the "leadership books" are targeted at middle managers, and if you follow their advice word for word, it won't work.
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#73Everything by Simon Sinek, but most important for me is "Leaders Eat Last" [0]. I haven't read the last one (The Infinite Game), but I've heard it's pretty good as well. Also Extreme Ownership [1] and Dichotomy of Leadership [2] by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin. All of these books had tremendous impact on me as a leader and I highly recommend them. [0]: https://www.amazon.com/Leaders-Eat-Last-Together-Others/dp/B... […
I must have missed something, seeing extreme ownership praised so much but I stopped reading it after a chapter or so. The whole macho thing didn’t jive and I’m struggling to find parallels to ordinary life. Lives aren’t at stake for 99.9999% of work out there. The whole military hierarchy and all the idealization doesn’t exist in normal contexts. Leaders aren’t trusted implicitly always or “lives are at stake”. So h…
I agree /lives/ aren’t directly at stake, but depending on what your business is, /livelihoods/ are.
When you’re an entrepreneur and have a small team, each of them may have a family. As the leader you are responsible for running a profitable company that can pay its employees so their families can eat.
At the large company I work for my team’s product is B2B. When we go down, other businesses go down. The number of people affected is very high. Treating every incident like someone’s business is dependent on you and they have put their trust in you to support them is very sobering.
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#74Dynamics of Software Development, by McCarthy.
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#75Tribes by Seth Godin is good as it talks about how communities grow around ideas not individuals.
Also read things written by great leaders. i.e. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius http://classics.mit.edu/Antoninus/meditations.html
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#76The best definition of what's a good leader is found in the book "the captain class" : https://www.amazon.com/Captain-Class-Hidden-Behind-Greatest/... What's interesting is that the author have a data oriented strategy to find a good definition of a leader: he processed a lot of data to find which teams had really exceptionnal success IN THE HISTORY OF ALL SPORTS. When he found the 8 teams with the most exceptionnal…
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Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#77Any of the classic books of the late Jerry Weinberg is full of wisdom. Oldies but goldies. Leanpub has all of them:
https://leanpub.com/u/jerryweinberg
There's the People Skill bundle: https://leanpub.com/b/peopleskillssoftbutdifficult with the books: Are Your Lights On?, What Did You Say? The Art of Giving and Receiving Feedback, Exploring Requirements One, Exploring Requirements Two, Becoming a Change Artist, More Secrets of Consulting, and Becoming a Technical Leader
But maybe the better for you are his classic The Psychology of Computer Program (to understand the mind of programmers) https://leanpub.com/thepsychologyofcomputerprogramming
Becoming a Technical Leader (to grow to a leadership position) https://leanpub.com/becomingatechnicalleader
Managing Teams Congruently (to manage groups) https://leanpub.com/managingteamscongruently
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#78Question is, do you want a book about the input factors to how people end up leading, or one on evaluating the output effects of other leaders against?
Leadership is not an activity or an action you can mimic, it it is an effect. Most books are the stories people tell afterwards about how virtuous they were and they call that leadership. Jeffery Pfeffer says this specifically as well.
Pfeffers books on management provide the insight into the dynamics leadership emerges from. His triad of, "performance, credentials, and relationships," that describe power in a situation also describe the necessary factors we look back on as leadership.
https://www.amazon.ca/Power-Some-People-Have-Others/dp/00617...
I like Jocko Willnick's whole attitude about ownership, respect, delegation, and working with people to leverage their skills to achieve outcomes. He says the hierarchy in the military isn't as much of a factor as how you relate to your team and the world, but I suspect Pfeffer would disagree in that its hierarchy and training culture provides the credential piece in his triad, where in business, that's more dynamic.
There are lots of good books about leadership, but reading them without having read Pfeffer's "Power.." is exploring the territory without the map, imo.
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#79Try "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920056843.do
Agreed, I particularly like the way each chapter dealt with a rank further up. Even if you have _no intention_ of going higher, seeing what they want from you and what they should be doing was immensely helpful and clarifying.
Re: Ask HN: Best book / resources on leadership, especially for tech teams?
#80The US Army has an exceptionally well-crafted field manual on leadership. No fluff, but also no chest-thumping. It's honestly the best resource I've ever seen on what constitutes a good leader, how good leaders are developed, and how good leaders develop their teams. Being a DOD publication, it's in the public domain: https://usacac.army.mil/sites/default/files/misc/doctrine/CD... I can't stress enough how excellent…
Couldn't agree more. Read a couple of battle analysis by the USA army , which constantly compared decisions to what the decision should be accordingly to the USA army field manual to explain. You're absolutely right!