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It's very short, about ten lines, but it contains all that you need to know. The final verse, especially, destroys or subsumes pretty much all concepts of leadership.
YMMV:
http://taoteching.org.uk/chapter17.html
http://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclz17.htm
https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-17.htm
The 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…
State what you, as the leader, are trying to achieve, and why ('the big picture')
State what you want the subordinate to achieve
Define the resources available to the subordinate, and any constraints
Say how you want progress / issues to be reported
You don’t define how the subordinate should carry out the task – if they are competent and you trust them, they should be able to figure this out themselves.
[Edit] - the military distinction between command and control is also relevant to the civilian distinction between leadership and management. Paraphrasing slightly: Command is getting people to do something. Control is stopping them from doing something else.
Everything 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…
It is primarily about owning responsibility yourself, and not externalizing blame. Even CEO and CTOs are prone to deflecting blame when there's politics and external parties involved.
All of the case studies show how managers suffer from defense mechanisms and logical fallacies that are harmful rather than helpful.
It also talks about the dangers of operating in a high complexity environment and the need to develop an understandable and legible method of communication.
* He says that leaders aren’t trusted implicitly in the Seal teams either, btw, and it's part of the job of the leader to build rapport with their teams, sell them on the plan, and make sure everyone understands the higher intent, if the team is really to be effective rather than dysfunctional. (this comes later in the book).
The war stories are what folks seem to focus on here, but I feel those are there mostly for entertainment, in addition to an example of the underlying value it's trying to demonstrate.
That said, the book really boils down to continual repetition of a few core points over and over. That may be necessary to drive the relatively few points home, with even fewer actually changing their behavior.
This is deliberately not an academic-level treatise on leadership. It is a challenge to accept the most fundamental challenges of responsibility - how many managers have you met which fail to do that?
We learn to perform by practicing the basics in any field.
Leadership Step by Step https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/... gives a set of 20 exercises that teach the basics of leading yourself and others. If you practice, you'll develop the skills, experiences, and beliefs of an effective leader. Other books are like music appreciation. This book is like learning to play the piano.
Written by a PhD in physics (me) then started several companies, got an MBA, and teaches leadership at NYU to stellar reviews. http://joshuaspodek.com/reviews-leadership-step-step
Leadership Step by Step: https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/...
I think "Team Geek" [0] is probably worth a mention in this light. It's written in that infuriating cutesy techy-language that seems to infuse a lot of the "hipper" books of this genre but there really is some good advice in there. FYI these are the guys that did Subversion, which was a pretty successful project for a while, back in the day. This same writing style pervades the SVN docs as well. Yeuch. In the same ve…
Happy to see I'm not the only curmudgeon around here. I'd say this trend is at its most loathsome when employed by big corporates - it's as if everyone is so terrified of being mischaracterised as old or uncool (daddio) that noone is willing to point out how facile, affected and obnoxious this type of language is.
When managing people in tech, I think it is equally as important to know how to organize as it is to know how to lead. I would recommend "The Phoenix Project" and "The Unicorn Project" and "The Goal" to all tech managers. No matter how good your communication/leadership skills are, your team will be severely handicapped if they are working in an inefficient/limiting environment. Coming at the same lessons from a diff…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Leaders Eat Last was one of the best books I read this year. Extreme Ownership was also quite good but Simon really explains the “Why” of leadership that most books are missing. High-Output Management is another classic.
I understand the “why” of leadership very well, but as a high-functioning autistic person, I struggle very much with the “how”, especially around communication. Like - for all possible values of X, if X is what I want someone to do, how do I communicate that so people (a) understand that I want X from them and (b) aren’t offended and understand that it is meant kindly/charitably (which it really is, I often just don’…
All of the books above cover some aspect of what you want but don’t seem to cover the whole picture. Further, a lot of it comes down to shared mental models. If you are coming from the perspective of action taking then the other person also assumes that you will take the action. I think Leader Eat Last explains this brilliantly and actually significantly changed the way I am trying to approach leadership as well as how I work with other people in general.
Try "The Manager's Path" by Camille Fournier. http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920056843.do
The best book on leadership IMO is the Tao Te Ching, Ch. 17. It's very short, about ten lines, but it contains all that you need to know. The final verse, especially, destroys or subsumes pretty much all concepts of leadership. YMMV: http://taoteching.org.uk/chapter17.html http://www.egreenway.com/taoism/ttclz17.htm https://www.taoistic.com/taoteching-laotzu/taoteching-17.htm https://taoteching.daodejing.org/17.htm h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Corporate business leaders here in America tend to be obsessed with trying to apply military-style terminology and doctrines to their business. In their minds, business is war, and "lives are at stake" gets translated to either "jobs are at stake" or "revenue is at stake," depending on the person. There are so many war-isms in business it's impossible to list them all. "In the trenches," "boots on the ground," framin…
Relevant David Brent quote:
"Does a struggling salesman start turning up on a bicycle? No, he turns up in a newer car - perception, yeah? They got to trust me - I’m taking these guys into battle, yeah? And I’m doing my own stapling."