Notes to a Software Team Leader: Growing Self Organizing Teams

Are you an Architect? Scrum master? Team Leader? Project Manager? Either way, you will find that leadership, done right, is a very tough job. This audiobook deals with the hard parts. Not with tools, but with people.

Here is the manifesto that drives this audiobook: For us as team leaders, the goal and the way we measure our work is the overall growth in skills of self-organization and self-maintenance in each member of our team and the team as a whole.

To that end:

• We accept that the team's needs from us change continuously based on their skills for handling the current reality of work, so we embrace a continuously changing leadership style over a one-style-fits-all leadership approach. We believe in challenging ourselves and our teams to always get better.
• We create slack time for the team to learn and be challenged.
• We embrace taking risks for our team over staying safe.
• We embrace fear and discomfort while learning new skills over keeping people within their comfort zone.
• We embrace experimentation as a constant practice over maintaining the status quo: With people, with tools, with processes, with the environment.
• We believe our core practice is leading people, not wielding machines.
• We embrace spending more time with our team than in meetings.
• We embrace treating software problems as people problems.
• We learn people skills and communication techniques.