Archive for the ‘Leadership’ Category

A good book that gives a comprehensive overview of how you can give effective feedback by avoiding being too nice or brutally honest, and instead having the right balance of just being candid.

“The good news is that many companies large and small are now taking active measures to shift to a culture in which caring personally and challenging directly go hand in hand.”

A well-balanced, accurate, and modern data-driven approach to Product Strategy and Roadmapping. Nacho Bassino’s hands-on product experience came through as he tackled all of the controversial points raised across the industry with product strategies and especially product roadmaps – now, next, future vs. dates. There wasn’t anything I disagreed with, everything was spot on, and this book is a testament to how far the industry has come over the past decade.

“By going everywhere, we were going nowhere. We didn’t have a problem with resources; we had a problem with focus.”

“Obtaining data about the user, business, market, competitors, macroeconomic conditions, and so on should be an ongoing process for an empowered product team.”

“Your product roadmap is the prototype for your strategy.” – Todd Lombardo

“We don’t hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.” – Steve Jobs

“Outcome-orientation is the single most crucial transformation a product organisation can make, and the strategic roadmap can be a keystone artifact to achieve it.”

I absolutely loved this book. Sahota provides a practical guide on how you can evolve your leadership skills to influence change within a business by developing others, focusing on the people, and having a growth mindset. Every single page is golden, and I found myself glued to the content and context behind the credible approaches, which are focused around the concept of Evolutionary Leadership.

Evolutionary Leadership is the choice to evolve oneself and develop the capabilities needed to evolve an organisation.

It’s common to hear in the business world that it’s leadership’s fault for specific problems, but the book focuses on how you can instead use that energy to focus on improving your own skills and behaviour to drive the necessary changes by taking responsibility, setting a good example, having courage, low ego, and ultimately influencing throughout the business which as a side effect drives change.

During my career in business, one of the most impactful leadership behaviours I’ve experienced is having the courage to do the right thing even if it’s hard and to set a good example, which proves to be one of the quickest ways to driving positive change and a healthy culture, so it’s been thoroughly enjoyable and thought  provoking reading a whole book about it.

“The most valuable learning is unlearning-replacing low-fidelity models of reality with more accurate ones.”

“The person who can reform themselves, can reform the world.”

“Anyone in the organisation can be leader-not just management. The only requirement is the choice to evolve oneself and have passion for success.”

“Understanding reality is a critical key ingredient for success.”

“All we can do to really learn the truth of reality is to constantly test our models and seek new ones.”

“The production capability will only evolve to the extent that organisational learning takes place.”

“Evolve people to evolve the organisation.”

The majority of leadership books talk about what leadership is and what a good leader looks like, but I liked Herminia’s fresh and practical approach that the best way to learn is by doing and therefore the book focuses on how you can take practical steps to improve your leadership skills (worth noting that before you can act, you need the courage to be vulnerable first).

“Action-changing how you do your job, how you build and use your network, and how you express yourself-gives you outsight, the fresh, external perspective you need to understand more deeply what is involved in the work of leadership and to motivate yourself to do it.”

What it means to act like a leader:

  • Bridging across diverse people and groups.
  • Envisioning new possibilities.
  • Engaging people in the change process.
  • Embodying the change.

The five things you can do to begin to make your job a platform for expanding your leadership:

  1. Develop your situation sensors.
  2. Get involved in projects outside your area.
  3. Participate in extracurricular activities.
  4. Communicate your personal “why.”
  5. Create slack in your schedule.

“The fastest way to change yourself is to spend time with people who are already the way you want to be.”

“Sometimes we so fully internalize what other people think is right for us that we don’t ever become what Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan calls ‘self-authoring’.”

“The idea of a learning economy is compelling, and where years ago many leaders would have said that the company is ‘as good as its people’, they would now say that an organisation is as good as its people’s ability to learn, develop, innovate and adapt.”

Brene Brown combines stories from her personal journey with years of research which reveals the benefits of swapping feelings of not being good enough, shame, and the need for armour with having the courage to be vulnerable which will lead to a more purposeful life.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again,

because there is no effort without error and short-coming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;

who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly…” -Theodore Roosevelt

The Daring Greatly Leadership Manifesto by Brene Brown

To the CEOs and teachers. To the principals and the managers. To the politicians, community leaders, and decision-makers:

  1. We want to show up, we want to learn, and we want to inspire.
  2. We are hardwired for connection, curiosity, and engagement.
  3. We crave purpose, and we have a deep desire to create and contribute.
  4. We want to take risks, embrace our vulnerabilities, and be courageous.
  5. When learning and working are dehumanized-when you no longer see us and no longer encourage our daring, or when you only see what we produce or how we perform-we disengage and turn away from the very things that the world needs from us: our talent, our ideas, and our passion.
  6. What we ask is that you engage with us, show up beside us, and learn from us.
  7. Feedback is a function of respect; when you don’t have honest conversations with us about our strengths and our opportunities for growth, we question our contributions and your commitment.
  8. Above all else, we ask that you show up, let yourself be seen, and be courageous. Dare Greatly with us.

Our satisfaction at work comes from having autonomy, mastery, purpose, and a voice. Daisley provides 30 ways and a summary at the end of each chapter to help you refocus on these areas, create actions to make work more enjoyable, make teams closer, and some secrets of energised teams.

This book not only has tips on how you can fall in love with your job again, but it’s also for leaders to help them create a culture where people can thrive, love their job, and be happy, where people can stimulate their intrinsic motivation – making those nerve cells tingle, rather than throwing unhelpful and destructive rewards into their motivation systems.

Whilst there’s a lot of talk across the business world around inclusiveness and collaboration, there’s generally not a lot of talk about the inefficiencies of having too many people involved in projects, multiple teams, or big teams. Daisley looked at studies covering 3,800 different projects which showed that when you allow for complexities of teams, discussions, presentations, status chats, emails and reviews, he discovered, the time spent on a badly organised project seemed to increase exponentially. In one study it took the bigger team 2,000 weeks to get done, yet the small team one week with both reaching the same quality of outcome.

“Learned helplessness pervades the modern workplace. We’re overwhelmed with demands and expectations placed on us by others, but we have come to accept it all because we assume that that’s the way it is and has to be.”

“Intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity; extrinsic motivation is detrimental to creativity.”

“It’s certainly hard to reach the Buzz state, but when a firm can achieve the combination of psychological safety and positive affect the results are breathtaking.”

Culture begins with deciding what you value most. Then you must help everyone in your organisation practice behaviours that reflect those virtues. When your culture turns out to lack crucial elements, you have to add them. This is what it means to be a leader.

In this book, Horowitz tells fascinating and inspiring stories of how businesses have thrived and revolutions came about by creating the right culture, using examples including the slavery revolution (Toussaint Louverure), the samurai code (The Way of the Warrior), and Genghis Khan, as well as Netflix, LoudCloud, and Silicon Valley.

Whilst culture is unique to a business, this book gives a comprehensive overview of things to keep in mind when creating your culture along with a culture checklist.

“Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.”

“For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions-by example.”

“Brains can absorb new information several times faster and more effectively by reading information versus listening to it.”

“Wilderotter build intense loyalty among Frontier’s employees and freed them to do their best work. Her approach earned her the nickname of the CEO of the people.”

“Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are!”

Brene’s leadership approach is focused on authenticity and vulnerability – less robot/command and control, more leadership from the heart, having tough conversations and creating a safe environment for people to feel confident that they can bring their authentic selves to work.

In this book, Brene shares the impact of leading with a body of armour and the benefits of stripping it and sharing your authentic self, full of courage, confidence, curiosity, empathy, and value-driven.

It’s common to think that Brene’s approach to leadership is a weakness in a leader, but Brene exposes these myths beautifully. Daring Leadership is ultimately about serving other people, not ourselves. That’s why we choose courage.

“It’s very hard to have ideas. It’s very hard to put yourself out there, it’s very hard to be vulnerable, but those people who do that are the dreamers, the thinkers, and the creators. They are the magic people of the world.”

“Daring Leadership has changed the way I work with my team. It’s made me a better listener and given me the tools to be brave enough to deal with the stuff that’s always easier to avoid. Choosing what’s right over what’s easy has become my mantra.”

“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” – Joseph Campbell

“When we have the courage to walk into our story and own it, we get to write the ending.”

“Time can wear down our memories of tough lessons until what was once difficult learning fades into ‘This is just who I am as a person.'”

“In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they’re about brains but in the future they’ll be about the heart.” – Minouche Shafik, director, London School of Economics

Written as a novel, this book by Patrick Lencioni tells a story of the damage that a dysfunctional team can have on the business and the value of prioritising time to nurture teamwork and alignment. With so much of the book relatable along with the gripping novel style of writing made it hard to put down!

The five dysfunctions of a team are:

Lencioni also provides another way to understand the model by taking the opposite approach and imagining how members of truly cohesive teams behave:

1. They trust one another.
2. They engage in unfiltered conflict around ideas.
3. They commit to decisions and plans of action.
4. They hold one another accountable for delivering against those plans.
5. They focus on the achievement of collective results.

“Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”

“If you could get all the people in an organisation rowing in the same direction  you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

A fantastic read! I’ve added most of Lencioni’s other books to my wish list since they’re also written as a novel.

This is the most practical book on how to lead and build a high-performing product management organisation. It’s another classic from Haines where he rightfully refers to the importance of business acumen and how to level up in this area throughout the book.

Whilst there are plenty of product leadership books out there, there are few that focus on leading product management as an organisation and practical steps to get product teams to high maturity. The book includes plenty of visuals and charts making it easy to understand and apply learnings.

What’s covered in detail:

  • Designing an org strategy for Product Management
  • Aligning R&Rs
  • Optimising Product Management processes
  • Managing the Product Manager talent pool
  • Cultivating and shaping Product Managers with competency self-assessments and maturity scores
  • Product Mindset
  • Building a Community of Practice (CoP)
  • Cross-functional product teams
  • Sustaining Product Management
  • Product portfolio management

Whilst Haines details the full R&R of the Product Manager job, he summarises it nicely into 6 core attributes:

  1. Strategic & Critical Thinking
  2. Entrepreneurial
  3. Decision-Making
  4. Leading & Influencing
  5. Domain & Technology
  6. Data & Analytics

This book is a must-read for any product leader (head of product, director, CPO, coaches, change management).

Written as a testament to the remarkable impact Bill Campbell made on Silicon Valley and so many executives throughout his lifetime – Bill wasn’t just any coach, he was someone that helped his coachees generate over a trillion dollars worth of business.

An easy and pleasurable read describing how Bill influenced so many people and the impact it made on them, their families, their business and their teams…

…”He did it through operational excellence, putting people first, being decisive, communicating well, knowing how to get the most out of even the most challenging people, focusing on product excellence, and treating people well when they are let go.”

“The purpose of a company is to bring a product vision to life. All the other components are in service to product.”

“Today the concept of ‘servant leadership’ is in vogue and has been directly linked to stronger company performance. Bill believed and practised it well before it became popular.”

“Bill would never tell me what to do. Instead he’d ask more and more questions, to get to what the real issue was.”

“When faced with a problem or opportunity, the first step is to ensure the right team is in place and working on it.”

The principles outlined in this book may not feel natural, but they can be learned. The key is pushing yourself to do it.

In the modern, complex, and remote world it calls for leadership to rely on a culture built on trust and openness to thrive, with that only being achieved by having personalised relationships – Humble Leadership.

Edgar’s book is full of case studies of humble leadership in action, how organisations transformed from traditional to humble leadership, and he talks about the future of leadership.

Recommended for anyone interested in empowering people, coaching, servant leadership or getting up to speed on a modern leadership approach.

“It’s not up to you alone to solve the problem, to lead to greatness, to change the world. It is up to you to create a learning environment in which you and your group can cooperate in identifying and fixing the processes that solve problems, and maybe then change the world.”

Over the past few months, I’ve enjoyed working through the ILM Leadership & Management level 3 course, with the most impactful learning experience being the breakout rooms with my fellow Flutter Entertainment colleagues during our weekly sessions. Whilst they were sometimes intense, it made the learning experience all the more impactful.

Most impactful model: The four stages of competence

Most favourite modules: Servant-leadership, coaching, developing others, and understanding my management and leadership point of view

Enjoyed reading Lee’s inspiring story of going from a farm boy to the VP of Walt Disney, made up of grit, resilience, character, and a lifelong learning mindset.

Written in an authentic way making it an easy read and hard to put down, Lee Cockerell shares what he’s learnt through these 10 leadership strategies with a practical breakdown within each:

1. Remember, everyone is important
2. Break the mold (drive change)
3. Make your people your brand
4. Create magic through training (coaching, servant-leadership, empowerment)
5. Eliminate hassles
6. Learn the truth
7. Burn the free fuel (appreciation, recognition, encouragement (ARE))
8. Stay ahead of the pack (lifelong learning)
9. Be careful what you say and do
10. Develop character

“That’s your job as a leader: to help your business grow by paying attention to your employees and your customers and by constantly fine-tuning your processes – so that every job gets done efficiently and without hassles.”

“In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in the world that no longer exists…in other words, great leaders need to be lifelong learners.”

After growing up using the LeSS framework, I’ve been looking forward to learning about SAFe in detail and comparing it to some of the myths associated with it.

Myth busters of SAFe:
1. Waterfall milestones ❌️ Products governed by self-managing mission-focused agile teams; objective measures and milestones based on working solutions, delivering early and incrementally ✔️
2. People organised in functional silos and temporary project teams ❌️ People organised in value streams/agile teams; continuous value flow ✔️
3. Overly detailed business cases based on speculative ROI ❌️ Lean business cases with MVP, business outcome hypothesis, Agile forecasting and estimating ✔️
4. Doesn’t support Lean Startup principles/innovation ❌️ SAFe Lean Startup Cycle to support high levels of uncertainty using the build-measure-learn Lean startup cycle ✔️
5. It’s not Agile ❌️ Thinking Lean and embracing agility combine to make up a new management approach with a Lean-Agile mindset which aligns with the values and principles in the Agile manifesto ✔️
6. It doesn’t have any compelling principles ❌️ SAFe is based on a set of Lean-Agile principles ✔️:

1. Take an economic view; deliver early and often
2. Apply systems thinking
3. Assume variability; preserve options
4. Build incrementally with fast, integrated learning cycles
5. Base milestones on objective evaluation of working systems
6. Visualise and limit WIP, reduce batch sizes, and manage queue lengths
7. Apply cadence; synchronise with cross-domain planning
8. Unlock the motivation of knowledge workers
9. Decentralise decision-making
10. Organise around value

Case studies show, that many enterprises – large and small – are getting extraordinary business results from adopting SAFe eg.
• 10-50% happier, more motivated employees
• 30-75% faster time-to-market

I particularly enjoyed reading about how important a continuous learning culture is to SAFe:

“In a growth mindset, people believe that their most basic abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work – brains and talent are just the starting point. This view creates a love of learning and a resilience that is essential for great accomplishment.”

“Our mindsets are the foundation for achieving success and happiness in life. With the right mindset, anything is possible.”

“Leadership is responsible for driving change proactively by ‘taking a stand’ for a better future state.”

I’d definitely recommend this book, especially for those who want to get an overview of where the Product Manager/PO split comes from.

Absolutely loved this read. In essence, Marty Cagan talks about the value of empowering product teams (several engineers, product manager, product designer) to serve customers with products that customers love, yet work for the business (by collaborating with stakeholders to come up with solutions that work). I particularly loved the fact that the majority of the book focused on coaching.

“Empowered product teams are all about giving teams hard problems to solve, and then giving them the space to solve them.”

“..this is really what I see in so many of the companies I visit. They have product teams that are more accurately feature teams, and they’re slaving away-pounding out features all day-but rarely getting closer to their desired outcomes.”

“Regardless of the reason for reviewing your topology, you should optimize for the empowerment of the teams by focusing on the dimensions of ownership, autonomy, and alignment.”

“Your highest-order contribution and responsibility as product manager is to make sure that what engineers are asked to build will be worth building. That it will deliver the necessary results.”

“Coaching is no longer a speciality; you cannot be a good manager without being a good coach.” – Bill Campbell

“Moving the product teams from the subservient feature team model to the collaborative empowered product team model begins with trust”

The majority of modern enterprise businesses now have a classic Scrum team setup (engineers and PO), but still wonder how they can respond to customer feedback quicker/more frequently, get ahead in the market, and innovate whilst protecting/growing revenue.

If you’re wondering this or generally interested in Agile, this book by Darrell Rigby is for you and will give you a very well balanced overview of what those next steps look like to unlock the benefits of Agile across the business, and introduces you to the concept of an Agile enterprise which allows bureaucracy and innovation efforts to coexist without the need for a big-bang approach.

An Agile enterprise involves creating Agile principles at every level starting from the top with an Agile leadership team, rather than just having an Agile tech team and the rest of the business bureaucratic. As a result, Agile Leadership is a big focus of the book and it dives into some starting points for principles:

– Employees learn by doing things themselves
– Trust is built over time
– Doing what only you can do makes everyone better off
– Customers are the best judges of what they want

To represent what a balanced approach could look like there’s a visual diagram showing an example of the agile enterprise operating model, which is fully customisable and “when you do it well, you create mission-inspired teams that work together across the organisation, both the run-the-business and the change-the-business elements”.

There’s plenty of inspiring success stories from Bosch, Amazon, Spotify and RBS too.

“More agile is not always better agile. There is an optimal range of agility for every business and for every activity within a business.”

“Genuine customer obsession sets a strong foundation for agility.”

View the book on Amazon here.

Enjoyed this read by Scott Belsky where he uncovers a pragmatic set of techniques to help organise, prioritise and execute actions turning high aspirational goals into reality, gives tips on collaborating with other people to help accelerate progress, and provides good insight into effective leadership and self-leadership methods.

“Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration”

“To push your ideas to fruition, you must develop the capacity to endure, and even thrive, as you traverse the project plateau.”

“Making ideas happen boils down to self-discipline and the ways in which you take action.”

“Even when the next step is unclear, the best way to figure it out is to take some incremental action. Constant motion is the key to execution.”

“Nothing will assist your ideas more than a team of people who possess real initiative.”

Most books touch the surface of what it takes to achieve high aspirational goals, but The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky gives a comprehensive insight into what it really takes to reach them and long-term success, covering the highs and lows of the journey built on seven years’ of research.

You read in books and the news new venture kickoffs with inspiring missions and the big celebratory achievements giving a sense it’s quick and easy to reach them, whether it’s funding, IPO, market-leader status, job role…when in reality it’s not and instead takes relentless patience, grit and empathy to achieve long-term success which is the focus throughout the book.

The book is structured well keeping to around two pages on each subject, where Scott gets right to the point and focuses on modern approaches to help build and optimise your team and improve yourself.

“Milestones that are directly correlated with progress are more effective motivators than anything else.”

“The only ‘sustainable competitive advantage’ in business is self-awareness.”

“Don’t start to question your gut solely because it is different. Nothing should resonate more loudly than your own intuition. The truly differentiating factors of your project are the ones most likely to be different, misunderstood, or underestimated by everyone else.”

“Every leader needs to come up for air now and then. By temporarily disconnecting from your journey, you’re able to take perspective of all the moving parts.” – very relevant as I read this on holiday.

A fantastic read which I’d recommend to anyone struggling to progress towards their missions, looking to make sense of their experiences or generally interested in learning from Scott’s journey and wisdom.