I recently read Notes to a Software Team Leader: Growing Self Organizing Teams by Roy Osherove where he talks about team phases and types of leadership.
His experience was that every team phase such as Survival phase, Learning phase, and Self-organizing phase needs different type of leadership: commander, or coach, or facilitator.
Do you agree with him(not sure if read the book)? What worked for you?
Curious to hear your feedback guys since my team is slowly growing and I need to be more educated and versatile in team management.
I haven’t read this book. I definitely have not had any specific methodology or result of leadership that I would immediately self-identify as commander, or coach, or facilitator.
I think that while certainly my leadership role has changed over time, at thoughtbot we approach everything as designers and developers trying to create a place which is enjoyable for us to work, so we tend not to approach things from a typical managerial perspective.
yeah, from everything I know about thoughtbot I thought so.
Roy outlined those types from the perspective of an agile team, his main point is that at some stages of the project like “survival” for example team lead would need to push a little bit in order to finish the task at hand and get the team to a more relaxed(learn) phase.
I myself try to go with “coach” type since the main asset of a team, in my opinion, is its skills. It’s always better to learn on your or someone else’s mistakes and don’t repeat them rather than dictate things(even if it’s for a good cause).