Shu-Ha-Ri and Situational Leadership for Managers
In the previous blogs What is the leadership style in your software teams ? and Situational Leadership in Software teams, I explored how leadership has evolved over time, and how we could relate it to the concept of situational leadership in the context of software development teams. Those thoughts were from an essentially western perspective where the ideas such as democracy in life and at work, free thinking, equality, participatory management, individualism (followed by a re-discovery of team-oriented approach to managing work) and shared leadership have been uniformally accepted in the social values and ably institutionalized by legislation. The net result is that we are seeing a great shift in the balance of power from the so-called ‘management’ ( the role in an organization responsible to get the job done) to the so-called ‘labor’ ( the role in an organization responsible to...
Situational Leadership in Software teams
In a previous post, What is the leadership style in your software teams ?, I discussed about four key types of leadership and their evoluation, and how it could possibly relate to software teams. In this blog post, let’s dwell on this topic further, and explore how to decide what leadership style suits a given situation. The assumption here is that there is no such thing as an “all-weather” or a personal favorite leadership style - each tool and method has pros and cons depending on why, how, when, what and where they are applied. The value one derives depends on how well a given style ‘fits’ the context - to that end, it it highly imperative to identify the ground conditions and only then decide what could work here more effectively. Our industry has a difficulty articulating with...
What is the leadership style in your software teams ?
Do you like to believe that the so-called ‘command and control’ is an exceptionally distasteful idea for intellctual work such as software development? I don’t particularly disagree with you, but just wondering - have you ever worked for a stereotypical ‘command and control organization’ in software industry, where things were forcibly thrust down your throat without taking your views, or you not having any freedom to question or disagree? We all seem to have romantic ideas and idealistic opinions about what it means (rather, what it should mean) but let’s ‘inspect and adapt’ our understanding with the real-world experiences so that we have a correct understanding of an incorrect idea.  In my close to two decades of working with European, Chinese (yes - contrary to what most people believe, Chinese also disagree with their managers very passionately just like anyone else,...