Mocoso

A collection of Joel Chippindale's infrequent reckons

Recommended links about engineering leadership

Recommended books, articles, sites, talks and podcasts about engineering leadership.

Delegation and empowerment

How to effectively delegate and empower

  • The Secret to Delegation [article]
    "delegating isn’t about making their lives easier, it’s about being a great leader and people manager" — Jennifer Clamp
  • What Choices to Make — and Not [article]
    "Leadership is about making only the choices that you are best positioned to make — and not making the ones for which you aren’t, even if you are more senior than the person who will make the choice." - Roger Martin
  • You don't "get" anyone to do anything [video]
    Matt LeMay's advice about how to cultivate your power by seeking to help, seeking to understand, and seeking to align around common goals is excellent.
  • Letting Go [article]
    Roy Rapaport shares a key lesson about letting go, "You can’t make people do good work. You can’t stop them from doing bad work. All you can do is share context and enforce consequences."
  • Critical Components of Successful Delegation [video]
    Spencer Norman's advice on what, how and who to delegate to provides invaluable guidance for delegating successfully
  • How to Level-Up Your Leadership With Task Relevant Maturity [article]
    Kate Dagher provides practical advice on how to think about how much autonomy and guidance to offer your team members when delegating tasks
  • Empowerment vs. Entitlement [article]
    Laura Tacho gives some great advice on empowering teams
  • Why do leaders keep disempowering their teams? | [article]
    Kellan Elliott-McCrea reminds us that as leaders we need to "Find that path to being okay with being accountable, without being in control."
  • Turn the Ship Around! [article]
    Anna Shipman gives an insightful summary of the book "Turn the ship around", an inspiring book about creating a "leader-leader" approach to running a nuclear submarine
  • Who’s got the monkey? [article]
    This classic article is a reminder of how important it is to be explicitly manage who has the initiative and not take it on without thinking

Make time to lead

Take control of your time so that you can lead effectively

Managing up

How to work well with your manager

  • Managing up is not optional, it's essential [article]
    Flora Devlin reminds us of the importance of managing up and gives practical guidance on how to do this
  • A Tactical Guide to Managing Up [article]
    30 tips from a wide range of experts on how to manage up effectively. If you are not sure how to improve your relationship with your manager then this contains lots of great ideas for change.
  • How to present to executives [article]
    Will Larson provides good practical advice for getting more out of your presentations

Related subjects: building teams and giving and receiving feedback

If you have suggestions for more links for this page then please do not hesitate to contact me at joel@monkeysthumb.co.uk or @joel@monkeysthumb.co.uk.