Elastic Leadership

I want to discuss Roy Osherove’s concept of Elastic Leadership, as outlined in his book Elastic Leadership, which explains how to use various leadership styles to grow sustainable and self-organised teams.

Building a team is a continuous process. A team goes through many phases and challenges before being self-organised. Leaders must adapt their leadership to fit the team’s needs.

In the following section, I cover three phases teams go through and share my thoughts on the leadership style for each phase.

Survival Mode → Command & Control

A team in survival mode struggles to deliver results. They are constantly dealing with incidents, fixing bugs and sacrificing quality to deliver within the timelines. Falling into this mode can happen for many reasons, such as:

• The engineers don’t know how to solve their problems.
• The team doesn’t have the context of the project.
• The team is mainly composed of inexperienced engineers.

All the above reasons are valid, and it’s not the team’s fault. As a leader, it is your responsibility to help the team overcome this situation and support them.

How do we escape the survival phase?

In this phase, the leader must use the command & control leadership style to help the team escape the survival mode. The leader should make most of the decisions and take control to solve the team’s problems. As you can imagine, this style must be temporary since the leader becomes a bottleneck, and the team can’t operate when the leader is not around. However, the principle of this mode is to guide the team and create slack time for the team to learn.

How do you create slack time?

• As a leader, you can make most of the decisions to ensure the team is going on the right path. This must be temporary until your team learns how to solve their challenges.
• When estimating the duration of a project, make sure to add extra time for learning.
• Push back requirements. It may be uncomfortable, but your team will have more time to learn and grow.

Creating slack time will help the team to breathe. Using this time to learn is vital for your team to transition to the next phase: learning.

Learning Mode → Coaching

The main requirement for a team to transition to the learning phase is time to learn. Suppose the team is always busy dealing with incidents and missing deadlines. Then, the team is still in survival mode, and the leader needs to create slack time, as discussed previously.

When a team has time to learn, the leader’s role is to act as a coach. Identify areas your team needs to improve, let them make the decisions, and learn from their mistakes in a safe environment. Investing time in coaching your team has a compound effect. Your team will improve delivery performance and increase quality over time with little input from you. So, prioritising learning time is essential for the team to grow and transition to self-organise.

However, it is essential to be mindful of time spent on learning. While sending your team to a Domain Driven Design (DDD) training course can be beneficial, it will not bring any value if they do not have the time to apply what they have learned. Otherwise, they will eventually forget it. Therefore, ensuring the team has ample time to practice is crucial. Additionally, the benefits of learning extend beyond adding value to the company. Your team will feel more empowered and motivated as a result.

Self-Organised Mode → Facilitator

The self-organised phase is when the team performs its job with minimal input from you and knows how to solve their problems because there was an investment in coaching and growing. At this phase, the leader should act as a facilitator and ensure that the team is unblocked and has clear goals.

The leader should allow the team to drive the work and focus on what they do best: efficiently solving problems and delivering customer value.

Be Elastic, My Friend

It is crucial to understand that any change in the team creates disruption. If a new joiner joins the team, the engineers must support them during onboarding, which impacts the team’s velocity. Another example is the team shifting their focus to build a new project. The team needs to build context and potentially collaborate with different teams. All these changes cause disruptions, and it’s expected teams transition to different phases as a reaction to change. The key point is to understand that you are accountable for your team as a manager. You must continuously observe the signals (1:1s, retrospective sessions, metrics, surveys) and adapt your leadership style to satisfy your team’s needs. Be elastic, my friend.

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