Awesome Leadership and Management

What This Is, and Where It Comes From

Since 2013-ish, Joe Goldberg, who created the original document inspiring this list, read a crap-ton of books and articles about "leadership" and "management" and took notes along the way. He shared it with friends who were transitioning to management roles and eventually decided to open-source it. Here you'll find Joe's still-public document, which provides meatier summaries of the articles you'll find listed here as well as lots of supplementary notes.

In summer 2017 Lauri Apple found out about Joe's docs via Software Lead Weekly and asked Joe about posting the contents to GitHub. He gave the greenlight. Lauri changed up the format (very brief blurbs), turned the doc into an Awesome List, and has continued adding new entries ever since. Helping out with the initial upload were a team of Lauri's former colleagues at Zalando. These days the list receives contributions from people around the world.

• "An awesome collection of resources!" —Angie Jones, Twitter
• "Thanks again for putting together this tremendous resource!"—Dave Golden, MongoDB and contributor — "I have hunted and used this repeatedly in the last few months and referred many others to the material. So thank you—it's making a real difference in more ways than you could Imagine! :)" —Dave Igoe, via Slack

Contents

• Abilities, Qualities and Values
• Building Products and Startups, and OKRs
• Conflict Prevention and Conflict Resolution
• Culture
• Diversity and Gender
• Firing
• Giving Feedback, Praise, and Advice
• Hiring and Interviewing Candidates
• For Developers: Software Craftspersonship, Teamwork, Technical Debt
• Influence, Delegation, and Decision-Making
• Leader List
• Leadership Forums
• Leadership Media
• Leadership Philosophies and Styles
• Leading Leaders
• Meetings and Time Management
• Motivation and “Retention”
• Onboarding
• One-on-Ones
• People Ops, Performance Reviews, and Goal-setting
• Postmortems and Retrospectives
• Transitioning to Management

• "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." — Sir Isaac Newton
  
• "If I have not seen as far, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders." — lots of people, including Leigh Caplan
  
• "A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when their work‘s done, her aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." — Lao Tzu*
• "People need to stop using the phrase 'natural-born leader.' No one is a natural born leader." — Kate Heddleston

Contribute Your Favorites

Please share/promote your favorite managing and leading resources/go-to's (books, articles, Twitter feeds, videos, etc.) by adding them to this list. It's easy: Review our contributor guidelines and make a pull request (one per item/entry).

FAQ

• Who is this for?
• Why should you read this or trust the authors for advice?
• How can I submit a link or ask a question?
• How can I get more info on [missing topic]?
• Did you write all this yourself?

Who is this for?

• Individual contributors (ICs) looking to move into a management role but not sure if it’s right for them
• ICs who want to stay ICs but want to have more influence in their orgs
• ICs who recently moved into a management role
• Managers looking to level-up a particular skill
• Managers transitioning to meta-management (managing managers)

Why should you read this or trust the authors for advice?

You shouldn’t. Much of this is self-contradictory. Some seemed like good advice at the time. Little of it is original, even less is written by me. Don’t read this cover-to-cover. Scan the Table of Contents and pick a topic you’d like to learn more about. Joe has highlighted the absolutely most essential content (a few dozen articles, six books, and a handful of videos, checklists, and slide decks).

How can I submit a link or ask a question?

First off, we'd love that! For submissions, follow our contributing guidelines. For questions, go ahead and post an issue in our Issues Tracker.

How can I get more info on [missing topic]?

Please let us know via the Issues Tracker if there’s a topic you'd like this list to include.

Did you write all this yourself? (Credit/Attribution)

Almost none of the content shared in this list is by the authors. Where there’s a link, the content below it is generally a summary of the linked webpage. When there’s no link, it’s either original content or gives credit/attribution. Some book summaries are from Personal MBA, which Joe piloted and consulted on, but not to the extent where he is willing to take credit for its content.

License