Elastic Leadership ─ Growing Self-Organizing Teams

One day it happens. You end up in charge of a team as a manager, technical team leader, architect, or scrum master. The team is looking to you for guidance. Personality clashes need to be worked out. Heated debates need to be mediated, and the team is constantly putting out fires instead of doing the right things, the right way. Everyone wants to do the right thing, but nobody seems to doing it. This is where leaders can get stuck and need the guidance that elastic leadership offers. This framework and philosophy of leadership can help as they strive to manage day-to-day and long term challenges, and create the elusive self-organizing team by coming to understand that their leadership needs to change based on the needs and goals of the team.

Elastic Leadership offers a set of values, techniques, and practices to consider in current or future leadership roles. First, it looks at the elastic leadership philosophy—a way of navigating the leadership world that provides a moral compass when making decisions, large and small. It includes the leader manifesto, and the elastic leadership framework phases (survival mode, learning, and self organization). Readers will discover a set of techniques and practices the author has acquired along his own journey that will complement and support their moral compass. Next, the book provides a set of thoughts and notes from other leaders, with accompanying annotations from the author about how they fit into the overall framework and compass.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

Roy Osherove is the author of The Art of Unit Testing and Beautiful Builds. For more than 17 years, he has worked as a developer, team leader, architect, Scrum Master, coach, and manager at companies all over the world.