Show Notes
Mon-Chaio gives a rundown of leadership books he’s read in the past few months and pulls out interesting nuggets from each selection.
References:
- Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t by Simon Sinek
- The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier
- Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais, and Ruth Malan
Transcript
Mon-Chaio: Welcome to a vacation cast episode of the TTL Podcast. Andy is on vacation this week, so I’ll be your host through a much shorter episode.
Today I’m gonna be talking about some books that I read in the last few months that I think you might find interesting. Of course, these books are on topic for the TTL podcast and not just some random books that I’ve been reading. They will also be linked in the show notes, so you can go there if you’re interested in checking them out or buying them and reading them for yourself.
The first one I’d like to talk about is a book called Leaders Eat Last. The title of this book is a nod to the Marine Corps, where the author mentions the leaders of the Marine Corps teams always eat last in the chow line. And from that you can gather the theme of this book is about what is commonly called servant leadership. And in fact, the general theme throughout the book is for teams to be more together, to build tribes within the company, and for leaders to be as close to the people that they serve as possible. Not too far removed and not too far abstracted from the teams and the day-to-day work that they do.
A few things that I want to call out that were especially interesting. The first one is, the author talks about the four chemicals that rule human life. He mentions those are endorphins, dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin. His premise is that in many modern organizations, the way leaders work, promote the wrong chemicals and demote the right chemicals.
As an example, he talks about how oxytocin is the chemical of trust. It helps us understand how vulnerable we can be and when we can trust. He also mentions that cortisol is a chemical that’s released when we’re feeling vulnerable and alone, and cortisol actually inhibits the release of oxytocin. And so many organizations built around these stressful situations where cortisol is released time and time again, actually makes it more difficult for us to build high trust in our organizations. He also talks about serotonin being the chemical that gives us a feeling of pride and gives us a feeling of pride when others respect us.
I think that’s a very interesting way of thinking about leadership and leadership styles, and I think that it’s very valuable to keep that in mind about what behaviors do we wanna promote, and keeping in mind human biology, the fact that certain behaviors and chemical pathways are hardwired into the way that we behave, and being able to tap into that thinking to determine optimal behaviors and optimal ways to lead. I think was an interesting insight from this book.
Another interesting thing the author talks about is this concept of alphas and he uses the animal kingdom for this, this concept that alphas have privileges, but they also have sacrifices. This kind of gets back to the title, Leaders Eat Last. And he mentions that in the world that we live in today, there are a lot of alphas who are working for themselves.
So they get the privileges, but they don’t have any of the sacrifices they have to make, such as offering protection to their team or to their people. One example he uses is a lot of social influencers or social media celebrities who get a lot of fame and privileges from that fame. But they offer nothing to their followers, and so he would say that is sort of a vapid type of leadership or a vapid type of fame and doesn’t actually help and trigger the right chemical reactions within people to feel a tribe of closeness or the feeling of closeness.
Overall, I thought, great book, good for first time managers to read, and definitely reinforces this concept of servant leadership.
Another book that I read a few months ago is called The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More, and Change the Way You Lead Forever. By the title itself, you might already know what the book is about: generally you should shut your mouth and do a lot more listening and do a lot more probing, instead of immediately jumping to solutions. And this does tie into our Feedback Fallacy episode, where we talk about the research that says, the way you solve the particular problem or your experience in solving that problem may not be applicable to the person that you’re mentoring.
Also, it’s often that the person that you’re mentoring already has it within themselves all the tools they need to solve the problem, and they just need you to draw it out of them. I think in those cases, this book works really well and I think that there are a lot of those cases. One thing that really stuck with me was the author talking about the AWE question, A-W-E, AWE question, and that is an acronym for “and what else?” It really does fill two roles. It allows you to ask them for more information instead of immediately jumping to a solution.
But it also allows you to not fill silences with solutions, right? I think one you could let the silence be, but also you can just say “and what else?” to elicit more responses from the person that you’re talking to, which I think is something that I try to do a lot and I think is very valuable. So I’m glad he called it out and I’m glad he gave it this acronym, which actually makes it really easy for me to remember and makes it easy to talk about as well.
The author also talks about trying to increase the TERA quotient. TERA being an acronym, standing for tribe, expectation, rank, and autonomy, and where good ideas will flow and trust will be built from increasing those four aspects or those four pillars.
Another thing I really liked is he talks about what he calls the seven dysfunctional dwarves. He has a specific tactic here, but what I want to call out is I really like his dwarves. They are Sulky, Moany Shouty, Crabby, Martyr-y Touchy, and Petulant. I am gonna try to find a lot of ways to use those dwarves moving forward. And in fact, I think I might even try to get a drawing of those seven dwarves somehow put together, maybe by AI, who knows?
Other than that, the book contains a lot of good general tips, such as starting sentences with “out of curiosity …” in order to soften the load and ask more deep probing questions or “help me understand better …” or “just so I know …” Or things like saying “first, what are your thoughts?” in order to allow them to speak before you immediately jump to solutions.
Really like The Coaching Habit. I think the author sometimes can come across as having all the answers, which as we all know is not quite true, right? Even, even experts don’t have all the answers. And it’s very rare, if ever, does the author say in this book “well, I don’t know”, but that’s generally okay, that’s more of a tone thing. I think the content of the book is really good. Definitely recommend a read.
Last book that I read that I wanna highlight, and I haven’t gotten all the way through this yet, and so this is gonna be a little bit shorter, is a book called Team Topologies. This is a really interesting book about how do you construct teams, and how the shape of teams affect the software that you produce. The author likes to talk about Conway’s Law, and he touches on how a lot of organizations are using the reverse Conway maneuver.
So Conway’s Law states that the shape of your organization governs the software and the shape of the software that you build. Therefore the reverse Conway maneuver would be thinking about what the shape of the software that you want to build and then intentionally building your organization in the same manner.
I thought that was very interesting. I had not heard about the reverse Conway maneuver before. I don’t know that I’m a big proponent of that, especially for teams in the “explore” phase where I think it’s irresponsible actually to think about the shape of the software you’re gonna build because I think it can change, but you still have to have teams built. Again, I’m early in the book here. Maybe he has a tactic for that, but my initial thinking around the reverse Conway maneuver touches on that a little bit and has me thinking, well, I don’t know if I really want to go all the way down that route.
Another interesting thing that he does talk about is the type of relationships and the number of people in the group. We’ve all heard of Dunbar’s Number. We talk a lot about Dunbar’s Number on this podcast, but he pointed to other anthropological research that goes beyond Dunbar’s Number. For example, 15 people is the maximum number, right around there, for the number of people that we can experience deep trust with. Which I think is super interesting. He also pointed out that for each of these steps, and I think he listed out four or five different step functions from Dunbar’s Number of I think five, to the next step of 15, and all the way up. It’s always, for some reason, often around a 3x multiplier for the team size as you go between these group sizes that influence how you can interact with all these people.
So I found that to be really interesting. Definitely really into this book, I’m gonna continue reading it and I think it’s a worthwhile read as well, especially for people that think about org shape and to think about how to build technical organizations that give a lot of AAA to folks and by virtue of their organizational structure help produce better software.
So those are the three books I’ve been reading that I thought were interesting. Leaders Eat Last, The Coaching Habit, and Team Topologies. Look for them in the show notes and give them a read if you feel like they apply to you as well.
That’s all I have for this episode. Until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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