Welcome!

Welcome to the Open Leadership & Management Cookbook! This 'book' is a work in progress (always, but especially now). We hope you enjoy our recipes and add your own.

Why Recipes?

Leadership & Management is like cooking. Everyone has their own style, and there's no "right" or "wrong" way to do it. We all learn by watching others, tasting their delicious (or not so much...) creations, and combining our favorite discoveries into our own unique dishes. So, since it is like cooking, we should have a Leadership & Management Cookbook! This is my attempt to start it.

A good cookbook does a few things. This is inspired by Mastering the Art of French Cooking

• Explain some fundamental properties of the ingredients. Beef, tomatoes, salt -- some of these are fundamental across all of cooking.
• Explore the techniques available to the chef. Searing, grilling, boiling...
• Build some simple, reusable recipes as a toolbox. Sauces, rubs, bases...
• Create magical dishes by combining all of the above in interesting ways.
• Explore variations on the themes.

We'll use a similar structure here. We'll break down our most complex leadership & management recipes into combinations of simpler building blocks. Hopefully as you grow in your career, you'll move up the recipe complexity ladder and feel comfortable trying the hardest ones! And, as an open cookbook, we encourage you to add your own variations, techniques, insights, or entirely new recipes here. The goal of this cookbook is not to be 100% comprehensive; the topic is too vast for that. It is instead an attempt to build a comprehensive 'overview'. Breadth vs depth. In many cases, we'll give a few example recipes, and then point at entire chapters or books dedicated to the subject.

Contents

Section Health

There are a LOT of sections in this cookbook. Since we are actively working on it, parts will be unstarted, parts incomplete, parts wrong and not useful yet... So to help folks navigate it while it is 'under construction' we use the following badges. Note that badge higher up the tree represents the MAXIMUM badge lower down, which should help with navigation down to the useful parts.

1. 🚫 Placeholder. This means the page/tree exists purely as an empty canvas for future work. It might have raw notes being stored to convert into an actual document. Probably not worth exploring these trees/documents.
2. ☢️ Draft. This means I'm actively working on the page/tree and it will be changing in the near future. It probably shouldn't be read yet, unless you want to torture yourself.
3. ✅ Published. This means the page/tree is likely useful.
4. ❇️ Core Team Contributions. This means the page/tree has had other people contributing to it and is now a "group-owned" page.
5. ✳️ Public Contributions. This means the page/tree is now generally useful to the public since we've had non core-team members contributing to it.

Current Progress

Since our tree can be quite deep & confusing as it develops here are the main sections that are ready for consumption.

1. Definitions 🚫: this will eventually contain terms that are used throughout the cookbook and may not be well-understood.
2. ingredients 🚫: a discussion of the key ingredients that, if we combine them in the right way, will make people think differently.
3. Tools 🚫: a discussion on the various tools that you have to combine those ingredients.
4. Recipes✅: this is the current place I'm focusing my attention.
   1. Leadership 🚫: not yet started.
   2. Management✅: some progress happening here.
      1. Winning 🚫: not yet started.
      2. Increasing the Capacity To Win ✅
         1. Growing ✅
            1. Expectations ✅: I added most of my recipes here.
            2. Reviews ✅: this is ready and should be useful!
         2. Reward Systems ✅️
            1. Compensation ✅: mostly usable now.
            2. Non-Compensation 🚫: not yet started
5. Meals🚫:
6. Feasts🚫:
7. Appendix:

How to Use This Book

Like a cookbook, this "book" is not intended to be read through, cover-to-cover. You can, if you're really bored. You probably won't remember very much though. Instead, it's organized in a way that should make it easy for you to quickly find the recipes that you need for the situation you are facing. For example, you might be having a poor performer on your team. You can look in the appendix to find the right section (wait we don't have one yet -- can you contribute it please??). Or you can think, "performance is about management more than leadership, and I'm trying to increase my team's capacity to win... So let's check there."

The Skill Stack: Choose Wisely!

TODO: explain what the skill stack is & how to build it.
Skill: Combination of knowledge + practice.

Audience: Engineering

All of the recipes in this cookbook are built assuming that the cook is a software engineering leader or manager. That doesn't mean that the recipes can't be altered to fit a different palate; like a type of cuisine, many of them can be adopted wholesale, while others might be usable with minor modifications. Some may not work at all.

The general bias of this cookbook is also towards startups. A lot of the recipes apply to any sized organization, and over time, we'd like the recipes to be labeled if they are more effective in smaller vs larger companies. We'll do that once we have a critical mass of recipes. For now, assume the recipes were written by startup leaders/managers, with that bias.

Editorial Policy

Need to expand this, but roughly something like this:

1. Recipes belong to the contributor. They can use "I", "my team", "our company", etc. They should be personal, real-world examples.
2. Pointing to third-party content/recipes is encouraged. A summary should be included so readers can decide if they want to go deeper.
3. Credit to inspirations/examples/etc is encouraged. We all stand on shoulders of giants. Link to other material if possible and call out what you've done differently/how you improved on the recipe or made it your own.
4. Copying third-party recipes without their approval is forbidden. You can link to their "recipes" (books, blog posts, etc) but don't verbatim copy/paste anything anyone else has written. If they give you approval encourage them to add a commit themselves instead, that way credit is clearly seen in the commit history. If that's not possible then you should have a link back to their public profile (LinkedIn/blog/etc).
5. Non-recipes should use the plural 'we' and represent the voice of the Editorial Committee (TBD what that is!). In rare circumstances, individuals can add their own editorial voices within the common sections by clearly marking them as such [I think this is a good idea but I'm open to not doing it -- Dobromir].
6. Humor is encouraged. Leadership & Management can be a tedious job sometimes. Let's make it more fun by laughing at ourselves & others. All humor in this guide should not be directed at any one individual or class of people in particular. Unless that class of people are Startup CEOs, in which case everything is fair game. They can take it.

References

Sources

There are a ton of inspirations for all the material here, too many to list. We'll call out the main ones that appear over & over within the cookbook. Whenever possible, we link to the specific recipes within the cookbook as well, in the right location.

• GitLab's Handbook

Thank you!

Working TODO list

1. Performance review recipes?
2. Leadership/Management explanation — this will be controversial.
3. Finish the compensation sections so they are fully readable end-to-end.
4. Expectations (scorecards / ladders / etc)
5. Clean up performance review examples, and add all of my historical ones.
6. Lessons learned from Doxel (for WT)
7. Execution recipes
   1. Red/Yellow/Green tracking
   2. Cycles recipe
8. Hiring budget recipe.
9. Engineering budget recipe.
   1. Cloud tracking?
   2. Software tracking?
   3. Managing a budget monthly.
10. Layoff risk recipe.
11. Hiring recipes
    1. Before you start...
       1. What are the core ingredients? Psychology... What else?
       2. What are the core tools?
    2. Topgrading recipe.
    3. Training meal. How do you up-level your team's ability to hire?
    4. Training feast. How do you up-level your org/company's ability to hire?
12. Patent recipes?
13. Add automatic checks to this github repo.
    1. Spelling.
    2. Broken links.
    3. Reformatting MD pages.
    4. Creating slideshows PDFs for certain recipes.
       1. Explore turning these into slides! https://marp.app/
    5. PII (names, internal documents, etc) removal.
    6. Recipe 'backlinks' -- if a recipe is used as an ingredient somewhere else, link back to it so it grows in usefulness!
14. Pressure test the organizational structure against other sources
    1. rands-leadership.slack.com
    2. theleaddeveloper.slack.com
    3. Staff Engineer book?
15. IDEA: make this repo easy to clone by a new Head of Eng and create the 'engineering handbook' for their company?
    1. Script to auto-pick recipes.
    2. What else would be useful??
16. IDEA: we should have video recordings of some of this material being taught, as well as written form. It'll be much more engaging.
17. IDEA: we should use DALL-E to add some funny illustrations to make the content more engaging.