I'll be in London next month, teaching my new two day "Lead Better" course - essential skills for team leaders. I hope you'll join me!

Why should you care about this course?

 Have you ever come across these situations?

• You try to convince your team that a specific practice is a good idea, but no one really adopts it, and you don’t know what to do about it.
• You are afraid of losing friendships just because you’ve become manager to the same people you’ve worked with as a team member up until now.
• Your team doesn’t have time to do anything but putting out fires and you feel helpless about it.
• You have a problematic team member and you feel like you’ve tried everything to solve this behavior and failed.
• You are being expected to perform impossible feats with impossible deadlines, and can’t do anything to stop it.
• You think that your team will never be able to be one of those “extreme programming” teams you keep writing about.
• You wonder “if only I had better people in my team I’d…”

You are not alone in these thoughts. We’ve all been there. A lucky few of us had good mentors to teach us what to do in these situations, but most of us just try our best and hope for miracles. Keep our heads down and pray nothing bad happens until the next person comes along.

In this course you’ll learn the basic trade secrets for managers and coaches - how to lead teams to greatness, with a twist - this course is especially designed for software team leaders - and deals with specific people issues in this highly technical world.   Hopefully, by the end of this course you’ll feel not only empowered to change things for the better, but you’ll also be equipped with a set of tools and techniques to help you think through and overcome tough people issues and challenges during your time as a team leader.

This course is based on my experiences and this blog

Prerequisites :

One year’s experience developing software using any language 

Course Outline

Day 1 – Elastic Leadership Principles

Skills being developed:

• Understanding the three phases of team maturity
• The chaos-command phase
• Dealing with impossible tasks, management conditions and people
• Exercises
• The Learning-commanding coach phase
• Managing current work with task boards and kanban boards
• Using Delegation as a growth tool

 

Day 2 – Influence and Team Growing

Skills being developed:

 

• The Self Leading-Coach phase
• Influencing the six forces that change people’s behavior
• Exercises 
• Understanding and approaching the five dysfunctions of teams