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
Transitioning to leadership from software development provides the opportunity to learn a lot. Joe Goldberg, who created the original document inspiring this list, read a crap-ton of books and articles, and took notes along the way.
Since 2013-ish, Joe has been keeping a collection of links and notes on the broad topics of “leadership” and “management." He shared it with friends who were transitioning to management roles but kept it private to the world at-large. Then he decided to open-source it. Here you'll find Joe's document, which provides meatier summaries of the articles you'll find listed here as well as lots of supplementary notes.
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).
- Culture (links available, takeaways in progress)
- Diversity and Gender (links available, takeaways in progress)
- Giving Feedback, Praise, and Advice
- Hiring and Firing
- Influence, Delegation, and Decision-Making
- Leader List
- Leadership Philosophies and Styles
- Motivation and “Retention” in progress
- Onboarding
- One-on-Ones
- People Ops, Performance Reviews, and Goal-setting
- Postmortems, Retrospectives, and Conflict Resolution
- Time Management and Meetings
- Transitioning to Management (and Managing Managers)
- When You're Not a "Manager": Leadership for Developers
- 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?
- 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)
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).
First off, we'd love that! For submissions, follow our contributing guidelines. For questions, go ahead and post an issue in our Issues Tracker.
Please let us know via the Issues Tracker if there’s a topic you'd like this list to include.
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.
