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. The originator/primary author of this list, Joe Goldberg, 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. And here we are.
Joe and others (including you?) will keep curating it as I read/learn more. Enjoy!
- FAQ
- Leadership Philosophies and Styles (uploading in progress)
- Transitioning to Management (and managing managers)
- 1-on-1s
- Influence, Delegation, and Decision-Making (in progress)
- Performance Reviews and Goal-setting (in progress)
- Giving Feedback, Praise, and Advice (in progress)
- Onboarding (in progress)
- Culture (in progress)
- Diversity and Gender (in progress)
- Time Management and Meetings
- Hiring and Firing
- Motivation and “Retention” (we hate that word)
- Postmortems, Retrospectives, and Conflict Resolution
- 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.
