TSPSMLeading a Development Team

2. Leadership

Now that you are a team leader, one of the first questions you face is: “What is leadership, and what must I do to be an effective leader?” That is the topic of this chapter, and its answer provides the foundation for the rest of the book.

2.1 Leadership Problems

To see why leadership is important, consider what its absence would mean. Have you ever worked in an organization that had an ineffective leader? You most likely have, and so have I.

My first brush with incompetent leadership was in one of my first engineering jobs. I was leading a team that was developing a military computer/communications system. This was a pretty advanced system, at least for the technology of the day, and I thought it had considerable commercial ...