Unmanagement and unleadership

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Luis Ibanez is a senior software developer at Google. In this short talk he explains what he means by "unmanagement" and "unleadership" and how they can change the course of a project.

He says that we create the impression that leadership is what you need to get through a difficult time. But, that is misleading because the story that it does not tell is the work the community is doing. When we focus too much on the leader, we diminish the work of the followers. Another problem with being in awe of the leader is that the community may be "off the hook" and may not feel responsible. You want everyone in the community to feel like an integral, important part of the team, and this can be monitoried because when things are going the preferred way, people exclaim: "We did it!"

You can help foster this in your community, or employees, or teammates by not being too helpful and allowing people to pitch in.

Opensource.com hosted a lightning talk event prior to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. Nine talks on interesting ideas, projects, and more in open source topics were held on October 21, 2014 at Red Hat Tower. Over 100 attendees joined Opensource.com in person, for an evening of open source awesomeness.

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2 Comments

I love this. I try to follow this paradigm. Empowering others is the key to community and team effort.

This was my favourite lightning talk at All Things Open. It was great to view it again.

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