Tag Archives: leadership

General

Open Source Software: A Path to Building Leadership Skills

In traditional top-down employment structures, if a manager asks an employee to do something, there is an expectation that they will do what was asked. In the manager / employee relationship, the manager has quite a bit of power over their employees. The really great managers collaborate with their employees and lead with empathy, while less experienced and less competent managers rely on power dynamics to get employees to complete their work. In contrast, leadership in open source requires influence without power, which can help build skills in leading through collaboration, influence, and empathy to help people become truly great managers and leaders. I’ve been managing people within companies for 20+ years, and I’ve learned so much about how to be a better leader and manager through my work in open source.

A common pattern in open source is that a community member finds something to contribute and then contributes it, regardless of whether they are doing this as an individual or on behalf of a company. Those contributions are often followed by an interactive feedback process. A maintainer might review the contribution and request some changes, and the contributor will usually need to make some modifications before the contribution is accepted. In this case, the maintainer needs to be able to clearly communicate the request for modifications and use their influence (not power) to convince the contributor to keep working on the contribution until it can be completed. The contributor needs to collaborate with the maintainer and maybe even negotiate a solution that works for both of them. They both need to collaborate and use influence and collaboration, rather than power to find the best solution.

Another common pattern in open source is that there are activities that need to be accomplished, but the people involved in that part of the project don’t have the time or the skills to complete those activities, or they want to use those activities as a way to encourage newer contributors to get more involved. In this case, the people who want the work done will need to reach out to the community or to individuals and encourage others to contribute. This usually means convincing potential contributors of the value of these activities and using influence and negotiation skills to help people complete this work. Again, these are valuable managerial and leadership skills that can be learned and practiced by participating in open source projects. 

These skills can be developed even if you aren’t in a formal leadership position within a project. If you are a regular contributor, there is probably something you’re working on where you could use help from others. By getting others to help with this work, you can practice your leadership skills. I also encourage people to volunteer for leadership positions. There might be existing positions that need a leader, but you can also volunteer to lead something even when that leadership position doesn’t currently exist. You can volunteer to lead a user group, facilitate a meeting, start a podcast, manage a project, or anything else you can think of that might need doing. For those of you working within OSPOs, you can encourage your employees to think about using their work in open source projects to help build leadership skills, in addition to just considering open source work as a way for someone to gain new technical skills.

I know that some maintainers don’t like to think of themselves as managers or leaders, but a lot of maintainer responsibilities are more managerial than just writing code, and they require leadership skills. Even if you don’t aspire to become a people manager as a career, the leadership skills learned in open source projects can improve your interactions with other people both personally and professionally.

Additional Resources:

If you want help with your open source strategy, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Photo by Brooke Lark on Unsplash

General

Sustainable Open Source Leadership

Sustainable leadership for open source projects is something that we all know is important, but it’s also one of those topics that can be neglected for far too long within a project. We’ve all seen projects where the same people sit in the same leadership positions year after year without providing opportunities for other contributors to move up within the project. Contributors can become disillusioned and disengage if they don’t feel like there are enough opportunities within a project, and since there are so many open source projects that need help, those contributors might just move on from your project to another one where they have more opportunities to participate and lead in a more meaningful way.

Sustainable open source projects and sustainable leadership is something that I’m deeply passionate about. I’ve had discussions about sustainability with more projects than I can count as part of my past role as co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group (TAG) and the Governance Working Group that was part of the TAG, and as part of my previous corporate open source roles when I worked at companies like VMware, Pivotal, and Intel. 

A few months ago, I published a 5-part blog post series about governance, and while all of the posts touch on sustainable leadership, Part 3: New Contributors and Pathways to Leadership is particularly relevant. But I’ve been thinking more about sustainable leadership lately, in part, because we recently recorded a CHAOSScast episode on diverse leadership to go along with the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide: Getting Started with Building Diverse Leadership, but also because we’ve been having discussions within the CHAOSS Governing Board about making the process for joining the board more inclusive. 

The CHAOSS Inclusive Leadership metric has several best practices that leadership bodies can reflect on as they work toward becoming more inclusive. This includes whether there are terms for leaders and regular opportunities for community members to get involved and have a voice in the project. 

Those of us who are established in our careers and in open source projects can use our influence and reputation in a project to help others gain visibility and opportunities that eventually result in other people moving into leadership positions. We call this sponsorship, which is more than just mentoring, and can include things like inviting someone to co-present or join a panel at an event, providing opportunities to collaborate together on some aspect of a project, or other activities that give people new opportunities to learn and lead. For me, it was Danese Cooper who encouraged me to blog and gave me opportunities for some of my first conference talks as part of panels and lightning talks that she was organizing. This gave my career in open source a huge boost back in the mid-2000s and helped me move from doing mostly internal corporate open source strategy roles into more publicly facing open source community roles that provided even more opportunities for me to lead.

As we move into the new year, I’d like to take this time to encourage everyone in a leadership position in an open source project to reflect on your governance processes and whether those processes provide ample opportunities for up and coming contributors to move into leadership roles. You could also be thinking about ways that you can personally provide more opportunities (aka sponsorship) for someone newer in their career or new to open source who is showing promise, but who could use your support to move to the next level.

Additional Resources:

If you want feedback or help with sustainable leadership, governance, or related open source topics, I’m available for consulting engagements.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash