“Herding Tigers” is Todd Henry’s playbook for being the leader that creative people need.
Herding tigers because herding cats doesn’t adequately convey the feeling of leading a creative team. Lulz. Nice one, Todd.
Apart from the intro (How to draw Darth Vader), the book is split into two sections, one for mindset and one for mechanics. It’s a clean split between approaching the task, and specific tactics.
The book is very much an attempt to roll up all sorts of good little nuggets harvested from many sources.
Key takeaways or concepts are nested in each chapter:
- Stop doing the work – summarising the move from maker to manager.
- They broke it, you bought it – the responsibility a leader has to take on for the team.
- Level Up – the pain of moving from an equal relationship to an imbalanced one, and tips on how to resolve that tension.
- Lead Brilliance – meditations on the difference between being a peer and a coach.
- Earn the right – on winning and managing trust.
- Prune proactively – on shaping the culture. A culture that just happens is a lot like a beard that just happens. Keep it clean and tidy instead, and you’ll end up with a masterpiece of a culture, rather than a scraggly bunch of weirdness.
- Stay on target – a chapter about focus, goals and taking aim.
- Defend their space – a chapter about being the whole team’s Deflector Shield.
- Be the muse – thoughts about sparking ideas. It can be a strange responsibility to have to drive ideation processes, and this is a chapter about techniques for getting it right.
- Fight well – on conflict management. Some of the good bits align a lot with The Hard Thing About Hard Things or Dalio’s Principles.
- Be a leader worth following – touches on what makes all the work worth it. To make change, you have to lead, and to lead, you must be worth following. It’s about finding a change that enough people think is worth making.
A culture that just happens is a lot like a beard that just happens.
After each chapter is a short selection of actions to take, conversations to have, and rituals to introduce. At the end of the book, the full list of rituals from all chapters is presented in groups of weekly, monthly and quarterly activities.
Solid tips in there for a beginner (like me), and there’s gotta be good reminders in there for anyone. The final list is going to sit on my desk for a while to be skimmed for reminders every so often, and to split specific tasks out of every so often.
It can be hard to adopt the full list of activities unless starting completely from scratch, but every point in there is worth attention and serious consideration, especially if it’s completely foreign, something you’ve never considered working with.