Situational Leadership for Architecture Decision Making

This is a hands-on lab with limited capacity.

In dynamic and evolving engineering environments, individuals often find themselves in leadership roles, whether formally appointed as tech leads, architects, or informally influencing decisions due to experience or expertise. Especially senior developers who might suddenly realise their influence or former techies who were promoted to a formal leadership position without further training often struggle in best supporting their team. This workshop, is tailored to help both in navigating their roles effectively, particularly in architecture decision-making.

The workshop is structured into two main parts. In the first part, participants will dive into the overall theory of Situational Leadership (II), which provides a robust framework for adapting leadership styles to the readiness and maturity of their teams. The workshop will combine the two versions by Paul Hersey and Ken Blanchard as they perfectly intertwine. Through interactive activities, the participants will map personal experiences to the different readiness/maturity levels and leadership styles, helping to demystify why some situation intuitively succeed while they struggled in others. With 1-2-4-all the group will be able to deepen their understanding of the theory through individual reflection, small group discussions and the collective knowledge and experience to create a cheat sheet for each of the 4 situations. The concrete facilitation method will be adapted according to the number of participants.

In the second part, the theoretical understanding will be transferred to the specific context of architecture decision-making. The participants will explore how situational leadership principles can be applied to real-world architectural challenges, like introducing/implementing DDD principles. To develop actionable next steps to their individual challenges the second part will close with 2-3 rounds of troika consulting.

Optionally, the workshop offers an opportunity to discuss the nuances between formal and informal leadership contexts, which includes the understanding how these roles affect team dynamics and how leaders can consciously leverage their influence to drive successful architectural outcomes.