Finding your bearings as a manager can feel overwhelming—but you don’t have to fake it to make it, and you don’t have to go it alone.
Lara Hogan shares her recipe for supporting and leading a tech team—from developing your mentoring and coaching skills, to getting comfortable with having difficult conversations, to boosting trust among teammates—while staying grounded along the way.
What’s in the book?
Whether your title is “lead”, “manager”, or something else: if you’re responsible for supporting and leading a team of people, this book is for you. You can read an excerpt here.
Throughout the book, Lara Hogan walks through how to create stability, clarity, and trust as you navigate the stages of group development with your team:
- Meet Your Team
Learn about your teammates’ core needs and work styles, and help them get to know you, too. - Grow Your Teammates
Help your teammates grow through mentoring, coaching, sponsoring, and delivering feedback. - Set Clear Expectations
Learn to set clear expectations around your team’s roles and responsibilities, vision and priorities, and collaborative processes. - Communicate Effectively
Strategically communicate to make sure each message is understood by your teammates, while balancing tricky aspects like confidentiality and disagreement with the company line. - Build Resiliency
Create resiliency in yourself and your team by preparing for times of crisis, managing your energy, and growing your support network.
Tools and tactics are included for each set of skills, so you can experiment and see what will work best for you, your team, and the environment you’re working in. At the end of each chapter, you’ll also find a section called “Coaching Questions”—prompts to help you introspect, and begin to hone these skills.
People are saying...
It's for all levels of management:
Lara’s book pushes managers to be empathetic, thoughtful, and most of all, effective—even when the news is bad or the tasks are hard. Resilient Management is filled with frameworks, checklists, tools, and, above all, optimism for building up your team—and wow is that refreshing!”
—Paul Ford, CEO
Resilient Management will help any manager who wants to improve. Lara Hogan has taken the often complex concepts about people leadership, and made them digestible and actionable—a roadmap for inclusive management.”
—Nicole Sanchez, CEO
Lara Hogan illustrates the underlying science & psychology behind effective people management—and shares a plethora of pragmatic tools and ideas for doing it well. Resilient Management is an excellent investment whether you’re new to managing or an experienced hand. There’s something for everyone to learn.”
—Meri Williams, CTO and chair of The Lead Developer conference
It contains valuable tools:
Many of us jump into management roles without first taking the time to reflect on who we are as leaders. Think of Lara’s book as a self-reflection guide: it’ll help you understand and harness the power of your unique perspective to grow healthy teams. Turn to Resilient Management whenever you need to make big decisions or navigate tricky conversations."
—Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Senior UX manager
Resilient Management is the perfect mix of actionable advice, leadership theory, and questions that will inspire introspection and the development of your own management style. It's close to having Lara in your corner, helping you navigate the complexities of management, and encouraging you to grow as a leader."
—David Brunelle, VPE
This could not have come at a better time! I'm handing off one team and starting a new one this week and I would have been lost without Lara Hogan's advice! If you are interested in the skills and craft of management buy this book (I bought two copies already!)"
—Cole Strode, Manager
It's about humane management:
I wish I could’ve had Lara’s book long ago, but I’m so happy it exists now for all (and so I can keep learning). And you couldn’t ask for a more excellent guide! Lara packs so much useful knowledge and humane management practice into this one book. It’s seriously required reading."
—Jason Santa Maria, Director of Communication Design
Historically, we had only our individual gifts for empathy and support to lean on in making the transition from individual contributor to manager, but in Resilient Management, Lara Hogan has produced a fantastic and concise foundational text for the practice of humane management."
—David Yee, Senior Director
There are entire warehouses full of business books that depict patriarchal management structures and toxic work environments, but this book is not among them. Instead, it defines an approach to management that redistributes power and optimizes for respect at all levels—and then it shows you how to get there. Required reading for managers everywhere."
—Mandy Brown, VP of Product
It's helpful during these unprecedented times:
It’s a bumpy ride at many tech companies right now. Of the management books I’ve read, this is the one I keep going back to. It’s 100 pages of solid advice without fluff."
—Laura Reznikov, Engineering Manager
We all need help with resilience following the last couple of years! Lara offers a tour de force summary of human centric management techniques and turns the dial to 11."
—Ryan Greenhall, Engineering Leadership Consultant
I've been struggling with consistent communication around change lately and, in a moment of frustration, opened Lara Hogan's Resilient Management and just wrote my first Communication Plan. Feeling way more prepared for the next change."
—Michael Phillips, Engineering Manager
Non-managers
should read it, too:
I read Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management this weekend!
—Lauren Sperber, Staff Software Engineer
I’m so glad this book exists so I can give it to all my future managers. It’s now required reading for being my boss. 🤓"
Although the book is aimed at managers, I’m strongly suggesting experienced engineers (non-managers) should also read this, especially those who want to positively influence a team’s capacities to weather good times and bad while still getting things done."
—John Allspaw, CTO
I’m not a manager, but as the most senior IC on the team I do feel like I share some responsibilities with my manager. Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management is SO USEFUL and directly applies to many aspects of my day-to-day.
—Torunn Skrogstad, Principal product designer
About the author
Lara Callender Hogan is an author, public speaker, and coach for managers and leaders across the tech industry.
As a founder of Wherewithall, Lara and her team run workshops, roundtables, and trainings on core management skills like delivering great feedback and setting clear expectations.
Before Wherewithall, Lara spent a decade growing emerging leaders as the VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and an Engineering Director at Etsy. She champions management as a practice, building fast websites, and celebrating your achievements with donuts (and sometimes sushi).