A big part of leading is communicating so, for example, when my first attempts at writing the full and official rules of Eclipse development failed, I switched to the more concise and humorous Three Laws of Eclipse ("a committer may not, through action or inaction...") and The Eclipse Intellectual Property Rules in Eight Cartoons (with a nod to xkcd).
I find that developers are happier to conform to rules if the rules are explained and justified, i.e., open processes: like open source but so much more so. So when Ward Cunningham and I created a workflow solution for the Eclipse community, we designed a test-driven development framework for developer productivity that also uses those same tests to provide self-documenting process transparency for our community. So it's both a floor wax and a dessert topping: test-first development that automatically provides open processes.
Hiring is perhaps the most important thing a manager can do, and over the years I've had the opportunity to hire a fair number of people. On the whole, my win-loss ratio is quite good and I'm always working on improving it. Lately I've been mentoring a few new managers on the topic, so I wrote up a few of my interviewing best practices.
The right people are a major factor in team productivity, but so are best practices. One way that I've motivated teams to adopt best practices is through ambient status - for example, I've installed genuine traffic lights connected to the continuous builds. I carefully chose a traffic light because of its societal implications of green is good and red is "stop everything"! I experimented with other devices (more lights, fewer lights, flashing lights, graphs) but none had the visceral impact of the glowing green or the fearsome red.

(I note that while I've been doing this for a decade, there is now at
least one company selling similar ambient information devices).

Another way that I've encouraged the spread of best practices is through gingerbread tools - tools that are more inviting to use than the alternative, but at the same time enforce a particular best practice. Thus developers voluntarily adopt the tools and, at the same time, the best practices. I've found this to be a much better technique for creating change than "thou shalt" directives from management.
As a project manager, I practice the art of under-promising and over-delivering. At OTI, we were early adopters of discard features to meet the schedule agile engineering, a practice I have continued and promoted since. I'm pleased to see that contemporary management tools (e.g., evidence based scheduling) have caught up with techniques I was utilizing more than a decade ago.
Part of ensuring a consistent organizational culture is reinforcing that culture. In the past, companies have used motivational posters and big company meetings. I prefer the more gentle reminder of a thousand raindrops: a blog... I write on a number of topics, but I deliberately return again and again to a small number of major themes:
Communication technology evolves (mobiles, blogs, wikis, im, twitter, ...) but in the end communication is still about people talking to people. I'm very pleased with my decade-plus of technical conferences (OOPSLA through EclipseCon). Officially, conferences are about the technical sessions, but really conferences are about establishing and maintaining social networks. Developers are mostly introverts so I take great pride in creating social situations that break the ice, dissolve the cliques, and encourage those hallway conversations that are the real backbone of a developer community.
I do a little consulting around software engineering best practices through my nameplate "Predictable Software". I also fly my little airplane around the pacific northwest, taking pictures of clouds, mountains and beaches.

bjorn@bjornfreemanbenson.com

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* this page of cool things is obviously biased towards the more recent ones
November 19, 2007