AuthenticBits

The Leadership Toolkit

Team Leadership

First- and second-line managers with formal people-management responsibility for a team.

Leading a team means the tools change: delegation, feedback, prioritization, and the difficult conversations that come with formal responsibility for people. This theme covers the practical mechanics of running a team well.

Contents

Leading people

  • The Delegation Spectrum (drafted)
  • Feedback models (SBI, radical candor)
  • 1:1 template and cadence
  • Coaching vs. directing
  • Situational leadership (adapt the style to the person, not the other way around)
  • Servant leadership in practice
  • Motivation (autonomy, mastery, purpose — the Pink model)
  • Career development conversations
  • Onboarding a new hire

Difficult conversations and performance management

  • Handling underperformance and PIP processes
  • Termination conversations
  • Leading former peers/friends after a promotion
  • The first-time manager transition (from IC to manager)
  • Upward feedback — giving feedback to your own boss

Leading the work

  • RACI Matrix (drafted)
  • The Bottleneck Effect (drafted)
  • Prioritization (RICE/MoSCoW)
  • Meeting hygiene and cadence
  • Calendar defense — protecting your team’s and your own time

Team dynamics

  • Five Dysfunctions, One Team (drafted)
  • No Bad Teams, Only Bad Leaders (drafted)
  • Humble, Hungry, Smart (drafted)
  • Psychological safety
  • Conflict resolution within the team
  • Building trust as a new leader of an existing team
  • Remote/hybrid team leadership
  • Burnout and workload management
  • Diversity and inclusion at team level

Leading up and across

  • The Manager Who Can’t Say Stop (drafted)
  • Stakeholder communication
  • How to say no upward
  • Cross-functional collaboration (PM, design, engineering)
  • Hiring and interviewing as a first-line leader

AI in people management: where it helps, where it doesn’t

  • Where AI genuinely helps a manager: summarizing status updates, drafting first-pass agendas, spotting patterns across many 1:1 notes, prepping for a review by pulling together scattered feedback
  • Where it shouldn’t be used: writing the actual feedback or performance review content wholesale — the words still need to be yours, the employee can tell, and it’s your judgment on the line
  • AI notetakers in 1:1s — the trust cost of recording a conversation that’s supposed to be a safe space, and how to be transparent about it if you use one
  • Using AI to “read” an employee (sentiment analysis on Slack/email, engagement scoring) — why this crosses from helpful to surveillance quickly, and where the line is
  • AI in hiring and interview screening — bias risks, and why a screening recommendation is not a hiring decision
  • Don’t delegate the emotional labor — a difficult conversation, a firing, a conflict mediation are exactly the moments a manager can’t outsource judgment or presence to a tool
  • Being transparent with your team about what you do and don’t use AI for as their manager