leadership styles | situational leadership | servant leadership | transformational leadership | mbti disc | mentoring
What You Will Learn:
- Choose a leadership style for the person in front of you rather than for yourself
- Switch style deliberately when the situation changes, and explain why
- Read personality type from a conversation, without asking anyone to take a test
- Use MBTI, DISC, PAEI, Belbin, Hogan and Big Five for what each is actually good for
- Notice your own reaction before it becomes the decision
- Apply Motivation 3.0 instead of incentives that stopped working
- Run a mentoring relationship properly: matching, first meeting, boundaries, ending
- Teach all of this to the managers who report to you
- Learn alongside Mike’s 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author’s experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
The “Social Engineering” Every Tech Lead Needs to Master
Look, we’ve all been there. You’ve mastered the stack, your architecture is solid, and you can spot a memory leak from a mile away. But then you get promoted to a leadership role and suddenly you’re dealing with the most unpredictable legacy system ever created: human beings. I’ve sat through my fair share of dry, corporate leadership seminars that felt like reading documentation for a software version that was deprecated in the 90s. This course, Leadership Styles: Situational, Servant and Authentic, is different. It’s more like a debugger for your management style.
What I appreciated most was Mike’s “no-nonsense” approach to career growth. He doesn’t just spout theory; he pulls from his time at high-growth companies like Preply and Wargaming to show you how to handle the high-pressure environments we actually live in. Instead of treating leadership like a fixed personality trait, the course frames it as a set of job-ready skills that you can toggle based on the person standing in front of you. It’s about moving away from a “one-size-fits-all” mentality and learning how to refactor your approach in real-time.
Prerequisites for Success
You don’t need an MBA or a decade of management experience to get value here. However, I’d argue that this isn’t for the total corporate novice. To really “get” the nuances Mike is teaching, you should have at least a year or two of experience working in a team environment—ideally one where you’ve seen a project go sideways because of a communication breakdown. Whether you are a beginner to advanced professional, the real prerequisite is a willingness to look in the mirror and realize that your “default” way of talking to people might be the very thing creating your team’s bottlenecks.
Industry-Standard Tools and Psychological Frameworks
One of the highlights for me was the breakdown of industry-standard tools. Most of us have heard of MBTI or DISC, but usually, they’re used as cringey icebreakers. Mike actually shows you how to use Belbin, Hogan, and the Big Five for what they are actually good for: predicting how a dev will react under a tight deadline or why a product manager is fixating on a specific feature. The “hands-on labs” of this course aren’t coding exercises—they are mental frameworks for reading personality types during a casual conversation without ever asking someone to take a test. That’s a superpower in a real-world project environment.
- Situational Leadership: Learning when to coach and when to get out of the way.
- Motivation 3.0: Moving past the “carrot and stick” approach to find what actually drives high-performers.
- Mentoring Frameworks: How to run a 1:1 that doesn’t feel like a status update.
- PAEI Model: Understanding the roles of Producer, Administrator, Entrepreneur, and Integrator.
Career Benefits and Job Roles
If you’re eyeing a move into a VP of Engineering, Staff Engineer, or Product Lead role, this content is your roadmap. Technical prowess will get you to the door, but these leadership nuances are what get you through it. By mastering Servant Leadership and Authentic Leadership, you’re positioning yourself as someone who can scale teams, not just codebases. This is certification prep for the “school of hard knocks,” giving you the vocabulary to explain your management decisions to stakeholders and the executive suite. It’s the difference between being a “boss” and being a leader that people would actually follow to a new startup.
Why This Course Hits Different (The Pros)
- The “No-Test” Personality Read: The ability to profile a teammate’s working style just by listening to them in a sprint planning meeting is worth the price of admission alone. It’s incredibly practical and avoids the awkwardness of formal assessments.
- Actionable Mentoring: Most people suck at mentoring. They just talk about themselves. Mike provides a clear structure for matching, boundary-setting, and ending a mentoring relationship that feels professional rather than aimless.
- Global Perspective: Learning alongside 1.6 million students from 185 countries means the insights are battle-tested across different cultures, which is vital if you’re leading a remote, distributed tech team.
The Honest Truth (The Con)
If I have one gripe, it’s that the sheer volume of frameworks (MBTI, DISC, PAEI, Belbin, Hogan, etc.) can feel like information overload at first. If you try to implement all of them in the same week, you’re going to crash. You have to treat this course like a library: learn the concepts, but pick the one or two frameworks that fit your current team’s “tech debt” and start there. Don’t try to deploy the whole suite at once.