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Comment by freddyc | Hacker News Reader

Over the years a test I've often used is asking "how does this person respond to being challenged/questioned?" A great leader tends to embrace the fact that someone is asking "why" and uses it as an opportunity to learn and potentially convert the questioning party (if they're questioning something in the first place, then you haven't nailed it 100%). A weak leader who doesn't have confidence in their abilities sees the challenge as a personal attack and reacts in a knee-jerk fashion (often, though not always, resulting in a termination). If you can't reconcile differing opinions and convert those with opposing views to you then you're doomed as a leader and odds are your company/team will experience high turnover.

Obviously there's a whole range of other traits that make great leaders, but I've found people that fail this test are almost always terrible leaders who others don't want to work for.

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I often see the opposite effect -- immature people who challenge leaders for the sake of challenging them (perhaps to perform this test, perhaps because they want to appear smarter than their managers, perhaps for other reasons). They ask irrelevant questions, slow everything down, and have little intuition about what's important to the business.

Most of these terminations I've seen haven't been about treating being challenged as a personal attack. They've been about getting smug weenies out of the organization so people can actually do their work.

There's a balance here. I had a manager at Google who once said the people who were terminated at Google were those who "question too much and code too little", i.e. you can always question your leaders, but you have to be willing to buckle down and do the work if their answers are reasonable.

I don't think there's anything wrong with questioning a leaders' decisions, but if you're doing it all the time, you really ought to consider whether you should be at that organization at all. It's like a therapist friend said about one of my (poor) dating choices once: "Look, either you trust her or you don't, but if you're constantly second-guessing her, you ought to evaluate whether this is a relationship you want to be in or not. It's not fair to her, and it's not fair to you." Same applies to corporations: ultimately you either trust your leaders or you don't, and if you don't you should do both yourself and the organization the favor of finding one you do trust.

Wow this is a really good comment. Great analogy with relationships and all.

Sometimes I think people naturally reflect who they are; i.e. a thief will naturally be aware/paranoid of other thieves snooping around his stuff. So I guess someone with trust issues probably sees himself as unfaithful?

I would be wary about blatant comments like this. One can be paranoid because they have had a history of being abused intimately within one's own personal life, or stolen from, or have grown up in a neighbourhood with a lot of crime, or have a mental illness such as PTSD, Schizophrenia, anxiety, etc. There are a variety of reasons someone has trust issues, and only one of them is "because they can't be trusted".

My paranoia comes from reading too many articles online about government spying and dishonest police/prosecutors. It's gotten a little better since I started markings a point of sticking my head or of our echo chamber occasionally.

We got a new junior developer about a year ago. He acted exactly as you described. I don't consider myself as a superstar dev but I do know a thing or two. So the guy questioned every thing I did for months. At first I welcomed the challenge because it forced me to look up things I haven't been 100% sure about. But when months went by the questions got more and more irrelevant to the work he was doing. He was asking questions for the sake of questioning me not for the answers.

I am friends with the CEO of a successful software company thats been around for ten years with a few hundred mil in funding (not just a wannabe) and a couple hundred devs. We are friends personally and don't overlap in work at all but he told me that in his company "I have an open door policy and I listen to everyone. It's ultimately beneficial to work that way. Some people come into my office every week, some once a year, and some come in about every 4 months to give feedback. I listen to the people who come in every 4 months and ignore everyone else."

and I am glad you brought up this point. To me, I'm a pretty introverted person and once was put in a leadership position a bit reluctantly. I didn't feel unconfident about the technical capabilities, just exuding the charisma and extroversion people expect from leaders. I got solid feedback, but the avalanche of horrible unconstructive criticism and just pushing me to my limits for no apparent reason except to try to frustrate me really made me have to draw the line between embracing conflict and standing up for yourself. Also interestingly enough, the most criticism came from people I did not work directly over or with or under, but other people surrounding the situation, but still with alot of influence. With so much dialogue about say for example leaders in Silicon Valley, and creating a public discussion amongst the tech industry about almost every decision a well known leader makes in their company, it makes me wonder who much of the criticism is perceived and created by the outside looking in versus the the actual team working under the leader, as I experienced a microcosm of this scenario myself.

It turns out when you stand up for yourself in cases where you really feel the feedback and composed conflict is out of line and destructive, that is when people begin to respect and trust you. Still, it was frustrating. It was also a very political role with non developers, and I have made sure if I ever go into a leadership position again, it won't be with no technical people. Yes, software developers can have the same mentality, but overall there's alot more objective ability to define and measure how much time someone is putting into creating constructive things versus composing destruction for the sake of challenging leadership or protecting their own entrenched interests.

Theres a fine line between embracing everyone's feedback and being a complete pushover and letting other people steamroll you based on their own motivations. Ultimately, I believe sometimes the best leaders make controversial decisions and stick to them regardless of what other people think, and ultimately the people who work under those people are people who have observed their decisions tend to lead to good outcomes, and they acknowledge the objective positive feedback loop from working under a person like this over the masses criticism of someone who does not please everybody.

Remind me of this quote from Meditations:

>If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.

Since you're quoting from Meditations, I hope you will entertain me if I go on a tangent. I find Meditations too disorganized to learn from it, and contextualize what it says. Do you have any advice?

I think of Meditations like a daily journal or notebook. It's one of the few books I keep around my desk and occasionally just flip to a random page and read. Individual passages have a lot of meaning so often I'll isolate one and really think about it or talk to my wife about it for a while.

In general, though, I agree it's not very organized or easy to read. If you're looking for a better entry into stoicism I'd suggest A Guide to a Good Life[1]. It's a structured overview of stoicism with straight forward advice on actually using stoic ideas in your own life.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195...

Put differently: leaders are comfortable with conflict, and know how to resolve it when it arises. Silencing it doesn't resolve it.

This requires good management skills, good listening skills, and problem-solving skills.

Great leaders will make sure not only to be comfortable with conflict, but to make the their whole team knows this fact, so they come forward.

Funnily, in my experience the people that say "diversity results in better products and decision-making" (dominant view today) focus on the wrong thing, and don't realize how important conflict is, or that conflict is what leads to better decision-making. Maybe communication and leadership should be taught in schools? Certainly in universities. More great leaders probably means less need for bloated middle management too.

Great comment, only tweak I would suggest is replacing "conflict" with "peer review" in terms of language, as I think people are more comfortable with that.

I'm learning as a leader that I am reluctant to accept a proposal unless it has been thoroughly peer reviewed for gaps or weakness, and if there is some disagreement about the approach, then great let me hear that to. Rigorous peer review is very healthy, the trick is to get people to attack the proposal and not the proposer ;-)

I struggle with this. My reaction to being challenged, even before finding myself in a leadership role, is always the knee jerk that you describe. After some reflection, often quite quickly once I can stop and think about the matter, I revert to your other scenario.

I've been trying to get myself to a place where even if I'm reacting in a knee jerk fashion that at least I'm keeping it to myself but man, it's hard to overcome something that's effectively instinctual.

It might be a sign for you being too ego-centric in general. It could also be completely unrelated, though.

But there definitely seems to be some kind of fear at the root of that.

In my case I believe it's a little bit of both, or one of the two managing to manifest as the other.

Sidenote: Mindfulness (AKA vipassana or insight) meditation can give you that gap between feeling something, an emotion in this case, and responding to it. It's potentially useful for a lot of usecases - the NHS have been offering mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for a while now - but what you're talking about sounds very relevant!

Thanks I will look into this

The knee-jerk reaction you are talking about is what is consider by some scholars as an Ontological Functional Constraints [1].

The constraint is considered deadly for the effective exercise of leadership. The constrains can however be removed or at least relaxed in a reliable way. :)

1). https://ssrn.com/abstract=1392406

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