Clear and Present Leadership
blog.davidtate.org
blog.davidtate.org
When I was younger myself, I sort of assumed competence on the part of everyone. The older I get the more I see that people around me (as well as myself) don't really know much about anything and don't care to know. This includes "leadership" and, as painful as it is to say, myself.
Coincidentally, the article doesn't mention "honesty" even once. I've found honesty to be the best policy. I can't _always_ be honest when I lead (everyone would quit and go into depression if I were perfectly honest), but I try to minimize the blind spots and somewhat accurately give people a sense of difficulties and tradeoffs without making the situation look as hopeless as it usually looks to me when running "hard" projects. That way, if they care at all, they'll steer things in the right direction on their own, and focus on the right things.
I'm in my mid-40's though, so I sort of assume (knowingly incorrectly) people around me think like I do, and bullshit doesn't work in the long term.
That is, "The people at the top don't know what they are doing."
For IC's and other people actually doing most of the work, they interpret this as base incompetence on the part of leadership. It's certainly fair to say that there is a lot of incompetency at the top. However, even for very competent senior leaders it's often completely unclear how to get from "Here" to "There" because the organization may not be positioned to actually get there.
It's an extension of the technical debt problem, what made you successful in the past may not be what makes you successful in the future - and as a senior leader, it's your job to help the organization make that transition. The costs/risks to getting "There" might be considered impractical or devastating to the current organization. You can see this with any major company that fails to capture some huge new market.
On one hand you want to take care of your people, and a complete pivot with a 20,000 person organization might see huge layoffs or "restructuring." Is doing that, not knowing if it's going to work in the long run the right plan? We praise those who made the right pivots, but forget those who mistimed them, so corporate survivorship is real - and it's not about pure genius competence.
Now, try and communicate all of that to everyone on the team, considering all of the market dynamics, funding personnel issues etc... for context, and it's just not something that is feasible to communicate with everyone in a way that doesn't totally spook the whole organization.
That said, it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. Communicating WHY smaller decisions are made and what the assumptions and context behind them are made is something feasible at some levels generally. This is where competence and maturity do play a huge role, and where great leaders distinguish themselves.
Besides not forgetting the word “know” make sure that you are actually prepared to honestly listen and act on what people tell you. I hear this phrase quite a bit but when you tell them how to help they promptly ignore it because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
A lot of today’s management phrases are totally empty and just sound good without any meaning. “Let me challenge that assumption” or “but what if we had an anti-gravity drive?” are fashionable phrases that sound insightful to the person saying them but really aren’t.
What does this one mean? I know you said you think they're meaningless, but in what context is this one used?
They're possibly asking you the second question because they have context that you do not about the first, or they have conflicting advice from another expert on the first question. It may not be possible to pass on that context, for example for reasons of time or security, but they want your answer to the second question anyway.
It's reasonable to answer the second without the first.
I've been an Individual Contributor, and a Manager, and am back to being an IC.
I've been on both sides of this conversation.
One of the benefits of being a manager is being able to see the forest from the trees while your team members may be so focused on their tasks they do not see the big picture.
Sure, sometimes the answer to "but what if it was possible?" if just "it's not."
But a lot of times, the good managers I've had would propose an approach to MAKING it possible that I just simply didn't see. And I've been able to do the same in their shoes.
Sometimes it requires a paradigm shift -
Q: "How do we get to the other town faster?"
A: "The horses are running as fast as they can"
Q: "What if we found a faster horse?" (e.g. a car)
But honestly in day to day office culture it rarely needs to be so revolutionary -
Q: "Could we finish the project faster if Bill's team helped us?"
A: "No, it's not possible. Bill's team said they are completely swamped"
<Goes off to do some managerial work>
Q: "Okay, I've chatted to Bill, and his team is fully available to help us finish the project."
I'll leave you with this "Expert" saying that something is simply not possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
And an actual expert showing how it can be done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7MIJP90biM
At a more granular level, in a different project, the answer to "how do we develop this faster" was "lose these requirements, and just use AWS services for those". Less work in total.
It's an example of hitting the limit of a certain technology, saying any further improvements are "impossible", while not recognizing that a "better horse" might just not be a horse at all.
It's not a metaphor for faster project delivery, but a meaningful technological difference that someone may not be able to see.
* We need Bob, but Bob is busy working on the other thing -> but what if Bob wants to work on this and this thing is more important. I'll ask him.
* We would need at least 32 TB RAM to process this in-memory -> okay, looks like we're going to GCP with some big requests then
* We can't scale like that in the datacenter (the capital costs are too high) and we don't have the time to move to the cloud -> I can find you the time.
* We can't fix that bug, it would cause downtime -> okay, tell me when you want that downtime. How much do you want?
* They won't sell us their data -> we can buy the company itself.
Almost everything except natural laws are mutable.
EDIT: Sadly, chris, I am rate-limited but we actually did take all the actions on the right. That isn't to say someone can idiotically offer these things when they aren't an option, but asking the question does often have value.
Start helping, then ask what else you could help with
An important thing we can actually do to help is think about what we can do to help and not wait to be told that. It’s hard, especially when your team grows, but it’s where you earn your team’s trust the most.
I worked for a VP who got upset if he didn't get questions, or requests when he asked, but he never answered any of them in the past and somehow he never understood that those two were related and by the time he wanted to do it he had established the culture and it was impenetrable.
A real request for help often implies things are going wrong, and tends to involve a lot of work, so the emotional reaction will tend to be negative.
This goes back to what you're saying. You need to actually be ready to listen, analyze, and present actionable plans. There's a lot of management like Homer Simpson who just buys everyone hammocks and parrots one liners.
A lot of people tell you things, just to talk about them. They don't want advice, they don't want you to problem solve.
Let me know how I can help is appropriate to figure out if they want help and if they want it from you.
On the nose.
Amazed by how many leaders that I've worked under that can't seem to set direction. That's all - communicate what's important, what's going to make the company differentiate itself, and then allow the smart folks you have hired to set their priorities accordingly, execute, and then adjust where needed (but sparingly).
It wasn’t a bad article, but in my head I was hearing “danger, danger, danger!”
Does it. Does it really.
"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."
Either way, the reader extracts extra layers of meaning at this point. Remember all that stuff in school about literature and how to read beyond the literal, that HN tends to ignore in favour of pretending to be rational cyborgs? It was for this sort of thing.
You missed the possible original point of the author, and my point as well. On the plus side, this comment could well have been a learning experience for you, so you should be happy with it.
your rebuttal OTOH is overboard, deserving of the downvotes IMHO. sometimes you just have to make your point and take your licks.
Maybe this is something that is only visible for you because of your particular situation (e.g. someone always uses that phrase)?
To be honest, I’m more bothered by the lack of a question mark though.
It's like saying you're on your own and if anything goes wrong, don't tell me I didn't offer to help.
Or the worst phrase ever: "let me know if you have any questions" (often following a barrage of gibberish empty talk). Kind of like saying if you have no questions then you totally agree with my poor vision/leadership.
`The leader is aware of her staff as complete human beings and has empathy towards them.`
Reinforcing the stereotype that female is the emphasising gender.
The rest of the article is gender free from what I can see.
But could you elaborate on the expression "female is the emphasizing gender"? My search skills failed me here.
"Avoid a having a hard conversation because of how uncomfortable it is, or fear for how poorly it can go."
There's a certain number of people in any crowd who get lost in the weeds, regardless of 'sides'.