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Comment by keeptrying | Hacker News Reader

Relentlessly upping a teams standards in everything - strategy, execution, effort etc, tires out everyone on that team. But that’s usually what you need to win or succeed in a competitive system.

People who push for this will always be called assholes because they force team members to stretch themselves which is never a comfortable proposition.

The corollary to this is that to win by not being an asshole, find something that is needed/wanted but no one else does or that which you can do 10x better than everyone else. Without competition you won’t need to push you or your team that hard.

(The only catch with having no competition, is that, having no competition will slow down the rate at which you can improve or stop all improvement in most people.)

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I think raising standards or changing things is different from being an asshole. Having dealt with this in a big way recently, it's very much on my mind.

It's entirely possible to say "we need to work harder, or take a risk, or be bold" while understanding where your colleagues are at in terms of what they need to do that, or what has or hasn't been communicated to them about how that will happen, or how things have been done in the past to change them.

Too often bad management or administration is justified by saying "well things needed change" or "things needed to be shaken up." There's a way to implement that while bringing others on board, giving credit where things are due, etc.

Put another way, it's easy to ruthlessly level an organization and rebuild it in the way you want to if you have the power to do that, but it doesn't mean the fairy tale you tell yourself about it having been necessary is actually true. More often than not you're just rationalizing away being inhumane and destructive, and probably even losing out on even better possibilities in the process.

>It's entirely possible to say "we need to work harder, or take a risk, or be bold" while understanding where your colleagues are at in terms of what they need to do that, or what has or hasn't been communicated to them about how that will happen, or how things have been done in the past to change them.

Great leaders, in my experience, haven't asked these questions or pushed performance in this way - they led their reports through soft management to come to the conclusion that it was necessary to increase performance. They framed questions that led people to the conclusions they had already made. Of course, this also requires that the reports are capable enough of being led in the right direction.

There’s no soft way to say - “you’re not good. You need to get better.”

It is hurtful and painful to hear however put.

> People who push for this will always be called assholes because they force team members to stretch themselves

...so no, I don't plan to stop screaming at our kid's little league team. You'd understand that if you'd ever won anything, loser.

> will always be called assholes

I think “asshole” has too many different meanings, it makes the discussion difficult in a way.

Michael Jordan was an ‘asshole’ in that he was harsh and impolite, and arguably most people don’t care if elite athletes or top level professionals are harsh and impolite. Michael Jordan’s teammates seemed pretty happy to have him being harsh and impolite.

That’s pretty different from Uber’s former CEO being a asshole because of utter lack of morality and illegal behaviors, or Elon Musk’s lack of restraint and common sense.

Putting everything under the ‘asshole’ umbrella makes it look like Michael Jordan was on the same plane as Travis Kalanick, which would be a mistake.

> Relentlessly upping a teams standards in everything - strategy, execution, effort etc, tires out everyone on that team. But that’s usually what you need to win or succeed in a competitive system.

Agreed.

> People who push for this will always be called assholes because they force team members to stretch themselves which is never a comfortable proposition.

The biggest problem with this is that leadership will inevitably realize that some of his team is just not capable of doing better, and he can't get rid of them, so he focuses his attention on those that are capable of upping their skills and doubles down on it. Scottie Pippen got it worse than the guys at the bottom of the roster. Put yourself in Scottie's shoes -- you're better than everyone except one person, and yet you're treated the worst. Scottie Morale quickly goes to shit.

It happens with tech teams, too. Bad hires kill companies because they cause assholes to act inequitably, driving the best of their supporting cast away.

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