Leadership as a Type B Introvert (2018)
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It is a fake latent variable cardiologists (who were being paid by tobacco companies) came up with to distinguish between people who had heart attacks and those who didn’t to mask the effect of smoking.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3477961/
It’s not surprising that this vocabulary persists - it’s a nice shorthand to casually describe personality. But the idea that it represents anything objective, measurable or scientific needs to be stamped out.
Our mind is more complex than simple dichotomies like this assume. We all behave like "introverts" in some situations and like "extroverts" in some situations. We constantly adapt to our environment and our responses to external stimuli are not stable in time. They also depend on our internal state like hunger, tiredness, etc. much more than these sort of classification schemes would have you believe.
This is true, but it's also true that peoples' average preferred amounts of stimulation are very different to other people's. And those averages often are quite stable.
As for introvert/extroversion: On Susan Cain's book "Quiet"
The "Galen’s Prophesy" reveals certain behavioral predispositions of children within four months old: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVJBzvaylH8&ab_channel=JillB...
The things in themselves do not know of these distinctions, and you can draw them fairly arbitrarily in ways that may or may not be helpful in making sense of the world.
Saying that there are some things that are alive, an others that are inert; and that some alive things are animalia, and others are not, and that some animalia are humans and others are not, and that some humans are Type A, and others are not.
Really, none of those distinctions are more justified than the other. It's even hard to motivate that there are things as separate. We have matter constantly moving through us, the air we breathe and the water we drink and the food we eat. We aren't strictly speaking entirely made of the same stuff we were yesterday.
It's like a wave across the water, the wave persists but the pieces of water it's made of changes over time. A bit in the same way our hands are features of our bodies, we are features on the universe. You can make the delineation to say we are separate, but only as a mental model.
Also for me it's hard to be energetic at the start of the day when meetings slowly appear on the daily agenda. The more I speak, the more confidence I get. But this is only in the case with a meet with many participants. I have no problems with 1:1 meetings.
Because that's the differentiator for me. If I have a goal I'm trying to achieve there, and the meeting is focused on that goal, it doesn't matter if I'm just a participant or not. If their isn't a clear goal, or I'm expected to be there despite not being involved in that goal (if it's an informational meeting I don't care about the information; if it's a decisional meeting I don't care or can't influence the decision; if it's a brainstorming meeting it's about something that doesn't affect me or a problem I'm not responsible to solve), it's massively draining.
Tech company CEOs are mostly engineers who switched to management.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29722441
Recommended book: Quiet by Susan Cain
The first 50 pages were doable when scrolling through. But soon it dived into how introvert people can be successful, while that success is measured in extravert ways. Like the introvert guy giving presentations about how to be successful. For me everything was "feet on top", "upsidedown". And all very much about looking successful and making an impression. It didn't do any justice to what I would want from my life, more like the opposite. I don't want to be like Bill Gates.
The only thing I took from that book was the description of three personality traits; shyness, introversion and HSP. They seem the same to other people but are very different. Shyness is about fear something might happen in response to what you do. Introversion is that you mostly gain energy in quietness, less in social situations. And HSP means that someone is sensitive and everything comes in quite hard.
Not everyone in charge has to be some hard charging loudmouth. That's basically style, not substance.
As an aside, I am deeply suspicious of people who assign letters to their personality or pronouns to themselves. We are all humans first and foremost.
"Professor Evelyn Algernon Valentine Ebsworth CBE, PhD, MA, ScD, DCL hc, FRSC, FRSE"
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/OP#Noun (def 4 at time of writing)
I've worked with two self-described "servant leaders" who claimed to give their engineers independence and then later smashed the same engineers at the first sign of defiance. I've also worked for a manager who embodied the supposed ideal of a "servant leader", who mentored me, watched out for me, and sacrificed for me. Yet he never even for a moment called himself a "servant leader", nor did anyone else call him a "servant leader" or use a lazy, feel-good on him.
I think the buzzword persists because we all want managers who cannot hurt us, belittle us, or fire us. But a positive illusion is a poor substitute for knowledge about power dynamics.
The drawback of servant leadership in the workplace (and curling parenting in childrearing) is that the servant leader quickly becomes (in my experience) an overworked single point of failure, and once they leave there is nobody else who knows how to handle the obstacles they've moved out of the way for everyone.
In the worst cases, they leave behind a group of people who have been completely isolated from the rest of the organisation, and has no idea what their purpose is and how to fit in with the rest of the world, once the leader leaves.
I would like to invent my own buzzword: transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader
- coaches people,
- connects people,
- teaches people methodical problem solving,
- explains values, principles, and other fuzzy values to aid people in making aligned decisions on their own,
- creates direct links between supply and demand (instead of deliberately making themselves a middle man),
- allows their direct reports career growth by gradually taking over leadership responsibilities,
- continuously trains their replacement (related to the above), and
- generally makes themselves redundant.
Ideally, transparent leadership has a side effect: it gives the leader more time to work on technical problems, keeping their skills fresh, which gets them more respect in the eyes of their direct reports too.
Note that servant leadership/curling parenting feels really good for the direct report/child... until it doesn't.
TL;DR: Parenting and leadership is very similar. Teach a man to fish etc.
This and the paragraphs thereafter are the most succinct description of how I feel on a daily basis that I’ve ever read.
I’m really good at being fun and high energy, so many are normally very surprised to learn that I need as much alone time as I can possibly gather to recoup.
This is why me being a traveling consultant was amazing. I could pair and present all day and recharge with a dinner by myself and some progress on side projects. That went out the window after COVID and has caused problems.
https://twitter.com/BlairBraverman/status/122221723604523417...
tldr is that it's not about aggression but rather motivation, ability to operate without someone else forging a path + initiative in strange situations
The above is not an example of a good leader. People only obey this type of leader because they are paid to obey. A true leader is someone people obey because they believe in him.
The previous sentences describe leadership in an idealistic way. In reality most leaders are sort of hybrids. Yes you work for you boss because of the pay, but if that's the only reason why you work for your boss, than your boss is an not a good leader.
No true scotsman?
There are multiple ways to reach your goals, I don't think that one of them is 'truer'than the other.
While agreeably there might be no "true" leader to be found on this world, the words mentioned above still differ in meaning and definition. Someone who leads does something else than someone who commands or bosses around. This discussion here is about that difference.
Of course you can also reach goals by just yelling and punishing people, but that would hardly qualify as leadership.
You've reached your goal yes. But you've made enemies. and your overarching goals are at risk.
Actual leaders attract people who want to grow both professionally and as persons, and who would do things because they want to support the company, their collegues or their superiors.
In reality it is usually some mix of both, sure, but it is known for quite a while that positive consequences are a better motivator than punishment.
An accidentally popular product with its own momentum can survive for awhile with even atrocious leadership and often other levels of management can make up for or mask the abilities of a CEO
If my project fails I like it rather to fail with me being a good leader than ot failing with me being a bad leader. My experience tells me that projects with good leaders fail less often than those with bad leaders or bosses — all while being 1000% more pleasant to spend your time with.
Being a good leader is not something you do purely for the money, ot is something you do, because it fulfils you and allows you to look back and not feel like you wasted time and energy on a pile of burning garbage.that was a bad idea to begin with.
I mean I'm not going to work for zero pay right? No leader can gain followers without some kind of bribe (aka salary) as well. The bribe gives the leader flexibility to overrule the employee. But if certain lines are crossed it becomes a problem.
Frankly, almost no grown adult wants an emotionally stunted partner who got that way because they never came to grips with their emotions; few people want to deal with childish coping mechanisms from a grown adult.
First off I want to emphasize I agree with this statement. I don't look at the world in an idealistic way. So let's make sure we're on the same page about this. Women are less empathetic and understanding about men than men are about women and this is a generality that is very very true. This entire narrative of the man as a bumbling buffoon trying to understand this mysterious creature called a woman is a false narrative. Women are by far significantly MORE ignorant about how men think, but women in general just don't care as much; hence why you see men coming up with deep behavioral theories about women like "friendzoning" and the like while women dismiss men as muscular simpletons with penises as brains all the while forgetting the fact that men are responsible for the majority of civilization and technology. Either way, I don't have any ire against the behavioral dichotomy between sexes, it's just nature.
>Could it be that your idea of a boss is how you'd think the world should work, but necessarily not how it does.
I don't think I'm biased. I've worked with leaders who I like and want to succeed. So from experience I've seen it happen. That already literally proves that the world can work this way.
Logically as well, employees do their best work when they love their work, if I hate my work and I hate my boss... well I'm only going to do the minimal work to keep him happy. Any other shit that happens I'm sweeping under the rug.
Typical example: If I code review an ass holes code and I notice a fatal bug, I'm going to approve it to fuck that ass hole over. Then I'll claim it's my fault for not noticing it during review and the ass hole will get blamed for sloppy code either way.
I'm not sure what makes you think the world works that way. From my experience... it doesn't at all. Bosses who do this in my experience literally have to be paying their employees pure gold. In the majority of the software world, however, developers can easily leave and find a job with a better boss.
I'm thinking either you're a manager who's paying people 600k salaries or you're an employee receiving that salary. If the salary isn't that high and if you're a manager, you'll note the attrition rate for your team is astronomical. Probably 3x other teams.... unless the entire company has this shitty culture then the attrition rate for the company is huge. If you're an employee and not getting 500k, well... leave now is my advice.
I've also seen bosses who are assholes while managing to pay their employees low salaries. This only happens when most of the employees are junior, in the sense that this is their first or second job and don't know any better. Guys who've been around much longer know the difference.