Absentee leadership – the most common type of incompetent leader | Hacker News Reader

Absentee leadership – the most common type of incompetent leader

hbr.org

32 pointsokl7 comments

This article and others like it reappear on HN every few months, and that’s a good thing. Absentee leadership is a big problem, especially in tech, where managers have been led to believe that the best way to lead engineers is to “leave them alone.” Instead that should be, “leave them alone when they need to work, but provide structure and support when necessary.”

There’s a similar though different problem in tech, where organizations are kept very flat in the hopes that leadership will simply “emerge.” Sometimes a staff engineer will be unofficially implied as the team leader, but without any actual management duties nor reporting lines. It’s a way for a company to have their cake and eat it, and it ends predictably.

Ahhh yeah. The "leave them alone" approach is only really suitable after a person has already demonstrated both competence and their own self direction / initiative.

If they're not yet at that stage, leaving them alone will generally make things worse (with a poor outcome) rather than better. :(

This is a very short book that explains the right approach pretty well, and seems based on the reality of how most people work, rather than theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager

I’ve been at a few companies that expect leaders to emerge and it always goes terribly. Certain personality types try to assume those leadership roles and they tend to be the last people you want as leaders. And they tend to stop doing the grunt work, prompting the more productive workers to fill the gaps. Those productive workers become demoralized and wind up leaving, and the team hollows out.

Like anything, it's a balance. I've seen plenty of strong engineers leave because they want to spend their time solving hard technical problems rather than talking about career trajectory, writing and revising OKRs, and talking about how they're feeling and their last vacation.

I worked with a kind gentleman from a previous startup who turned me to HBR’s email subscriptions on management. I think they’re pretty good as another source of reading for leadership.

Now any time I read HBR I think about his thoughtfulness and try to recommend it to others.

Do you mean "Management tip of the day" from https://hbr.org/email-newsletters ?

Yep! If I remember correctly, they lead into longer reading sessions, but the synopsises usually give you something interesting to think about, too.

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