A style of leadership that is direct and forceful, yet also respectful (2023)
respectfulleadership.substack.com
respectfulleadership.substack.com
In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.
Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more.
That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.
If you're a manager and the employee can't give you anything but complete and utter capitulation to satisfy you, you're not taking to them, you're just making yourself feel better about disliking them
When you combine this with a difference in authority, as it is in this situation, it's even worse to behave this way. If this person was a peer and wasn't forced to sit through this "meeting" I can imagine they would have hung up about 20% through it.
He treated his subordinate like a child and didn't even handle it well in that context. Even in the situation where the employee was is wrong it reflects poorly on the manager. It's wild to be bragging about it on the internet. Being the authority figure means you are expected to be the adult in the room and understand the other person even when they lack the words to express themselves. That's why you're paid the big bucks.
If Jerry was not willing to accept that responsibility, then him quitting would be the ideal outcome anyway, so I understand why the manager was pushing him like this.
OTOH the manager should have been smarter about acknowledging Jerry's thinking (technically Bermuda is not in the Caribbean) and in explaining why they needed to overrule that (vacationers searching for Caribbean destinations mostly want to see listings for Bermuda). Their messaging was pretty disempowering to Jerry, kind of like saying "shut up code monkey, dance when the product team tells you to".
> every team member is treated as an adult
Adults take responsibility for their own actions. If someone is lying like this and being difficult to work with you want them to either get it together or leave. It's not about saving their feelings or letting them save face anymore. Let them leave. You can replace Jerry, and you'd rather he leave than the people who aren't being difficult.
But the world doesn't have time for people who need to "save face". That is a personal problem that needs to be figured out off company time.
Sales is often deceptive. I think that's why the author was so defensive, notably about "honesty".
While Bermuda not being part of the Caribbean might be true…it’s really not a valid point in this circumstance. It was an apparent dev assumption that this level of precision was desired even if it wasn’t requested or its absence as a requirement was a mistake. When it was reported as a bug, that should have prompted the developer to clarify with the PM the OG requirement so they were both on the same page. He didn’t, he assumed she was wrong…apparently twice.
The PM probably understood that to their lay users the terms “Bermuda”, “Caribbean”, and “Islands” all have a degree of marketing relevance to each other (There is a reason why you might dumb down search results for something like that). Judging by what was information given in the story, apparently dumbed down search results was known and required in the past.
Not sure there is any “right” way to gently coach an employee that disregarded proper protocol and requirements, lied about it, blamed a colleague, and initially refused to accept responsibility when it was brought to their attention. That would be damn frustrating. I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer. It least in my opinion.
I’ve been in the business a long time in multiple roles up to senior leadership. I am at the sunset of my career and found a lovely tech role where I happily don’t have to manage anyone but myself and it’s glorious. In all that time I have encountered my fair share of the Jerry types in the last almost 40 years so I am probably jaded and know the frustration.
Edit: Sure enough, look at your comments. Elon, Tesla, Musk, Trump, Trump. Hilarious + predictable.
Yeah, that is a tell that the manager is being unreasonable. What are the odds that every portion of this sits with the developer? Close to 0. That isn't how miscommunications generally happen. But it is a pattern that turns up when borderline abusive people report their interactions on the internet [0]. I don't trust this paraphrase of what Jerry was saying at all. It seems much more likely he led with something reasonable "Bermuda isn't in the Caribbean and we made a decision in the past to exclude Caribbean deals when that sort of search happens" then the manager fumbled the conversation in follow-up and managed to make it weird.
Though it does seem like the developer was making mistakes; I've seen scenes play out that I'd rate as similar. Part of the dev's job is to manage their manager when that manager is struggling. In this case the manager seems to have gotten stuck in the mindset of being a big monkey and the response to that is to let them monkey out peacefully and not make a fuss.
It could have been worse; but this looks like bad-to-average leadership on display.
[0] Big red flags in the "I wasn't sure he was working in good faith" and "Maybe he was feeling lazy" quote with no evidence. We're likely seeing misreported conversation; the manager doesn't understand what is going on conversationally if he got to that mindset in this sort of situation. What else did he get wrong?
When I managed technical people I used to describe the challenge to management folks outside of tech that in tech management you are managing a group of people where everyone is absolutely convinced that they are smarter than everyone else around them. Often not only just smarter but their other colleagues are bumbling idiots.
So my bias from experience is that this dev was wrong, because I have been through very similar scenarios with similar Jerry’s. I spent 2 decades managing engineers, but haven’t for a decade so I acknowledge that times change and perhaps stroking fragile egos is a management necessity in 2025 where it wasn’t in 2015. I also had the benefit of supportive executive leadership that allowed me to quickly cycle out those personalities like “Jerry” to build a team where even if folks were convinced they were smarter than their peers, they would at least communicate with each and be respectful of the entire team’s contribution that allowed us to minimize source issues like was described in this story.
There are engineers convinced that they are smarter than everyone else but that isn't what is happening in this vignette at all. Even with my grave concerns about how accurate the reporting is of what he said, half the story is the reportee trying to figure out what he's done wrong and how to stop his manager from beating him with a rhetorical stick. That isn't the action of a man convinced he is the smartest guy in the room. But it is the reporting of a manger who believes beating someone else with a rhetorical stick makes him look good.
I'm not even saying this guy is a bad leader overall; at least he isn't being especially passive aggressive and this doesn't say anything about him at his day-to-day. But if he understood what attitudes and behaviours he was displaying in this story he wouldn't have been so keen to publish it. People who've had to deal with abusive people in power positions are going to have alarm bells going off reading this. It looks like someone lying to themselves and the reader in order to feel good about wielding power. Although, reading charitably, it might just be ignorance and low-grade communication ability.
It’s the underlying cause though. According to what was written, Jerry made an assumption without any real investigation, didn't clarify the problem by engaging in communication to Sonya, argued his “superior” knowledge because of his assumption of her mistake, then apparently was dismissive again after Sonya apparently developed enough detail to escalate the problem to the leader who had to investigate and fix the issue himself.
Remove the Jerry’s arrogance all the way to the point of that rhetorical stick is there even a blog post here? Perhaps frustrated leadership is the effect, but Jerry’s poor attitude, handling, and arrogance is damn sure the cause.
There is scant evidence that it is the underlying cause. The manager didn't do his due diligence in figuring out what the cause was; I repeat myself but it looks suspiciously like he's disregarded whatever Jerry actually said, substituted a strawman and dealt with that strawman harshly.
At no point did Jerry assert superior knowledge. He should probably have talked to Sonia... but that isn't something that the manager seems to have picked up on. That is something that manager should have done, in fact, which is prompt the developer and Sonia to talk to each other. That seems like a much more reasonable underlying cause of problems than arrogance; a relatively minor mistake in failing to check what the ticket raiser wanted on a call when the ticket didn't seem plausible. If the manager had suggested that at any point he'd get a free mark for having done some good managing.
> Remove the Jerry’s arrogance all the way to the point of that rhetorical stick is there even a blog post here?
My guess is that is why it ended up being flagged; there isn't really a blog post here that is good to read. The post is basically Jerry mishandles a ticket in a minor way and his manager responds by melting down, mishandling the situation and making Jerry eat the heat for that in a style that looks mildly abusive. But the manager doesn't know what respectful communication actually looks like so he posted it expecting a warm response. Sure, Jerry made mistakes here but it isn't the elephant in the room.
If the manager had good communication skills he could have resolved this by articulating to Jerry some basic & polite actionable feedback instead of the display we actually got in the blog. There wasn't enough legwork done to justify a hard conversation.
You can be direct and respectful, but this was not respectful, this was just aggressive.
Also, this dynamic is one of a boss to employee, not of a relationship peer. The boss in this instance needs to communicate something very clearly: "This is a fire-able offense if this keeps happening." Is it better in this instance to be more aggressive?
The problem with that phrase is it is trivially untrue - the person is listening to him. It would be like me saying "you're not reading what I'm writing"; you are reading it. You might not understand it, you might not agree with it, maybe the writing is even improper in some way. But you can't write a response to it if you didn't read it. The concern he's raising isn't a real one and Jerry can't address it because he's already listening and he has no control over how his manager feels about said manager's misconceptions.
You'll notice that Jerry had to spend a few rounds of begging and pleading to figure out he needs to say "Yes, I will be accurate and careful from now on, so you can trust what I say. If I have a concern, I will raise it with you directly and honestly" to get through this and end the encounter. There are two things to note here:
1) Manager should have led with this if that is what he wanted. Not "I’m worried you’re not listening to me" but "To make sure you've heard what I've said, could you please repeat back in your own words".
2) The manager shouldn't be asking for Jerry to repeat stuff back to him in that way in the normal course of events, it is somewhat unprofessional/a stupid power play. Nothing Jerry is committing to in that sentence is a real change in behaviour. He was probably already trying to be accurate and trustworthy. He didn't realise there were any concerns here until his manager exploded. Changes in behaviour would be something like "There was a conflict between X and Y, in this instance I prioritised X. Next time I will prioritise Y." One of the issues is the manager did such a bad job of steelmanning and drawing out Jerry's reasoning behind the behaviour we can't tell what he did wrong. Many of the accusations ("attitude problem", "didn't like Jerry's tone", "not working in good faith", etc) are absurd and ungrounded. In my opinion we can't really figure out what Jerry's mistake was from the article; Manager wanted him to write certain code, he wouldn't because [reasons] and we aren't being told in any depth what [reasons] were. They may have been bad [reasons] but the manager should be interrogating and dealing with them instead of complaining about being "listened to".
"I feel like you aren't listening to me" happens to be a pretty classic phrase used by people who are inarticulate by the way. They can't get a message across and they don't think to look at their own communication to find the problem; but they know that they can't accuse the other person of being too stupid to understand (the other classic :[ ). So the problem becomes that somehow the other person just isn't listening.
The obvious, glaring issue of broken dynamics between product and devs is never taken care of nor addressed, and it seems inevitable the manager's actions create resentment towards product by the dev, and a "us vs then" culture.
Good leaders always see dynamics and patterns, rather than "John is good and Betty is bad".
Doubly so that the author published this as a rebuttal to a well thought out counter point. You’ve got to question the whole concept of this blog when the author is posting Ls like this and thinking it’s a W
The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? Four hours were apparently an underestimate anyway because it took the author "several hours" to fix it.
I agree Jerry did a stupid thing too by not testing the queries properly against the previously deployed version of the code. He works remotely so he didn't interact with Sonia enough to take her more seriously. But instead of telling him that so that he can learn, this guy starts assigning him motives and patronizing him, and then pats himself on the back for being a good dad^H^H^H manager who doesn't cuss?
Story has holes and the cunt is insufferable.
Edit: The author is also the one who submitted this here, and he seems to submit every article from his blog. There are other articles in there like this one about how he deals with people. After reading some of them, all I can say is that the word "cunt" is insufficient to describe him.
> The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it?
I think he meant that if the ticket was dismissed in a much shorter time than the allotted then it also needs a good reason.
I also believe a bug ticket saying “this shouldn’t happen” is not solved until until “this” no longer happens or everyone involved agrees that it’s okay for it to happen.
This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss.
This isn't to say Jerry didn't screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager's authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others' needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It's a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.
But no, author never gives in to anger...
Not sure if the problem is fixed though. What are the reasons for thinking the bug was no big deal. It may be hard to get the truth. Some people lie because they need a job and want to keep it. Maybe he has an KPI he needs to keep. Closing the bug as no issue would help a feature based KPI or OKR.
Also need to address culture. It should be like a "door desk" (Infamous Amazon cultural thing!) level thing that quality is first.
You delay the feature work to ensure quality and investigate bugs. Their manager accepts a feature slips because the team fixes bugs.
Not all bugs (you need triage) but definitely the ones that cause real issues for customers. Someone (QA and dev together) do an impact assessment. Understand how bad that bug is.
Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn't have the decency to be embarrassed.
Many aspect of modern society now does this, from churches to non-profits to politics to business. Just look at the salaries of the people running these organizations and how they have grown when compared to their employees.
Decades ago, at least these "CEOs" would attempt to think of society and employees before making decisions. Now it comes down to "how much can I get and screw everyone else".