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Comment by jnovek | Hacker News Reader

“Leadership”, whether you like the LinkedIn-ism or not (I also think it’s stupid), generally refers to upper management, not people management.

At my startup, my team reached a headcount of ~30 and I had to design process to keep things moving. Getting a bunch of disparate parts in even a 100 person company to produce the artifacts needed to create software is a massive undertaking that doesn’t involve people management at all. The two responsibilities can be completely divorced from each other if you want.

I never thought I’d be dusting off those skills again because I do strictly IC work now, but I’m now using them every day. It feels (a subjective term, which the author used as well) like when I was in “leadership”.

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Leadership is a mutual influence process that happens outside formal authority. It’s not a corporate title or rung on a ladder. If one is a leader, that’s a status informally conveyed by the leader’s voluntary followers.

These are different definitions of the same term. Yes, “leadership” is a stupid word to co-opt, but it’s been used this way for 20+ years and I suspect that you know what the author means.

There’s a very interesting conversation here that apparently HN doesn’t want to have today about how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans, I don’t know why we’re hung up on semantics.

> how LLMs seem to respond to the same sorts of process structures as humans

Pattern recognition to be sure, and structured communication conveyed with proper contextualization and emphasis, are common to both humans and LLMs. (at least if you want to get anything done)

Yep a leader is simply someone people follow.

That’s it. That’s all it is. All the books, leadership courses, etc. are lipstick on that pig. I suppose it can happen, but I’ve never seen someone who is a terrible leader educate themselves into being a great one. It’s pretty close to a natural skill you can build on and develop.

The term has been usurped by the usual suspects, but the definition is still the same on the ground.

LLMs require zero leadership skills. They do require strong management skillsets. These are not remotely the same thing.

VOLUNTARILY follow. That part’s crucial.

Your manager isn’t a leader simply by nature of being a manager because your followership isn’t voluntary.

And there’s other crucial parts of leadership, mainly having a vision and motivating people to that vision.

I think at some level that "following" bit requires a certain sacrifice or loss of autonomy that people don't strictly have to suffer. And good leaders tend to be able to get people to accept that willingly without needing to invoke authority. An LLM is making no sacrifice, they don't value autonomy so there is no leadership.

Exactly. For example, you can be the leader of an open source project.

I think of leadership as distinct from management. Importantly, I think you can be in a position of leadership without needing to be in a position of management.

Management requires direct reports: you make decisions which directly impact the careers of other people.

Leadership can be more subtle than that. You can influence people without needing to directly manage them.

John Carmack at Facebook/Meta is a great example. He was an IC - they had to invent a new level of the IC ladder for him! Definitely a leader, not a manager (at that company).

(Amusingly, I got to attend some "leadership" classes at Stanford a while ago. My main takeaway was that the way to create leaders is to put a bunch of people in a room and tell them that they're "leaders" until they start to believe it.)

Being picky with words, you can be a manager of something other than people, it is the same broad skillset. Managing people has a few skills that are people-specific, obviously. But you can manage servers, manage widgets, etc.

Which makes it clearly distinct from leadership, because it is very hard to lead something that isn't alive. It is hard to lead a server.

… or at least it always used to be hard to ‘lead’ a server.

But now that the server has an agentic interface maybe that is changing.

Leaders lead. Managers manage. It is something you do, rather than your title.

Some leaders are also great managers. Some managers are also great leaders.

But not all managers are leaders.

The best distinction I have heard for ‘leadership’ vs ‘management’ is that you manage things but you lead people.

So you can manage a project or a budget or a facility or an office or a process. But if you need to get people to do things, that requires leading not managing.

The problem with applying this to an AI agent is that it is a thing that thinks it’s a person.

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