"Leadership" has to be one of the biggest scams in the history of civilization, because it is actually really hard not to buy in, even when you don't want to. Are there great leaders? Maybe, I guess? Or are we all just propagandized (by the shitty leaders we actually have) to think that they exist? I've certainly never met one, and the only examples that seem plausible are far enough in the past (Lincoln, FDR), or so tied up with other, ideological identities (Moses, Martin Luther), wealth and power (any President, CEO, etc), or traumatic/dramatic events (military leaders) that nobody alive can remember them personally or objectively.
We're a hagiography-driven species and it gives the impression that you're somehow a failure unless you're one of the lucky apes with enough "leadership" to get one written about you.
That said, I'd definitely agree with you about people being a species driven by dominance hierarchies more than capacity or will to lead. Achieving management status is a reward, not a role that requires its own skill sets and ambitions. Which is probably where much of the white collar work place suffering comes from.
But do these people posses something called "leadership" though, or are they just in control of a lot of capital (either by the lucky success of their app, or by being crowned by VC firms) and people. I don't know that we, as apes, can really disentangle the two.
Even Nadella turning around Microsoft is arguably just down to business strategy, which is a technical skill like anything else, but we imbue it with this aura that defines it as something more valuable than merely coding, building something mechanical, dispatching subway trains, or comforting a sick person.
In my view, it's not. There are two categories of business leaders: capitalists who are looking after their own assets, and paid managers. Neither deserves any more respect than any other rich guy or technocrat, respectively.
Leadership is the ability to make decisions on behalf of the group under you that are good. It's seen as being altruistic because it can enhance, or detract from the quality of work, and the quality of life of everybody beneath you. The effect of good decision making is multiplicative based on how great the scope of your 'leadership' is. A good decision maker in charge of 100,000 people will therefore bring a lot more productivity and positivity to society than a good decision maker in charge of only 100 people.
Moving forward by replacing 'leadership' with the term 'decision making' - which is really what it is - there are a lot of individuals who have consistent history of good decision making. These individuals exemplify good decision making far too often for it to be a function of luck or random chance. Of course, there are definitely some people who got lucky and were mistakenly labeled as 'good decision makers' (lest we forget November 2016). I'd also say that because we don't live in anything remotely close to a meritocracy, some people achieve leadership and management only because they come from a position of privilege in society. Nevertheless, the concept of good decision makers bearing great importance in society should not be dismissed, because historically the human race has excelled, or completely grinded to a halt based on how, and who we let make decisions.
My objection, or I guess social critique, is that we have a lot of undue reverence for decision-making. It's important yes, and can have a big impact, but it's just a skill, not fundamentally different from other skills, and isn't especially more difficult than most.
The Little Dutch Boy had a huge impact too, because of the leverage of the situation he found himself in, but we don't seem to imbue sticking your thumb in things with any special reverence.
The brand of leadership which gains actual reverence in society seems to be top performers. And top performance in any role is revered. Brain surgeons, athletes, "rockstar programmers", investment bankers, etc. all possess a certain 'aura' about them that makes people idolize them, perhaps disproportionately or unfairly in some cases. But I would say your "Steve Ballmer" brand of CEO does not get much reverence in society whatsoever.
In purely financial terms, Nadella probably did more for Microsoft's stock price than any one person "in the trenches" could have. Business decisions have enormous consequences.
Microsoft can't survive without it's coders, but none can make or break the company. Making billions of dollars for a company is a real accomplishment, and being able to lose billions of dollars is a huge amount of responsibility. Much as I love to code, maybe respect should* correlate with those things, and maybe it's worth aiming for those things personally if we think it'll move the needle further than what we're doing now.
(Of course, if there aren't a large number of decisions of consequence to be made then the leader-quality/impact correlation will be loose, and it probably has to be measured against companies in similar sectors too.)
In sports, the ability to perform especially well in high-leverage situations is called "clutchness" (as in "comes through in the clutch") and it's a real debate whether or not it exists at all. I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't (good pitchers are just good pitchers, regardless of the leverage of the pitch), which effectively is the same opinion that leads me to believe that "transformational leadership" is a scam and the whole C-suite is vastly overpaid basically everywhere.
If Nadella provides 1% more value than the next guy, that's a lot of money (from leverage, as you say.) Why wouldn't Microsoft pay top dollar for him if it means not settling for a lower market cap?
And sure, 20% of idiots and 12.5% of fair coins might have made all the great decisions Nadella did, but as a board of directors, do you want to sample from coins or idiots or second-best CEOs when billions of dollars are at stake?
As far as pay goes, you can say they have a "big impact" all you want, but that's not how any other labor market works: it doesn't matter how much value my labor provides. Plumbers are paid the same to fix the toilet in the Louvre as they are at the gas station down the street from it. Leverage or no, my salary is determined by how little other, similarly skilled people are willing to take. If you can find somebody as skilled as Nadella in the technical skill of managing a software company, but for much less money, then you should either hire that other person or make Nadella take the lower salary.
But again, I'm not talking about money. These corporations have shareholders, and the shareholders are free to overcompensate whichever of their employees they choose too, even the C-suite. My point is that we revere "leaders", our "history" classes (unless you actually study history at a univesity) are mainly hagiographies of past "leaders," and every societal norm tells us that "leadership" is this powerful, ineffable magic. It's not. There's no such thing. Some people are in charge. They might even be powerful. They might get incredible things done. That doesn't mean that people who could have gotten the same things done given the same power or leverage are scarce.
Management is a technical speciality, probably one that's less difficult than, say, being a good welder. We pay good welders tons of money too. I'm not trying to say either is overpaid. I'm just trying to say "leadership" (i.e. directing the work of others, business strategy, and decision-making) is over-valued in terms of respect and esteem.
To begin with, in my opinion, leadership isn't stopping doing, but reaching the point where the interesting work isn't humanly doable by a single person, and at this point deciding the only way to keep going is finding people to do the stuff with you.
At no point do I think leaders aren't doers : a CEO takes on a mission of finding money (be it through fundraising, having an actual product, or pretty much any mean), and never ceases doing that, he just gradually stops doing pretty much everything else.
A great developer may start leading technical project, and will develop the most complex (and in his mind, interesting) part of the code while trying to delegate the parts he doesn't find as interesting. Cf. the large number of open source projets with "available for beginner bugs" documented, or calling for help with documentation.
And this is what, I think, defune find great leaders : some person will at the same time continue their mission, federate people and will make you them great for helping them, because they'll feel adequate at the scale where you're working.
And when this happens, they start federate always more people because working for/with them is a rewarding experience.
So, I'd contest that : - leaders are people "who want to be in charge of people". There are definitely people who want explicitly that, but they're not what I'd call leaders but rather managers. - everyone who is "in charge of people" is necessarily a leader. And ultimately the shitty "leaders" we have sometimes aren't leaders at all, be they President or w/e. They may very well be here through other means than aligning people wills.
But I find there are plenty of people, at all levels of society who just at some point say "I want to go forward, but I can't do it alone, so let's go together and I'll go in front because I'm too damn curious and passionate and I wanna know what's out there, and here's why it's exciting", and it's always great to embark on a journey with them !
TL;DR : the "details" in the original citation I think aren't the intricacies of your core product/mission, but rather everything that's in the end noise disturbing the path forward.
RMS is a something, but not exactly what I'd call an excellent role model for leadership. Especially for anything outside of the narrow niche of Free Software. His leadership style would never, ever work in a for-profit company or, especially, a startup. There is no room for unbending, unwavering principled stands in a startup--you'd completely lose your shirt and go bankrupt if you never changed your startup.
Movement leaders often become unpopular for a time before they become relevant again. For instance, MLK was exceedingly unpopular after his anti-Vietnam speech until his death. I don't mean to put RMS on the same level as MLK, he's just the prominent example of that pattern that springs to mind.
That being said, this isn't the preferred career path for many (especially for those on HN, based anecdotally on the comments / attitudes I generally see in these types of threads) and that's fine. Not everyone wants or needs to be a CEO much less a strategic leader.
There are all sorts of places in our lives where we make these trade offs. We give up being single to enter a relationship; we don’t “give up our inner self”.
There are projects that only large groups of people can take on, or at least timelines for them. If you want to be involved in something like that, you have to trade off other things.
After all groups of 1000 people can't work together effectively the same way as groups of 10. This is true even if your 1000 people are separated into 100 groups of 10...
Anyway, there may be a lot of BS around too, but fundamentally you have to come up with ways to deal with the above two facts.
That is a conflict of interest. You can't do both. A good leader delegates to others.
- You start doing the work yourself and nobody will challenge your (probably questionable) technical decisions--your their boss, so you have to be right, right?
- A leader knows when to make course corrections. You start doing the work yourself and you'll be more likely to get caught up in the sunk cost fallacy and hold onto projects you worked on longer than they ought to exist.
The older and hopefully wiser I get, the more I have realized that the technical decisions almost never really matter as much as you'd think. Having a vision for your product, a roadmap to get there, key metrics to correct course with, and buyin from key stakeholders are very important things to a successful project. No technical person will do that work. That is on you...
Where I draw the line, I think, is trying to make meaningful “productive” contributions at the “worker bee” level. Be it code commits, installing rebar, or packing a shipment, you are there to gain empathy and to learn what is up on the front line. This means you get to watch and ask a lot of questions. If you do actual work, your host will be right next to you guiding you. They get all credit for any work produced.
You are the guest, they are the host. Trying to do their job for them isn’t gonna help you do yours. Learning how they do their job, why they do what they do, and how to make it better... that is your job.
Note: I’m talking about leaders that are one or two levels removed from the rank and file.
Whatsapp, with 55 employees at the time of their $19b acquisition, is more of the type of company I'd want to strive to become. Not a company that has "30 fortune 500 clients," and will not say anything about the nature of their relationship with those companies or the cash flows that they create.
I'd also strive for minimum employees -- not because I am cheap but because more people means more problems. Even adding 3rd person in a team of 2 upsets the balance quite a lot.
Every person comes with their own baggage of emotions, prejudice, way of doing things, and bad habits. Accounting for an increasing amount of those is emotionally so draining that managers have been known to commit suicide many times in the past.
As for why supposedly very smart people buy into crap like "30x Fortune 500 clients" and "we have 250 employees!", I can only theorize that most businessmen are followers (and not leaders) and to them such numbers are something to strive for to prove success and that's why they finance people who toot their own horn in such a lame way.
That, plus filter bubble. When you start having dinners with people like that you definitely can change and become one of them. From then on, you start using their lingo, dress like them and think like them.
It is exciting to see what you can achieve by communicating your goals to a team and by working with them on the goals. It feels like you are able to multiply your forces.
What the author points out is you need to be willing to do different things than before: instead of coding, you mainly listen and talk, and remove obstacles so that others can work undisturbed on the details.
I totally agree that this is not what everybody likes. But it is also not some 'marketing cancer'. It is simply what must be done if your team becomes larger than ~7 people.
> And you need to give up control and really allow them to do their part as they see fit (and not as you see fit).
...in reality that's exactly what's NOT happening, 99% of the time.
CEOs and bean counters better at coding than me abound. They're all better than all programmers!
- "Can't you just... not do it that way?"
- "Do it faster, we're on a deadline." <-- yeah, this one REALLY solves your problem, right there and then.
- "We cannot afford your solution." -- what they mean is they want to save money this month and spent 50x the money over the course of the next 2 years.
Examples are endless.
I like your sentiment and that's how I think about good managers but for 16.5 years of career I barely met 3 managers fitting that profile. Everybody else was not suited to even coordinate cardboard boxes distribution in a small warehouse.
I believe that core value is in things that are created by focused groups of professionals, and all that 300-500 growth along with ‘success’ badges is a marketing cancer that kills it all. Does anyone experience similar issues(?) with this topic?