You are absolutely right. I'd like to point out, that as one person, I've been both depending on the role.
If I'm in a new space with new tech, I need to learn before I have the technical excellence. If I don't feel safe, I won't have courage to challenge leadership. If don't have hope, I won't have optimism in the future.
I say confrontational systems, because the only way to actually spark change in a system that has been systematically extinguishing sparks of change is actually confrontation. And the very fact that confrontation as such is now associated with negative emotion (same with conflict actually) goes hand in hand with the top level comment on this issue. Confrontation/conflict is bad, optimism is good.
Confrontration is how you bring attention to a problem. Conflict is what happens when that dominant idea is challenged by another idea.
Confrontration is how you bring attention to a problem. Conflict is what happens when that dominant idea is challenged by another idea.
what i mean to say is, confrontation/conflict is a normal part of debugging reality, and is healthy as long as there is an open/healthy system to enable it
Take out any of those and you get either nothing or a disaster. But if all come together, you will have someone on your team who doesn't just recognize that missed opportunity the other excellent other engineers already realized, but actively go against the plans of at least one level of management in order to do what's right for the company.
They tend to create a lot of friction, but can often save a project. I personally love working with these kinds of people as I was formerly one of them — and they can and often do make the best managers later on (funnily enough, I've heard similar stories in the bio of almost any technology leader I respect).
Having made the mistake more than one time of accidentally enabling people who didn't have the loyalty / optimism or technical excellence parts though, I get why these kinds of people are usually held in place in large organizations. The resulting friction, bickering and havoc can as well break teams and companies.