From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
My biggest complaint about some people is that they measure success by the act of doing and rarely by the result.
If I help someone, I am checking if you no longer need help. If I say I’m going to be there at a certain time, I remember every time I’m late. If I do laundry a certain way so I won’t lose a sock, I make sure I haven’t lost a sock. When I do something, my brain replays me “Oh the last time you did this, you made this mistake. Do you want to try it a different way?”
People read how you are “supposed to do things” and feel good when they do it. If you switch to measuring your work by your result, you learn way faster and also get really good at things.
This works if you can connect your actions directly with the outcomes. How would would you assess the efficacy of preventative actions whose consequences are delayed and uncertain?
"I think we should X because it will probably contribute to Y."
What if Z happens? You could say "Doing X was pointless - Z happened anyway!" but then you are discounting at least two things:
1. the possibility that the magnitude of Z would be much higher
2. that it's a numbers game: sometimes you lose despite making the right decision
I don't really understand your examples in the context of decision making - they feel more like execution lapses than strategic choices.
Choosing to park my car correctly because I used get tickets is a reactive action. Helping someone because they asked for help is a reactive action. Being late and then doing things to stop being late is also reactive.
I’m not talking about preventing hypothetical consequences for events that could happen but have not even happened.
You've put into excellent words what I have done my whole life. Intent matters but it isn't sufficient. If you "meant to be on time" but weren't, you failed. Simple as. You don't need to lash yourself about it but too many folk are ready to give themselves a pat on the back for good intentions, or trying but failing, etc.
If you say you're gonna be somewhere, show the fuck up. Anything short is a miss. Failing to account for that makes you an asshole, IMO.
I did ceramics for a whole and noticed a common trend.
The creator judges the product compared to their imagining of what they wanted to make. Yhe piece invariably falls short (because our imagination is better than our skillset.)
Everyone else simply looked at the piece objectively. It was either beautiful or not.
I started to look at programs the same way. The criteria for judging my program differs to the criteria for judging other programs.
So for my software I care about architecture, clean code, the language I used, how clever it is.
I judge others by their UI, documentation, support, correctness, intuitiveness etc. I hate when their UI constantly changes. Even small (cosmetic) bugs turn me off.
But my stuff has no docs, the UI is butt ugly, there are some rough edges, but if you avoid the bugs it gives you the right answer (very fast) while consuming less ram, disk, or cpu. And I used new-framework or popular-new-language and runs on any OS etc.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
How do you measure results until something is done? It's simply not possible to reliably measure or predict the result of something before it's done, and at best any numbers will be incredibly rough estimates.
The only thing we can control for is the act of doing.
1. Mentoring: "this is what I did in a similar situation..." - overused and often not as similar or detailed as needed.
2. Coaching: "what do you think?" valuable for longer term development that depends on deeper thought and introspection; Your immediate problems a generally neither of these.
3. Sponsoring: "You mentioned you're looking for X and I heard about a new project where you could learn... want me to connect you?" under-used by managers, super valuable but harder to scale & can be hit/miss.
What your ICs actually need a lot of the time: "solve this problem for me." Most managers can't do this, which is why they became managers. The good ones combine their own skills with 1-3 above to unblock and DON'T push it back on the requestor.
In my experience people mostly become managers because that's the next step to more money and there is no other next step to more money. Nothing more nothing less. They certainly don't have a sophisticated philosophy on management and being the best manager they can be.
I've never worked for someone I felt was less able than I was. Maybe I had a specialty beyond theirs or more recent experience but you don't become a successful technical manager without knowing your shit. Maybe I've been lucky
You may not mean it but I do think sometimes framing it this way implies leading and managing is something that requires less ability (it's a skill in its own right).
What I think is true is people cap out their technical competency, and look to shift their skillset and, globally, we are bad at a) training them to be good managers (because there is a wrong assumption it's an innate skill) and b) weeding out the many who also lack the ability to be a manager.
Agree, it’s a skill, it can be learned and improved, and of course some people have some natural ability.
But for every skill there’s a floor and a ceiling. The floor for managers is imo far lower than it is for tech ICs. Incompetent managers have many options to hide their misdeeds. That doesn’t say anything about the average or the ceiling.
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs.
They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery.
Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
Also makes for a poor metaphor, because coaches in sports are supposed to be absolute experts in absolutely everything about the sport without the physical ability to implement it.
Imagine if a football player told their coach "I'm not sure how to deal with this specific opponent's strategy" and the coach was like "Well have you tried thinking about it more?"
there are lots of sports coaches that were not good players, but they are absolute experts in their sport. For some reason we've let agile/life coaches convince us that "management" is the event and someone with customer service management experience has a lot to say about software development management. Ted Lasso is a great show, but it's not gonna happen IRL.
Though the Diamond Dogs would be a great peer group for Engineering Managers...
The "required" reading for newly minted managers in my $billion company was/is this shit called "One Minute Manager": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager, including "one minute reprimands" as if employees are children. Happily, I am no longer a manager.
Oh wow. This comment just completely explained the worst "manager" I ever had. They must have been using this terrible method.
>no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
They nearly drove me insane with this circular cycle. It was the only job I ever walked out on. I emailed on a Sunday night that I would not be returning to the office after a particularly terrible cycle of this nonsense.
To be clear I am not a "needy" employee. When I ask a manager for something it is because I do not have the authority do the thing.
I'm not sure you understand just how dedicated they were to this whole turn it back on the employee method they were apparently using. I just skimmed the summary on the book after reading this comment. Its a toxic method of avoiding accountability masquerading as "mgmt"
You can't do whatever you describe if it needs sign off by a manager that simply ghosts on everything you try to send their way. You can assume responsibility but I'm not committing fraud for a company that does not care.
Also what you said means that you are now officially responsible for the mistakes which I'm pretty sure is what this whole "method" is about.
One of my worst job experiences was when I depended on a colleague who wouldn't deliver. Any feedback or conversations with that colleague mostly resulted in tantrums and empty promises.
The lack of delivery severely harmed the services I provided to the company and to external users, ruined team morale, and was a huge source of stress.
My boss always turned the problem back on me, despite him also being my colleague's boss.
I tried everything I could for 18 months and had extensive documentation of all my attempts, sometimes working in parallel with my boss or using his recommendations.
Still, the problems persisted and every time I brought it up with my boss it was as if he was oblivious to the ongoing saga. I want to HR and over his head about it and he always fed me shit about "empowerment" and "growth."
Yeah, I was empowered to interview with other company's and grew into other new roles.
The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.
E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.
Obviously there are cases where it's appropriate for you and a coworker to address a problem directly with each other. And there are cases where it makes more sense for your boss to intervene.
The problem is the culture at some jobs gravitate towards either end of the extreme. The ideal is somewhere in the middle. A good manager will find that balance.
> The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.
What's wrong with that? Resolving conflicts is the boss' job. So long as the team mate is doing their actual job appropriately, that's all that matters.
> E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.
The author should not be coming to you directly, going through the boss is the appropriate route. If the author's complaints were unreasonable, it should be the boss telling them that, not you. If your boss is coming to you, it means they feel the author's complaints are at least partially valid, and you should be hearing that from your boss, not the author.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if people bypass the manager to settle things directly, so long as both parties are comfortable with that, but it's not a happy medium.
Handling negative feedback on a PR is a necessary skill for a developer. A manager should only get involved if it becomes hostile. Negative is very far from hostile.
Handling negative feedback doesn't involve going to anybody - neither the manager, nor the person who gave the PR. Someone giving negative feedback is not supposed to be a conflict in need of resolution. We are talking about a situation where there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, ie that it has already become hostile.
If they are going to their manager, and then the manager, rather than convincing them that they are over-reacting, is instead going to you and telling you that there's something wrong with the feedback you gave, you should handle that negative feedback.
If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.
If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other. If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.
If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.
> If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.
Bullshit. Being a routine mediator makes you a better mediator when big things come up, not a worse one. It means you are in tune with the particular needs and idiosyncrasies of the people involved, and assuming you are any good at it, it means you have the trust of all parties to mediate fairly.
> If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other.
First of all, managing adults and parenting children are two radically different things. Second, being a go between is not handling a dispute, if anything it facilitates the dispute. Kids can't agree on whose turn it is to play with a toy? Toy gets taken away with the understanding they'll get it back when they agree to a system - that's conflict resolution.
> If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.
What?
> If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.
The fact there is this conflict to resolve is evidence that the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers, but given that there is a conflict, the manager should be the one resolving it, because, again, that is their job.
Control, responsibility and accountability have to align.
* You should only be accountable for what you are responsible for.
* You should only be responsible for what you have control of.
Bad managers hate this structure because in makes them accountable for themselves and their subordinates and prevents deflection of blame to low level employees.
Responsibility without accountability is that it's your job to make sure something gets done but you don't face any real consequences for not doing it.
Accountability without responsibility is "being the final desk." Leadership is usually in this position where they aren't responsible for designing the product but they are accountable if it doesn't happen and they miss targets.
Ah yes, the need for "influence without authority", i.e. "the real challenge of this project is that you have been organizationally set up to fail, and we expect you to find a way to succeed in spite of that."
This is what removed any lingering thoughts I had about moving up the corporate ladder. If in order to succeed I either need to do certain things or at least get other groups to do those things, and if I'm not allowed to do those things, and if no other group is willing to do those things, and if no one above me is going to change the circumstances, why on earth would anyone think this could be successful?
It was clear the author never actually performed servant leadership. If they did, they would be writing a different article about how much work they did to support their team instead of “how much lack of work can I get away with”. They sounded like an absent manager.
Came here to say this. What he describes is not really servant leadership.
Servant leadership is more or less just the concept that the leader's job is to make sure the team are working to their full capacity. This is in contrast to authoritarian leadership which says that the team's job is to do whatever the leader tells them to do.
A lot of leaders have a problem with the "servant" in servant leadership, there's an ego hit in the title that doesn't sit well with people who have more authoritarian ideas about what leadership is. That doesn't seem to be the author's problem, though.
The author's idea of transparent leadership seems centred around the idea that the team doesn't need a leader, in that the leader should be trying to make themselves redundant and should be training everyone else to be able to function without them. I agree that this is an absent manager.
If they succeed in making themselves redundant, the team will have selected another, informal, leader. Possibly a dynamic set of leaders who each take up leadership in different circumstances. Humans just do this, it's how we work together.
I think the author just doesn't want to be a leader at all, and would prefer it if they could go back to solving technical problems. This is perfectly valid. Management isn't for everyone.
I suggest the author looks at Dyad Leadership [0] where the management role is split into two parts; one part provides the leadership role (setting the vision, coaching, quality, behaviours, etc) and the other provides the administration function (approving holidays, organising events, handling HR, etc). This is used in the healthcare industry a lot, and works in the right situation. It might work for the author because they're obviously providing leadership but don't seem keen about the management part.
In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power.
I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.
As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.
Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.
>> but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
Managers definitely need to contribute and this is a great way to do so, and also build credibility with your team. You don't get the fun or deep technical problems; that's not your job, but you can fulfill whatever transparent leadership is (I think?) by protecting your team from the noise (i.e. the shit umbrella) and contributing in a supporting role (the servant part). The hard / tiring thing is doing this consistently and repeatedly.
For me the worst of this is organizations where employees have to write their own performance reviews. Eff that. You're the boss, you tell me how I'm doing. If there's one thing a manager should be accountable for it is the development and evaluation of the people the manager is responsible for.
No - Performance reviews are important legally, it's the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc.
Also - If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter
There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.
The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.
How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.
It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy.
A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions.
That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one.
Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill.
But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc.
The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career.
I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.
That entire paragraph is a string of poorly-articultated, cringeworthy sentences. In fact the whole article seems to be a series of strawmen set up on the basis of oddly specific and naive interpretations of management concepts like "servant leadership". There's basically nothing in here that I would agree with as a blanket statement without a lot of company and org-specific provisos.
All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, which is a common failure mode for newly converted IC to junior manager. Where he goes off the rails in the most tone-deaf way is describing that as "not doing useful work". As a manager your work is constantly observing what people are doing, staying the hell out of the way when things are working, and leaning in when things are not going well from a team and outcomes perspective. Doing that well is incredibly challenging and important work.
I(we) call that running interference, and it has always been an extremely high value activity. The people who see the benefit rarely complain. I myself have always recognized it as valuable.
The biggest issue in the post is "creates direct links between supply and demand". One of the more important things to do as a manager is sit in hours of meetings so your reports can get a fifteen minute synopsis about the decisions made. And represent your reports in those meetings.
Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.'
I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.
>Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.
My first manager at Amazon was like that. Loved him to pieces.
He didn't micro-manage, he didn't even fully care about the scrum. Just said "I can see the ticket status myself. If you are blocked by something, need any info or resource, I'll hunt it down for you, otherwise you keep cooking".
I often describe myself as a bulldozer for my team. My job is to lay out clear expectations, do my best to steady the course free of external chaos, and bulldoze a clear path for the team to get stuff done.
Agree and follow this principle to certain degree, however there are caveats here - something being a blocker shouldn't prevent you from trying to resolve the blockers by yourself or work with your boss to resolve them ie - "hey boss, I'm blocked with task A with refactor of this code; are you happy for me to do XYZ?". Then I have options to say: "yes! excellent! go ahead!" or "no, we need to do ASD here" or "no, we cannot do XYZ right now". If every time people encountering blockers would come to me to resolve them, or wait until they're resolved I'd not get anything done. On the flipside, if every time a blocker is encountered people were to handle it themselves, then a) it might not align with my vision on what actually needs to be done here b) I'm blindsighted with what was actually done.
Clear boundaries and strategies eliminate these caveats = team members are aligned on what they can make decision for and general direction the team is heading towards.
Yeah like I said if we are straying in to over-reliance/not really doing our job, he clearly lays out what to do and says "there go take care of it" a few times. He does a good job of not fostering a culture of constantly playing CYA
Reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote about on his blog. The best managers were those who "moved the furniture out the way". Basically clear the way for the people working on the problem to do so.
Friendly reminder that management exists to get you to justify your expensive pay check. Every employer-employee relationship is adversarial. Adjust accordingly.
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
There's a big difference between protecting a team from all the shit and hiding it from them completely.
It's good to be a transparent shit umbrella. The team should absolutely have visibility into what's going on, and understand why certain decisions are being made, but a good manager does need to step in to avoid the shit hitting them directly.
Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?
I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.
Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.
Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.
After deploying your transparent shit umbrella, your next problem is your own shitty boss or your boss's boss who will get pissed off you are using a transparent umbrella once that transparency starts blowingback on them. Because once your team learns that it's raining shit outside, they will want to know what you're doing to mitigate, reverse, or sidestep the shit. Some of the time, the things you confide to your team in the course of this feedback will piss off adjacent teams or some people up the ladder once they get wind of it (your opinion of some decisions, or the perceived negative consequences of your mitigation strategy on said people) Hence your umbrella being transparent makes what people euphemistically call "managing up" much more fucking annoying. I don't claim that there is an alternative, just that it's a fact of the principled life (one result being getting fired, often ironically for not being a "team player"). I don't have a fix, but would like to hear some if anyone has any.
Agree. team needs to know about the shit. It's important information that helps them prioritize their work and motivates them as they know that what they do is important for the bigger bosses. If manager shields me from everything I go apathetic, not knowing why I even do the boring stuff if manager doesn't tell me his manager is giving shit
I hate having to rely on my own sense of what happened in a meeting, or which executive is upset about something. While its usually accurate, it's been borne out of chaotic leadership and shouldn't be necessary, especially if its to try to get off the tracks when a freight train is coming.
Sometimes the culture of poor management is so ingrained and normalized people really don't understand what the problem is. That usually ends with me looking elsewhere, as taking on the responsibility other's won't while not having authority has lead to multiple full years lost to burnout.
I'm laughing because I used that exact same phrase: "shit umbrella". Like some of the other replies mentioned, telling your team it's raining is great. The balance I found was to let them know what's coming and why but to let leadership's "pivots" to stabilize for a few days before sharing the unfiltered shit stream with my reports. This meant that the team still knew what was going on early but didn't panic as much when there was a sudden crazy random request from leadership that would be highly disruptive.
You do need to expose your team to some of the shit that's getting flung or else your team gets used to operating under clean conditions and loses its tolerance.
For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)
In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.
A shit umbrella is not a two way block. It keeps shit from falling onto the employees but doesn’t prevent employees from knowing what is happening at higher leadership levels.
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too.
I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
There is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, but without that contrast in mind, you can easily lose track of what the terms mean. The article does a decent job of trying to find a healthier middle ground, IMO.
The problem is when things evolve we no longer know if someone refers to the evolved form or the original. Or more importantly if the evolved form retains the important parts of the original.
Firstly, in 'proper' servant leadership as taught by Greenleaf the leader is supposed to put the church before their own needs and wants. It is not about serving the people who report to you; it's about serving the organisation first. In a business context that's horribly toxic and a great way to spend years being exploited by a company that will grind you to burnout for very little money. Thankfully most people don't actually follow what Greenleaf teaches because they think it's about the people.
Secondly though, people don't bother to read much about it. They hear the term and a basic summary, and then fill in the blanks based on their own biases and assumptions. Consequently when someone says they practise servant leadership you can't know what they mean unless you know them well. People who practise their version of servant leadership assume other people mean the same thing by it, and automatically align themselves with that person based on (probably) false assumptions. It is not a helpful term because it's used for a huge range of leadership styles.
Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long you’re aware you you’re serving and who you’re working peer to peer with/against/whatever.
Another term for it somewhat is being a “players coach.”
End state is you will build loyal as heck teams with it, and if you want to take a very cynical business mindset, it produces with the least pain and suffering three very impotent outcomes - your team will produce output, they won’t hate you along the way, and your team will write you (well earned) manager perf reviews. A manager who has a loyal as heck team up and down the stack builds unique odds of corporate survival.
All these trendy management things either go back to straight-up bullshit (this is the more common case) or some non-bullshit thing that's been ripped out of its original context such that it becomes bullshit.
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:
> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect
Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.
Because of the Ukraine conflict, the phrase "mission command" came to my attention. It's about C2 rather than leadership but another one of those gems we might filter out in our "Bay Area" (you're all terminally online Europeans / teenagers jk) bubble.
The idea of mission command is pretty simple. If you see an incidental opportunity that will contribute to the big picture and pursuing it won't compromise the objective of your orders, take it. IIRC they call it something like "scoped initiative."
If you see an incidental opportunity that you can't take because it would compromise your local objective, you escalate. Up the chain, in the larger scope, that incidental opportunity that would compromise the objective of the smaller unit may be addressable using some available resources of the bigger unit.
It works by deduction and beautifully because you get the best of both individual initiative and large-scale coordination. It's an example where from-first-principle CS and pragmatic emergent systems resonate because it's near a morally true optimum.
In the context of OP, knowing the objective of your larger 1-2 organization levels is all the transparency that is every necessary. Neurons aren't smart. Information flows in a network are smart. Don't trust people who start performing and asking for transparency because ninety-nine times out of ten, they can't do better with what they ask for but will make everyone else do worse by breaking the cohesion.
And finally I read OP. It's a vapid feel-good long-form tweet that is nothing compared to the comment section.
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.
Man was I wrong.
The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.
There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
There are no good organizations, only ones that aren’t completely corrupt yet. Consider that to start and maintain an organization takes significant capital and energy expenditures upfront, which means you need to fund them from somewhere and ask sources of funding are corrupted. Consider: there are no long lasting egalitarian, distributed power, grassroots organizations that can compete at a level of social influence that can overcome or resist the existing power structure.
I’ve looked at every possible organization that could theoretically fit including; MSF a.k.a. doctors without borders, swords to plowshares, goodwill industries (who employ significant numbers of disabled people for sub min wages while the CEO makes 3M+), Mondragon etc… and they all have exactly the same fucked up incentives
why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.
unless your organization is the lead maximalist resource dominator you will be overrun by some organization with no ethics
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that people have to trade physical and mental work for money to survive. So there is no alternative to do the “right thing” without also risking your own safety and stability in your chosen society. 99.99999% of people are completely unwilling to risk their life on behalf of any particular philosophy - if only because those people don’t feel strongly enough about any particular philosophy to actually put themselves on the line for it.
So whoever has the most money, has the ability to get the most people to work for their goals.
Unfortunately the people with all the money/power do not care about anything other than growing their own personal power
I’d be curious what you identified as the shortcomings of e.g. MSF or Mondragon. I might throw semi-decentralized social ventures like the IFRC in the mix there too: that emblem alone sure carries an almost-talismanic degree of social weight, seemingly worldwide, I think in large part because they’re foresworn from swinging around their influence outside of their lane.
And I mean… “don’t want to live like a monk” seems like a telling qualifier: the whole monastic lifestyle seems pretty widespread and enduring across cultures and through time… is the humbler mode of religious devotion an example of what you’re looking for?
In any case you’ve clearly thought deeply and widely about this question—I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you end up collecting them somewhere!
That's quite a strong claim. I disagree. Military leadership, like business leadership, is imperfect. Both vary based on individuals, the operating environment, and culture.
I'm pretty sure software development of a website doesn't translate to a life and death situation that US army is dealing with. If anything it's why there is so many managers who think this works as if we are solving lives so they have to be strict and we all have to be strict and everyone needs to have their story points updated.
The reason why most people went into software development is because they like building stuff so you have to inspire that - it's quite different to why people join US army.
My 2 cents on the actual manager philosophy is that it depends on the organization and the personal and cultural differences of the team members, some people like leaders, some people like servants and some like equality.
At the end of the day everyone has to be aware they do work for the business and why they do stuff. The manager has to make that aware and inspire people.
I was never taught that servant leadership should be some weird "manager as parent" relationship.
Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.
It’s the concept of a management chart as an inverted pyramid with each layer holding up and supporting the layer above them. If you imagine a promotion as working your way down the corporate pyramid, then it’s easier to see how the managers at the bottom are carrying more weight and deserving of higher pay.
As opposed to a pyramid where it’s visually represented as the broader management layers supporting the layers above them.
In a pyramid, it looks like the CEO has a cushy, overpaid job. In an inverted pyramid it looks like they have the weight and responsibility of the company on their shoulders.
I honestly have never heard anyone—even those executing it poorly—try to frame Servant Leadership the way the original author did here (the "curling parent" analogy).
I have certainly seen people fail badly at practicing this style, but that failure was invariably due to a lack of character, poor communication skills, or other individual execution matters, not an issue with the core concept of servant leadership itself.
Author gives own take on what they thinks servant leadership means, then invents a supposedly different kind of leadership that is just servant leadership, taken into a different context than the original church one, then gives it a new name, one that doesn't really tie into their definition.
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development.
Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.
This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
"Servant leadership" is not a buzzword but it's been misused and abused by Big Corporations to the point that it basically lost its meaning [1].
For me - personally - the idea is about being less of a boss and more of a nightwatchman or janitor.
I believe in agency and ownership and - in sane environment - people can be left alone with clear objectives. It's more about removing obstacles.
I'll give you a simple example.
Once a week a maid comes to our apartment. Despite a clear power balance disproportion (it's easier to find a new maid than a senior engineer) and her being used to being transparent and prioritizing to not disturb tenants for me it's the other way around. I'm super happy to hastily finish a call or leave my room is she feels the need to disturb me, and if she needs an extra pair of hands I'm happy to help her with anything. After all, I'm more interested with the final result than feeling important.
We have a bucket list of tasks than has to be performed that slightly exceeds her capacity and she has a full right to prioritize things. It took my a while but I eventually convinced her that it's ok to skip things - like cleaning the windows - if she's feeling under the weather or it's cold outside rather than faking it.
Most of the pointy hairs I worked in corporate environments would probably prepare a list of requirements and walked through the apartment with a checklist every time she would finish giving her a full, harsh performance review.
But that doesn't build trust and long term relationship.
And after some time she developed - what people around here call ownership - and sometimes I feel she cares about the household more than I do.
I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.
The fantastic element that explains the appeal of games to many developers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without any change in the user requirements.
'Management' is not one size fits all. Every company is different. Its needs are different. What a manager is supposed to do is different too. If someone behaves the same way as a manager no matter the company or the people they work with, I think that's terrible.
Being a manager is about listening. It is about tuning into the environment. It is about being there for the team in whatever way they need support. Sometimes that means being a coach. Other times it means fighting for them. And sometimes, when an unpopular decision is made above your pay grade, it means breaking it down for the team in a way that they 'get it'. You want them to understand without completely losing morale or slipping into rebellion.
Brutal honesty sounds great on paper. But not everyone can handle it or is ready for it.
It is a balancing act. Even if everyone "knows", bitch*ng about the company to your reports can only lead to bad outcomes. So you acknowledge the company's shortcomings. At the same time, you try to help the team find purpose and fulfillment in other ways.
Having a bad manager in past roles can be some of the best "manager training."
If one your past managers did something recommended in this article but it caused problems, that's ok! It just means you have seen another failure mode that the author didn't experience.
I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the best managers at a former company. "Why did you originally want to be a manager?" was one of the first questions passed around the circle. The most common answer was, "I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
>"I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
That doesn't mean that those people are learning from prior bad management. That could instead mean that management tends to be people who are convinced of their own above average competence.
Did anyone ask the reports of those managers whether they were any good?
"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
I want to reproblematise the word ‘leadership’ here. The phrase ‘servant leadership’ is actually a paradigm shift away from classic ‘out-the-front’ ‘the-boss-knows-best’ ‘dominate-others’ leadership.
What the author is missing is parallelisation. By definition in systems of clear one person in charge leadership the work bottlenecks and power centralises, hard.
In models of servant leadership, it’s possible for multiple people to bring leadership and leadership skills all at once.
In a group of a dozen or more people, huge bottlenecks and ego power crap are resolved as multiple people can bring servant leadership.
It’s single core vs parallel, in the later leadership can then come from all participants, even the very young and vulnerable involved in the group can learn to do this.
The emphasis is on skill sharing and being of service OVER power hoarding.
The problem I've found with servant leadership in large orgs is the direct manager usually has little agency over problems. The best you can get is maybe they can provide additional context on the good intentions behind the bad decisions. This is essentially by design, a critical role they play are to be the scape goats and shock absorbers for the bad machinery above them.
> Servant leadership seems to me a lot like curling parenting: the leader/parent anticipate problems and sweep the way for their direct reports/children.
That's not what "Servant leadership" is. It's about _letting the team lead_ - and they can come to you if they need help - instead of _pushing the team_. So in practice it's the opposite of anticipating problems. If something, servant leadership gets a bad rep for being used as an excuse to let people fall on the sword, instead of protecting them
The rest of the post is just describing the role of "Management".
Looking back at the best leaders I've ever worked for, they all followed that philosophy that was explicitly stated at Netflix: Context not Control.
The goal of the manager was to explain to their reports what problems the team need to solves and why. Make sure the team was aware of any factors elsewhere in the org that might make a difference, and then connect the people on their team with the people on other teams who they need to talk to.
Beyond that the leader's job was to seek out such context from their peers and leadership.
But then it was up to the IC to figure out the how. The manager never told me how to accomplish the task unless I asked, and that was more of a mentorship than as a manager. And when I was a junior, most of that mentorship came from my more senior peers than my manager.
Yeah, this makes sense. What I am missing from both the blogpost and the comments is that the most valuable contribution a manager can provide is information and not some elusive, esotheric, corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo. And when I write information I mean information in advance (you can call this call for comments if you wish), not after the fact when decisions have been already made. 99% of managers rather focus on some self-patting feel good mindfulness guru teachings instead, and I wonder why...?
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic boss's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and deciders rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.
If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. Basically they are a customer, but also on the payroll.
That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings some value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.
When I say something like this it usually means “I don’t want to dictate your job to you. You’re here because you’re smart, ambitious, and capable. We’ve talked at length in team settings and 1:1 about our goals. What do you think are the problems that need attention, and what solutions do you propose?”
The anti-pattern I’ve seen from some folks is that they never want to propose solutions because then it’s someone else’s fault if those fail. These folks often demonstrate minimal ownership of any decisions, so they don’t feel bad complaining about all the problems they see. Not only is that unhelpful, it can actually be very toxic for the team. (As you mentioned.)
So when I’m saying “bring solutions” what I’m really asking for is some shared ownership of the choices and consequences—I’m asking folks to act like the main character in the story. And don’t worry, I own the consequences of the mistakes in my team to my leadership—this isn’t about throwing them under the bus. (Getting this to work well requires a lot of trust both ways.)
> When I say something like this it usually means…
Yes, exactly. This isn’t “do my job for me”, this is “do the job you have, and solve the problems you should be able to solve”. It’s also, at times, “pointing at fires is junior shit - find a fire extinguisher while you call 911.”
But see, Claude can do nothing even better than it can choose between options. So why should that boss keep his job again?
"Bring me solutions, not problems" can mean "You are a competent, knowledgeable employee, who has identified a problem. You know enough to look at the alternatives and decide which is best, or at least which ones are workable. Bring me that, not just the problem."
And if it does mean that, it's empowering. You with your hands on the situation, you get to tell the boss what you think the best answer is, and the boss backstops you from deciding something that won't work in the bigger picture.
What I am missing from both the blogpost and the comments is that the most valuable contribution a manager can provide is information and not some elusive, esotheric, corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo. And when I write information I mean information in advance (you can call this call for comments if you wish), not after the fact when decisions have been already made. 99% of managers rather focus on some self-patting feel good mindfulness guru teachings instead, and I wonder why...?
I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.
Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
I appreciated the parallels in this idea to the concept of wu wei (無為), or achieving by doing nothing. The idea appears in writing attributed to Confucius and Lao Zi, that regarding political leadership, the best leaders can order their group or society even simply by the strong example that they set and correct judgments that they execute. This isn't meant to be carried to its extreme of course, a leader doesn't do nothing all day, and may indeed pitch in to work, but they should be making time to think and reflect. I read it as an ideal (you know when things are good when you can do nothing), not as an instruction (do nothing).
> continuously trains their replacement, and
> generally makes themselves redundant.
This is the advice we get from many business books and leadership advices. However, I see more often than not leaders in a company do the opposite to keep their power. There is a missing link to making the good advice actionable: what can the leader do to keep becoming more valuable while making themselves "redundant".
IMO: I think there is a helpful distinction to be made between leadership and management. Leadership provides purpose and inspiration. Management provides, coordination and motivation. I’m not saying one person can’t do both.
I do agree that most management books read like parenting books - but I’d add that whats more important than the method is consistency in whatever approach you believe in. I’m not sure that managers/leaders will ever do that well relying on a book or a special ‘way’ they have read. They really need to have worked this out for themselves.
I think the premise is a little shaky since a good servant leader is already transparent. But there's some good takeaways. Leaders should inform their team of what's happening behind the scenes and allow them to understand why things are playing out the way they are. Allowing people to take on more responsibility, if they want it, is a healthy sign of an organization, but it shouldn't be imposed nor expected if they already have enough on their plates.
I don’t really relate to many comments here stating “my approach is X”, or “I went from servant-leader to process-master-whatever leader”.
I’ve found that trying to be anything but flexible to the environment is unrealistic and even egotistical.
E.g, There are some environments where the CEO is so “command and control” that the “I want us all to bring our authentic selves to the peace circle of work, and from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, we will figure out a synergy that works for all” just won’t ever work.
And for me, being unable to adapt the approach to environment suggests ‘one trick pony’.
Yeah, shallow dismissal of people's effort to try to make a change must be because they are a ‘one trick pony’. Is that all you brought to the conversation?
All these comments are from the standpoint of being managed, with a derogatory view of someone who would stoop so low as to take a management role. I liked the article. Managing people is ass hard. Doing so is a way to make peoples working lives better, anf to tackle problems larger than a single person can accomplish. Thinking about how to do it better is good thing. It takes courage.
It is pleasantly sensible since servant leadership in a sense creates an innocence because of the incents; the underlying reality is that wisdom dwells with prudence. Principles of revelation arise from incentive compatibility. Aiming at the apparent target is good hearted folly.
The biggest omission that immediately stands out to me is: "provides a clear sense of direction".
I've seen so many examples of teams and organizations that experience a lack of clarity, with all sorts of negative downstream consequences - muddled strategies, moving goalposts, fatigue/low morale. Having a leader that can provide that clarity is so important.
"transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader
coaches people"
So ... why does coaching people require transparent leadership?
I think people can be sneaky and secretive; or transparent. Both can easily be used for coaching and training and teaching people. The other points have a similar issue in my opinion. The article is more like a "feel-good" statement - people subscribe to "be nice and kind". But are all leaders nice and kind? Are evil and mean leaders automatically incompetent and ineffective? I think the analysis part should be decoupled from ethics in regards to "xyz beats abc". One has to define what the goal is.
For instance, some CEO firing 50% of the people will be critisized by many - but greedy shareholders may get more money that way, so for them they may prefer a CEO that is mean-spirited here. That same mean-spirited CEO could be an awesome family guy and super-friendly with his close reallife friends and family, but when it comes to the company, he is ruthless. And so on and so forth.
This article is a great example of the Strawman Fallacy. I suppose it's a method to generate traffic but I would argue a key aspect of servant leadership is being transparent that you are in a role that should collectively support and lead to enable and expand the team.
I feel attributing any sort of parental concepts belittles the meaning here.
I think the author is significantly straw-manning the concept of servant leadership.
The short take presented in the article doesn't match my lived experience with this style, both in secular and faith-based circles. The core idea is absolutely not that of a "curling parent." Instead, it embodies living the walk, walking the talk, and putting the team's needs before your own ego.
In fact, this profound concept goes all the way back to Jesus Christ, who modeled it by washing the feet of his disciples—a task reserved for the lowliest servant of the time. This act was deliberately shocking and context-defying. He effectively "turned the world upside down" by saying, "Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all."
I'm not trying to proof-text, but this idea is ancient and deep. It's a profound leadership style that is unfortunately often executed poorly or misunderstood by modern practitioners. Poor execution doesn't invalidate the concept itself.
"The ability to smooth things out for everyone while helping them accomplish their goals"
I think it helps differentiate the "authoritarian" leader or the "Servant leadership" from the "legitimate" one. All kinds of leadership (sports, education, business, relationships) come from understanding people's needs and providing more efficient strategies to meet them.
Managing upwards beats being managed in my experience. Seems to work with most managers, and reduces surprises which reduces stress all around and causes course corrections and course alignments earlier.
I tend to do status updates in public channels before anyone can ask me but I've been the fortunate loner for the last couple years where I get to work with a lot of people but outside a lot of process.
The founder of Zingerman's (famous deli and family of businesses in Ann Arbor) description of servant leadership is a bit more complete and overlaps heavily with what the author of this post is advocating for:
This is actually not such bad advice for a manager who manages other managers, though I can see why ICs find it very frustrating. If you are giving high level platitudes and counseling-disguised-as-coaching to a junior new hire, they can rightly ask WTF. But managers, especially those recently moved from IC tech roles, often do benefit from this kind of forced introspection. If they have an underperforming employee, they should bounce ideas around with a more experienced manager, but the first line manager ultimately needs to be the one deciding how to rebalance work to maximize learning or to ultimately make the call to part ways with the employee. If a servant senior leader over them is actually doing the slog of working through the hardest issues (interpersonal conflict, serious direction change needed for team, firing people, top performers at risk of leaving), the first line manager is never going to grow.
Similarly "cut out the middleman" advice in the article is great for senior ICs/quasi-architects or sub-managers but potentially toxic for junior engineers who may get steamrolled by the classic "1000 urgent requests issue" that managers or potentially very senior ICs need to drive.
Why is forced introspection good for managers but not for ICs?
I’m not saying that the extreme “I do nothing except act as a sounding board and tell my team to solve their own problems” is a good approach. But pushing people to solve their own problems does help them grow. It needs to be a balance.
A good manager should be able to see what someone is capable of solving with zero, a little, or a lot of help and engage accordingly. And sometimes they can’t solve it at all and the manager has to take it in directly or pull in someone else who can.
>transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader ...
I practice this in my day job, as in that is the default mode for continued employment.
Not sure how these practices are new. I wonder if it is a generational thing.
I did everything he mentions in "Transparent Leadership," but also the stuff he talks about in "Curling Parenting."
I did it for 25 years. Seemed to work. I kept my job.
In my company, Personal Integrity and Honesty were very important. Not sure how representative that is, in today's world. It was an old-fashioned Japanese corporation.
I suspect this is written by someone who stepped into managing a team and no further.
My reflection overall is; he's probably heard of servant leadership but not understood it? It's not about sweeping away problems but more a mindset that your role is to empower. I feel strongly that all new managers should embrace and get good at this because it instills the mindset that the best leaders ultimately only succeed through their team.
A servant leader who becomes overworked is either not doing their job well (delegation isn't contrary to the mindset!) or, more likely, has a poor leader themselvesw.
I actually love the concept of transparent leadership but sadly I can't see it come through in his points. They are all things a good leader, a good servant leader, should also do.
For me transparent leadership becomes more critical as you move up the stack. Once you get to multiple teams or teams of teams leaders must pivot strongly to strategy setting, and in this your servant leadership comes in painting a clear destination for everyone to get to.
At this point I believe the best leaders are genuinely transparent and the worst keep secrets. One of my most respected mentors framed it as deliberately over-sharing. Which I love, even if I get into trouble for it constantly!
(I do like the writers anarchic streak; the best leaders are radicals)
Kind of a weird hyper-literal interpretation of "servant leadership" IMO. Upskilling and empowering your team, not making yourself a SPOF, treating your adult colleagues like adults, all sounds like servant leadership to me...
Coming from the Sales world sometimes I don't want to be taught to fish.
I'm coming to my VP for help because I already tried diff baits, went to diff ponds, and tried diff reels.
I'm coming for a fish finder not a lecture on maybe my casting was off
Can’t wait for AI Slack plugins to replace all low tier middle managers. You can achieve so much transparency since the data is already out there anyway.
There has to be a better way to organize how ICs communicate. More productivity to unlock.
I think this has somewhat strawmanned “servant leadership,” which is more about humility in posture than purely intercepting annoyances and blockers, but nevertheless the conclusions are solid.
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is. I identify as such, but I also do just about all of the "Transparent Leadership" things called out in the article. I may have to re-evaluate my orientation.
There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.
Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:
Comparing leadership to parenting right out the gate tells me all I need to know about this person's management ability.
Your direct reports are not children. You are not raising them out of an altruistic drive to guide the next generation. You are a part of a team of grown adults. You are not above the team, you have a roll on the team. It is an important roll: as a leader you provide high level direction so people are working towards the appropriate goal and confident it is achievable. Likely you are also acting as a manager, coordinating resources and resolving internal and external stakeholder conflicts. This makes the team more efficient, it's important.
But the people you are leading are the ones actually doing the work. They are likely more skilled at their particular role than you, and knowledgeable about much more. You are not leading them because you are better, you are leading them because that's how you can best contribute to the team.
Leadership has absolutely nothing to do with coaching, connecting, teaching, explaining, linking, growth inducing, or training their subordinates. Zero. Zip. Nada. It is the role of more senior practitioners to mentor their more junior colleagues. Leaders often are drawn from more senior ranks, so it's not uncommon for a person in a leadership role to also be in a mentoring role, but they are two separate and unrelated positions. If anything, the most important skill of a good leader is effectively soliciting the right information and wisdom from the right team members so they can most effectively leverage their team's expertise.
You shouldn't be teaching everyone how to communicate with the customer well, you should be identifying the person who is already great at such communication and making sure the rest of the team is giving them what they need to communicate effectively. The person who is great at such communication should be the one teaching that communication to their peers, and not through coaching but by showing everyone how it's done.
A leadership style of getting your direct reports to do your job for you is transparent in the sense that your subordinates will see right through you.
My worst managers were “transparent” as in they were basically a telephone game actor between me and my skip, with a little extra anxiety mixed in. Needless to say, I couldn’t quit those jobs fast enough. Who comes up with this nonsense?
Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.
You see, this only works in orgs that don't suck. It breaks down the moment employees must be manipulated in some way to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the employees. Unfortunately a regular occurrence even in countries that have employee protection laws.
From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
My biggest complaint about some people is that they measure success by the act of doing and rarely by the result.
If I help someone, I am checking if you no longer need help. If I say I’m going to be there at a certain time, I remember every time I’m late. If I do laundry a certain way so I won’t lose a sock, I make sure I haven’t lost a sock. When I do something, my brain replays me “Oh the last time you did this, you made this mistake. Do you want to try it a different way?”
People read how you are “supposed to do things” and feel good when they do it. If you switch to measuring your work by your result, you learn way faster and also get really good at things.
This works if you can connect your actions directly with the outcomes. How would would you assess the efficacy of preventative actions whose consequences are delayed and uncertain?
"I think we should X because it will probably contribute to Y."
What if Z happens? You could say "Doing X was pointless - Z happened anyway!" but then you are discounting at least two things:
1. the possibility that the magnitude of Z would be much higher
2. that it's a numbers game: sometimes you lose despite making the right decision
I don't really understand your examples in the context of decision making - they feel more like execution lapses than strategic choices.
We’re not talking about preventative actions.
Choosing to park my car correctly because I used get tickets is a reactive action. Helping someone because they asked for help is a reactive action. Being late and then doing things to stop being late is also reactive.
I’m not talking about preventing hypothetical consequences for events that could happen but have not even happened.
> Choosing to park my car correctly because I used get tickets is a reactive action.
How do you explain someone who chooses to park correctly and has never received a parking ticket?
You've put into excellent words what I have done my whole life. Intent matters but it isn't sufficient. If you "meant to be on time" but weren't, you failed. Simple as. You don't need to lash yourself about it but too many folk are ready to give themselves a pat on the back for good intentions, or trying but failing, etc.
If you say you're gonna be somewhere, show the fuck up. Anything short is a miss. Failing to account for that makes you an asshole, IMO.
If you’re interested in the subject and want to read more, the concept is commonly called “outcome oriented” vs “process oriented”.
A LOT of workplace conflict arises out of outcome oriented ppl having to work with process oriented people.
I did ceramics for a whole and noticed a common trend.
The creator judges the product compared to their imagining of what they wanted to make. Yhe piece invariably falls short (because our imagination is better than our skillset.)
Everyone else simply looked at the piece objectively. It was either beautiful or not.
I started to look at programs the same way. The criteria for judging my program differs to the criteria for judging other programs.
So for my software I care about architecture, clean code, the language I used, how clever it is.
I judge others by their UI, documentation, support, correctness, intuitiveness etc. I hate when their UI constantly changes. Even small (cosmetic) bugs turn me off.
But my stuff has no docs, the UI is butt ugly, there are some rough edges, but if you avoid the bugs it gives you the right answer (very fast) while consuming less ram, disk, or cpu. And I used new-framework or popular-new-language and runs on any OS etc.
From Ira Glass:
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.
But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
How do you measure results until something is done? It's simply not possible to reliably measure or predict the result of something before it's done, and at best any numbers will be incredibly rough estimates.
The only thing we can control for is the act of doing.
No I mean you measure after.
Some people just don’t seem to measure after though.
Three buckets of "management":
1. Mentoring: "this is what I did in a similar situation..." - overused and often not as similar or detailed as needed.
2. Coaching: "what do you think?" valuable for longer term development that depends on deeper thought and introspection; Your immediate problems a generally neither of these.
3. Sponsoring: "You mentioned you're looking for X and I heard about a new project where you could learn... want me to connect you?" under-used by managers, super valuable but harder to scale & can be hit/miss.
What your ICs actually need a lot of the time: "solve this problem for me." Most managers can't do this, which is why they became managers. The good ones combine their own skills with 1-3 above to unblock and DON'T push it back on the requestor.
"Can't" is not why people become managers.
At least be thoughtful and say "Won't" (because they prefer management)
In my experience people mostly become managers because that's the next step to more money and there is no other next step to more money. Nothing more nothing less. They certainly don't have a sophisticated philosophy on management and being the best manager they can be.
I intentionally used the word can't, because I don't think it's an option that they're choosing, rather a lack of ability.
I've never worked for someone I felt was less able than I was. Maybe I had a specialty beyond theirs or more recent experience but you don't become a successful technical manager without knowing your shit. Maybe I've been lucky
You may not mean it but I do think sometimes framing it this way implies leading and managing is something that requires less ability (it's a skill in its own right).
What I think is true is people cap out their technical competency, and look to shift their skillset and, globally, we are bad at a) training them to be good managers (because there is a wrong assumption it's an innate skill) and b) weeding out the many who also lack the ability to be a manager.
I've generally switched to management when I realised I was doing both great, complex technical work and management work my managers were failing at.
I fully subscribe to the Conway's law, so I love creating system architecture through organizational setup.
Agree, it’s a skill, it can be learned and improved, and of course some people have some natural ability.
But for every skill there’s a floor and a ceiling. The floor for managers is imo far lower than it is for tech ICs. Incompetent managers have many options to hide their misdeeds. That doesn’t say anything about the average or the ceiling.
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs.
They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery.
Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
Also makes for a poor metaphor, because coaches in sports are supposed to be absolute experts in absolutely everything about the sport without the physical ability to implement it.
Imagine if a football player told their coach "I'm not sure how to deal with this specific opponent's strategy" and the coach was like "Well have you tried thinking about it more?"
there are lots of sports coaches that were not good players, but they are absolute experts in their sport. For some reason we've let agile/life coaches convince us that "management" is the event and someone with customer service management experience has a lot to say about software development management. Ted Lasso is a great show, but it's not gonna happen IRL.
Though the Diamond Dogs would be a great peer group for Engineering Managers...
https://larahogan.me/blog/manager-voltron/
And plenty of great coaches that WERE very good players. Steve Kerr for instance had 5 NBA Championships as a player and is up to 4 as a Head Coach.
The "required" reading for newly minted managers in my $billion company was/is this shit called "One Minute Manager": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager, including "one minute reprimands" as if employees are children. Happily, I am no longer a manager.
So basically a crash course in psychoanalysis?
> "The Coaching Habit."
Oh wow. This comment just completely explained the worst "manager" I ever had. They must have been using this terrible method.
>no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
They nearly drove me insane with this circular cycle. It was the only job I ever walked out on. I emailed on a Sunday night that I would not be returning to the office after a particularly terrible cycle of this nonsense.
To be clear I am not a "needy" employee. When I ask a manager for something it is because I do not have the authority do the thing.
Tell the manager you are assuming their authority.
You will force the answer out of them either way
This is really how it’s done. Don’t go over their head; go under their boss’s.
I'm not sure you understand just how dedicated they were to this whole turn it back on the employee method they were apparently using. I just skimmed the summary on the book after reading this comment. Its a toxic method of avoiding accountability masquerading as "mgmt"
You can't do whatever you describe if it needs sign off by a manager that simply ghosts on everything you try to send their way. You can assume responsibility but I'm not committing fraud for a company that does not care.
Also what you said means that you are now officially responsible for the mistakes which I'm pretty sure is what this whole "method" is about.
One of my worst job experiences was when I depended on a colleague who wouldn't deliver. Any feedback or conversations with that colleague mostly resulted in tantrums and empty promises.
The lack of delivery severely harmed the services I provided to the company and to external users, ruined team morale, and was a huge source of stress.
My boss always turned the problem back on me, despite him also being my colleague's boss.
I tried everything I could for 18 months and had extensive documentation of all my attempts, sometimes working in parallel with my boss or using his recommendations.
Still, the problems persisted and every time I brought it up with my boss it was as if he was oblivious to the ongoing saga. I want to HR and over his head about it and he always fed me shit about "empowerment" and "growth."
Yeah, I was empowered to interview with other company's and grew into other new roles.
You're describing one end of an extreme.
The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.
E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.
Obviously there are cases where it's appropriate for you and a coworker to address a problem directly with each other. And there are cases where it makes more sense for your boss to intervene.
The problem is the culture at some jobs gravitate towards either end of the extreme. The ideal is somewhere in the middle. A good manager will find that balance.
> The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene.
What's wrong with that? Resolving conflicts is the boss' job. So long as the team mate is doing their actual job appropriately, that's all that matters.
> E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly.
The author should not be coming to you directly, going through the boss is the appropriate route. If the author's complaints were unreasonable, it should be the boss telling them that, not you. If your boss is coming to you, it means they feel the author's complaints are at least partially valid, and you should be hearing that from your boss, not the author.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if people bypass the manager to settle things directly, so long as both parties are comfortable with that, but it's not a happy medium.
Handling negative feedback on a PR is a necessary skill for a developer. A manager should only get involved if it becomes hostile. Negative is very far from hostile.
Handling negative feedback doesn't involve going to anybody - neither the manager, nor the person who gave the PR. Someone giving negative feedback is not supposed to be a conflict in need of resolution. We are talking about a situation where there is a conflict that needs to be resolved, ie that it has already become hostile.
If they are going to their manager, and then the manager, rather than convincing them that they are over-reacting, is instead going to you and telling you that there's something wrong with the feedback you gave, you should handle that negative feedback.
If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.
If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other. If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.
If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.
> If a manager is handling (almost) all disputes of all sorts, then they will fundamentally lack authority to enforce an outcome on a real dispute. They simply are too involved because resolution requires you to take some sort of side.
Bullshit. Being a routine mediator makes you a better mediator when big things come up, not a worse one. It means you are in tune with the particular needs and idiosyncrasies of the people involved, and assuming you are any good at it, it means you have the trust of all parties to mediate fairly.
> If my children won't speak to each other I will refuse to be the go between because I become a proxy for one to the other.
First of all, managing adults and parenting children are two radically different things. Second, being a go between is not handling a dispute, if anything it facilitates the dispute. Kids can't agree on whose turn it is to play with a toy? Toy gets taken away with the understanding they'll get it back when they agree to a system - that's conflict resolution.
> If one then punches the other they won't respect my perspective that this was wrong because I've set myself up as the proxy for the others feelings.
What?
> If you need a manger to resolve the above example, the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers.
The fact there is this conflict to resolve is evidence that the org is broken and the engineers are poor engineers, but given that there is a conflict, the manager should be the one resolving it, because, again, that is their job.
There's a good chance he was an executive's nephew or some other protected class.
If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control.
Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.
Control, responsibility and accountability have to align.
* You should only be accountable for what you are responsible for.
* You should only be responsible for what you have control of.
Bad managers hate this structure because in makes them accountable for themselves and their subordinates and prevents deflection of blame to low level employees.
Please compare and contrast "accountability" and "responsibility".
Responsibility without accountability is that it's your job to make sure something gets done but you don't face any real consequences for not doing it.
Accountability without responsibility is "being the final desk." Leadership is usually in this position where they aren't responsible for designing the product but they are accountable if it doesn't happen and they miss targets.
Being responsible for something while having little/no control is so demoralizing & infuriating.
Ah yes, the need for "influence without authority", i.e. "the real challenge of this project is that you have been organizationally set up to fail, and we expect you to find a way to succeed in spite of that."
This is what removed any lingering thoughts I had about moving up the corporate ladder. If in order to succeed I either need to do certain things or at least get other groups to do those things, and if I'm not allowed to do those things, and if no other group is willing to do those things, and if no one above me is going to change the circumstances, why on earth would anyone think this could be successful?
Isn't this what a PM does
As someone once again in such a role, it really is, and it never gets easier.
This is a wonderful, succinct way of capturing this danger to businesses as they grow & jump the gap!
It was clear the author never actually performed servant leadership. If they did, they would be writing a different article about how much work they did to support their team instead of “how much lack of work can I get away with”. They sounded like an absent manager.
Came here to say this. What he describes is not really servant leadership.
Servant leadership is more or less just the concept that the leader's job is to make sure the team are working to their full capacity. This is in contrast to authoritarian leadership which says that the team's job is to do whatever the leader tells them to do.
A lot of leaders have a problem with the "servant" in servant leadership, there's an ego hit in the title that doesn't sit well with people who have more authoritarian ideas about what leadership is. That doesn't seem to be the author's problem, though.
The author's idea of transparent leadership seems centred around the idea that the team doesn't need a leader, in that the leader should be trying to make themselves redundant and should be training everyone else to be able to function without them. I agree that this is an absent manager.
If they succeed in making themselves redundant, the team will have selected another, informal, leader. Possibly a dynamic set of leaders who each take up leadership in different circumstances. Humans just do this, it's how we work together.
I think the author just doesn't want to be a leader at all, and would prefer it if they could go back to solving technical problems. This is perfectly valid. Management isn't for everyone.
I suggest the author looks at Dyad Leadership [0] where the management role is split into two parts; one part provides the leadership role (setting the vision, coaching, quality, behaviours, etc) and the other provides the administration function (approving holidays, organising events, handling HR, etc). This is used in the healthcare industry a lot, and works in the right situation. It might work for the author because they're obviously providing leadership but don't seem keen about the management part.
In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power.
I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.
As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.
Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.
>> but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
Managers definitely need to contribute and this is a great way to do so, and also build credibility with your team. You don't get the fun or deep technical problems; that's not your job, but you can fulfill whatever transparent leadership is (I think?) by protecting your team from the noise (i.e. the shit umbrella) and contributing in a supporting role (the servant part). The hard / tiring thing is doing this consistently and repeatedly.
The reward is helping people hone their craft and grow in their careers. Being a shit shield sucks, but the trade-off is worth it.
For me the worst of this is organizations where employees have to write their own performance reviews. Eff that. You're the boss, you tell me how I'm doing. If there's one thing a manager should be accountable for it is the development and evaluation of the people the manager is responsible for.
No - Performance reviews are important legally, it's the only company IP you're entitled to take with you when you leave etc, so this is where you can have evidence of specific projects etc.
Also - If you write the PR you want to get and give to your manager, the burden of effort falls on the manager to correct it where they disagree. If your manager writes it, the burden of effort falls on the manager to comprehensively justify your value as a matter of record. It is better the former be halfassed than the latter
There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.
The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.
The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.
How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.
It isn't the best written piece, but your snippet feels taken grossly out of context. The rest of it:
"A common response is to invent new work, ask for status reports, and add bureaucracy. A better response is to go back to working on technical problems. This keeps the manager’s skills fresh and gets them more respect from their reports. The manager should turn into a high-powered spare worker, rather than a papersshuffler."
While being an IC and a manager is quite challenging, I think it's worth discussing the various permutations of it (only one of which is what the author has written about). It can lead to all sorts of systems (round robin leadership within a team being probably one of the most experimental). But for a more conservative, traditional system, there are many examples, e.g. Apple leadership coming out of former ICs.
First, let me make one thing clear: my comment was in no way meant to be a substitute for reading the post. I was not writing some kind of a review for people to decide whether they should read the post, or presenting a summary. I was commenting on what I disliked about it and everyone should read the post to form their own opinions.
That said, I disagree with you about the context. Yes, what you quoted is the immediate context, but I think the bigger context -- the one I described in the rest of my comment -- is the more important one.
Managers are welcome to try to integrate IC activities into their job. In fact, I wish more of them did it, so I didn't have to deal with managers who equate coding to "typing" and can't wait for the AI to replace those of us who have spent years honing that particular skill.
But the IC work should not come at the cost of doing what the manager is supposed to do in the first place: provide a higher level of integration and problem solving for their ICs. By "higher", I mean in the hierarchical sense. A manager is higher on the ladder than I am, and that means they should be able to see a wider perspective and help me integrate it into my work. And their manager should do that for them, so that they can pass it on to me, etc.
The author doesn't want to be a "paper-shuffler"? Guess what, that's one of the most important aspects of their job and, incidentally, one of the reasons why I didn't pick management as my career.
I can relate to the feeling of frustration one occasionally gets when a core aspect of one's job becomes unpleasant, but that's no excuse for straw man arguments.
That entire paragraph is a string of poorly-articultated, cringeworthy sentences. In fact the whole article seems to be a series of strawmen set up on the basis of oddly specific and naive interpretations of management concepts like "servant leadership". There's basically nothing in here that I would agree with as a blanket statement without a lot of company and org-specific provisos.
All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager, which is a common failure mode for newly converted IC to junior manager. Where he goes off the rails in the most tone-deaf way is describing that as "not doing useful work". As a manager your work is constantly observing what people are doing, staying the hell out of the way when things are working, and leaning in when things are not going well from a team and outcomes perspective. Doing that well is incredibly challenging and important work.
> All that said, to be charitable, I think what the author meant to express is that you don't want to make yourself a bottleneck as a manager,
That's not being charitable, that's just having basic interpretation skills of the very next sentence of the article.
Huh? The next sentence is: "The difference lies in what to do once one has rendered oneself redundant."
>solving all the other problems
I(we) call that running interference, and it has always been an extremely high value activity. The people who see the benefit rarely complain. I myself have always recognized it as valuable.
The biggest issue in the post is "creates direct links between supply and demand". One of the more important things to do as a manager is sit in hours of meetings so your reports can get a fifteen minute synopsis about the decisions made. And represent your reports in those meetings.
Yep, this is just a ploy to create a PMC that actually has no skill workers in it. You just shove MBAs, nepos, etc into these roles and just have them gobble up some managerial course which is often nothing but: delegate, CYA, and 'manage expectations.'
I dont think we need to go back to the old ideas of The Manager who is Above It All and Doesn't Get Their Hands Dirty. At least at middle levels.
>Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
One of the reasons I really like my current manager is he spends a lot more time reminding us he can/offering to "take care of any blockers." His whole management style can be summed up as "Why is it blocked? Ok, leave it to me." Frankly I love it. If it's something we should take care of he's very specific about it too.
My first manager at Amazon was like that. Loved him to pieces. He didn't micro-manage, he didn't even fully care about the scrum. Just said "I can see the ticket status myself. If you are blocked by something, need any info or resource, I'll hunt it down for you, otherwise you keep cooking".
I often describe myself as a bulldozer for my team. My job is to lay out clear expectations, do my best to steady the course free of external chaos, and bulldoze a clear path for the team to get stuff done.
Agree and follow this principle to certain degree, however there are caveats here - something being a blocker shouldn't prevent you from trying to resolve the blockers by yourself or work with your boss to resolve them ie - "hey boss, I'm blocked with task A with refactor of this code; are you happy for me to do XYZ?". Then I have options to say: "yes! excellent! go ahead!" or "no, we need to do ASD here" or "no, we cannot do XYZ right now". If every time people encountering blockers would come to me to resolve them, or wait until they're resolved I'd not get anything done. On the flipside, if every time a blocker is encountered people were to handle it themselves, then a) it might not align with my vision on what actually needs to be done here b) I'm blindsighted with what was actually done.
Clear boundaries and strategies eliminate these caveats = team members are aligned on what they can make decision for and general direction the team is heading towards.
Yeah like I said if we are straying in to over-reliance/not really doing our job, he clearly lays out what to do and says "there go take care of it" a few times. He does a good job of not fostering a culture of constantly playing CYA
Reminds me of something Joel Spolsky wrote about on his blog. The best managers were those who "moved the furniture out the way". Basically clear the way for the people working on the problem to do so.
Like that metaphor
> it starts with a straw man argument ...
Perhaps they have, but there are also no shortage of middle managers that are adequately described by it. I worked for one for a few years.
Friendly reminder that management exists to get you to justify your expensive pay check. Every employer-employee relationship is adversarial. Adjust accordingly.
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
There's a big difference between protecting a team from all the shit and hiding it from them completely.
It's good to be a transparent shit umbrella. The team should absolutely have visibility into what's going on, and understand why certain decisions are being made, but a good manager does need to step in to avoid the shit hitting them directly.
Love the idea of the transparent shit umbrella.
Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?
I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.
Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.
Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.
To your point about dysfunctional orgs:
After deploying your transparent shit umbrella, your next problem is your own shitty boss or your boss's boss who will get pissed off you are using a transparent umbrella once that transparency starts blowingback on them. Because once your team learns that it's raining shit outside, they will want to know what you're doing to mitigate, reverse, or sidestep the shit. Some of the time, the things you confide to your team in the course of this feedback will piss off adjacent teams or some people up the ladder once they get wind of it (your opinion of some decisions, or the perceived negative consequences of your mitigation strategy on said people) Hence your umbrella being transparent makes what people euphemistically call "managing up" much more fucking annoying. I don't claim that there is an alternative, just that it's a fact of the principled life (one result being getting fired, often ironically for not being a "team player"). I don't have a fix, but would like to hear some if anyone has any.
> But they need to FEEL the weather
You mean they need to smell it!
"Transparent shit umbrella" is indeed a much more useful metaphor.
You CAN tell the team it's raining and details of the weather without letting them get overly wet.
There's middle ground here.
Agree. team needs to know about the shit. It's important information that helps them prioritize their work and motivates them as they know that what they do is important for the bigger bosses. If manager shields me from everything I go apathetic, not knowing why I even do the boring stuff if manager doesn't tell me his manager is giving shit
I hate having to rely on my own sense of what happened in a meeting, or which executive is upset about something. While its usually accurate, it's been borne out of chaotic leadership and shouldn't be necessary, especially if its to try to get off the tracks when a freight train is coming.
Sometimes the culture of poor management is so ingrained and normalized people really don't understand what the problem is. That usually ends with me looking elsewhere, as taking on the responsibility other's won't while not having authority has lead to multiple full years lost to burnout.
I'm laughing because I used that exact same phrase: "shit umbrella". Like some of the other replies mentioned, telling your team it's raining is great. The balance I found was to let them know what's coming and why but to let leadership's "pivots" to stabilize for a few days before sharing the unfiltered shit stream with my reports. This meant that the team still knew what was going on early but didn't panic as much when there was a sudden crazy random request from leadership that would be highly disruptive.
You do need to expose your team to some of the shit that's getting flung or else your team gets used to operating under clean conditions and loses its tolerance.
For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)
In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.
Shit umbrella is not a great analogy. More like a shit filter. Let through what needs to be let through and block all the distracting crap.
Distinguish between "seeing the shit" and "being hit by it all".
The metaphor I prefer is to be a transparent shit umbrella.
An opaque umbrella doesn't hide the rain, it just keeps it from falling on you.
A shit umbrella is not a two way block. It keeps shit from falling onto the employees but doesn’t prevent employees from knowing what is happening at higher leadership levels.
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too.
I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
There is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, but without that contrast in mind, you can easily lose track of what the terms mean. The article does a decent job of trying to find a healthier middle ground, IMO.
The problem is when things evolve we no longer know if someone refers to the evolved form or the original. Or more importantly if the evolved form retains the important parts of the original.
Exactly. And like evolution, what of the millions of species it evolved to are referring to.
IMHO either stick with the original, or say “like X with following changes/details” or just go with a new thing.
The problem with servant leadership is twofold:
Firstly, in 'proper' servant leadership as taught by Greenleaf the leader is supposed to put the church before their own needs and wants. It is not about serving the people who report to you; it's about serving the organisation first. In a business context that's horribly toxic and a great way to spend years being exploited by a company that will grind you to burnout for very little money. Thankfully most people don't actually follow what Greenleaf teaches because they think it's about the people.
Secondly though, people don't bother to read much about it. They hear the term and a basic summary, and then fill in the blanks based on their own biases and assumptions. Consequently when someone says they practise servant leadership you can't know what they mean unless you know them well. People who practise their version of servant leadership assume other people mean the same thing by it, and automatically align themselves with that person based on (probably) false assumptions. It is not a helpful term because it's used for a huge range of leadership styles.
Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long you’re aware you you’re serving and who you’re working peer to peer with/against/whatever.
Another term for it somewhat is being a “players coach.”
End state is you will build loyal as heck teams with it, and if you want to take a very cynical business mindset, it produces with the least pain and suffering three very impotent outcomes - your team will produce output, they won’t hate you along the way, and your team will write you (well earned) manager perf reviews. A manager who has a loyal as heck team up and down the stack builds unique odds of corporate survival.
All it takes is a little EQ.
I don't think they interpreted it correctly anyway.
All these trendy management things either go back to straight-up bullshit (this is the more common case) or some non-bullshit thing that's been ripped out of its original context such that it becomes bullshit.
Just wanted to provide a useful link on the topic of leadership. The US army publishes its doctrine for free and updates it somewhat regularly:
https://talent.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ARN20039_...
The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in leadership.
Last published 2019.
I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:
> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect
Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.
Because of the Ukraine conflict, the phrase "mission command" came to my attention. It's about C2 rather than leadership but another one of those gems we might filter out in our "Bay Area" (you're all terminally online Europeans / teenagers jk) bubble.
The idea of mission command is pretty simple. If you see an incidental opportunity that will contribute to the big picture and pursuing it won't compromise the objective of your orders, take it. IIRC they call it something like "scoped initiative."
If you see an incidental opportunity that you can't take because it would compromise your local objective, you escalate. Up the chain, in the larger scope, that incidental opportunity that would compromise the objective of the smaller unit may be addressable using some available resources of the bigger unit.
It works by deduction and beautifully because you get the best of both individual initiative and large-scale coordination. It's an example where from-first-principle CS and pragmatic emergent systems resonate because it's near a morally true optimum.
In the context of OP, knowing the objective of your larger 1-2 organization levels is all the transparency that is every necessary. Neurons aren't smart. Information flows in a network are smart. Don't trust people who start performing and asking for transparency because ninety-nine times out of ten, they can't do better with what they ask for but will make everyone else do worse by breaking the cohesion.
And finally I read OP. It's a vapid feel-good long-form tweet that is nothing compared to the comment section.
> ninety-nine times out of ten
that gave me a chuckle
> no-nonsense, no-fluff document
> Links ~100 pages pdf
> US army
Yeah that checks out...
I kid. Thanks for the share though!
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on.
Man was I wrong.
The US military has by far the best, all encompassing, most focused and persistently updating leadership development and it’s STILL absolutely garbage.
There’s ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
It sounds like you have been burnt, badly.
There is surely a business out there that does fit your world view, though the pay and conditions might not.
In my view, the need for growth at any cost is toxic and leads to all sorts of horrible behaviours.
There are no good organizations, only ones that aren’t completely corrupt yet. Consider that to start and maintain an organization takes significant capital and energy expenditures upfront, which means you need to fund them from somewhere and ask sources of funding are corrupted. Consider: there are no long lasting egalitarian, distributed power, grassroots organizations that can compete at a level of social influence that can overcome or resist the existing power structure.
I’ve looked at every possible organization that could theoretically fit including; MSF a.k.a. doctors without borders, swords to plowshares, goodwill industries (who employ significant numbers of disabled people for sub min wages while the CEO makes 3M+), Mondragon etc… and they all have exactly the same fucked up incentives
why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.
unless your organization is the lead maximalist resource dominator you will be overrun by some organization with no ethics
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that people have to trade physical and mental work for money to survive. So there is no alternative to do the “right thing” without also risking your own safety and stability in your chosen society. 99.99999% of people are completely unwilling to risk their life on behalf of any particular philosophy - if only because those people don’t feel strongly enough about any particular philosophy to actually put themselves on the line for it.
So whoever has the most money, has the ability to get the most people to work for their goals.
Unfortunately the people with all the money/power do not care about anything other than growing their own personal power
> why? because there is no way to survive as a structure, if your org is made up of people who want to eat and don’t want to be a monk.
The worse offenders in terms of corrupting power structures seem to be religious organisations, so being a monk is out too.
That power eventually corrupts shouldn’t rule out an organisation, but if it does, start your own and keep it to one employee.
I’d be curious what you identified as the shortcomings of e.g. MSF or Mondragon. I might throw semi-decentralized social ventures like the IFRC in the mix there too: that emblem alone sure carries an almost-talismanic degree of social weight, seemingly worldwide, I think in large part because they’re foresworn from swinging around their influence outside of their lane.
And I mean… “don’t want to live like a monk” seems like a telling qualifier: the whole monastic lifestyle seems pretty widespread and enduring across cultures and through time… is the humbler mode of religious devotion an example of what you’re looking for?
In any case you’ve clearly thought deeply and widely about this question—I’d be interested to read your thoughts if you end up collecting them somewhere!
I’m simply acknowledging that only a tiny fraction of any group will find themselves devoted to the group in the “monastic” way of self erasure
That's quite a strong claim. I disagree. Military leadership, like business leadership, is imperfect. Both vary based on individuals, the operating environment, and culture.
I'm pretty sure software development of a website doesn't translate to a life and death situation that US army is dealing with. If anything it's why there is so many managers who think this works as if we are solving lives so they have to be strict and we all have to be strict and everyone needs to have their story points updated. The reason why most people went into software development is because they like building stuff so you have to inspire that - it's quite different to why people join US army.
My 2 cents on the actual manager philosophy is that it depends on the organization and the personal and cultural differences of the team members, some people like leaders, some people like servants and some like equality. At the end of the day everyone has to be aware they do work for the business and why they do stuff. The manager has to make that aware and inspire people.
Team topologies Shapeup Sooner Safer Happier
I think those fit most companies.
I was never taught that servant leadership should be some weird "manager as parent" relationship.
Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.
Exactly.
It’s the concept of a management chart as an inverted pyramid with each layer holding up and supporting the layer above them. If you imagine a promotion as working your way down the corporate pyramid, then it’s easier to see how the managers at the bottom are carrying more weight and deserving of higher pay.
As opposed to a pyramid where it’s visually represented as the broader management layers supporting the layers above them.
In a pyramid, it looks like the CEO has a cushy, overpaid job. In an inverted pyramid it looks like they have the weight and responsibility of the company on their shoulders.
Very succinct, I agree.
I honestly have never heard anyone—even those executing it poorly—try to frame Servant Leadership the way the original author did here (the "curling parent" analogy).
I have certainly seen people fail badly at practicing this style, but that failure was invariably due to a lack of character, poor communication skills, or other individual execution matters, not an issue with the core concept of servant leadership itself.
Yes indeed. Thank you.
Author gives own take on what they thinks servant leadership means, then invents a supposedly different kind of leadership that is just servant leadership, taken into a different context than the original church one, then gives it a new name, one that doesn't really tie into their definition.
This is just trying too hard. "Servant Leadership" is a buzzword invented to divert the general opinion from the power mechanics that hierarchical organizations are funded upon, i.e., the boss (sorry, leader) commands and the direct reports execute. Being "servant" basically just means being a decent human being, as per putting people in the right condition to carry out their duties, not coming up with unrealistic expectations, and do the required 1:1 coaching/mentoring for career development.
Hand-helding employees as this "blocker removal" interpretation of servant leadership seems to imply is just the pathway to micromanagement. It's ok to shield your juniors from the confusing world of corporate politics, but if your direct reports need you to do a lot of the sanitization/maturation of work items and requirements then why should you even trust their outputs? At that point you're basically just using them as you would prompt an AI agent, double- and triple-checking everything they do, checking-in 3 times a day, etc.
This "transparent" leadership is the servant leadership, or what it's intended to be anyway in an ideal world. Some elements of it are easily applicable, like the whole coaching/connecting/teaching, but they also are the least measurable in terms of impact. The "making yourself redundant", i.e., by avoiding being the bottleneck middle-man without whose approval/scrutiny nothing can get done is fantasy for flat organizations or magical rainbowland companies where ICs and managers are on the exact same salary scale. And it will continue to be as long as corporate success (and career-growth opportunities) is generally measured as a factor of number of reports / size of org. managed.
"Servant leadership" is not a buzzword but it's been misused and abused by Big Corporations to the point that it basically lost its meaning [1].
For me - personally - the idea is about being less of a boss and more of a nightwatchman or janitor.
I believe in agency and ownership and - in sane environment - people can be left alone with clear objectives. It's more about removing obstacles.
I'll give you a simple example.
Once a week a maid comes to our apartment. Despite a clear power balance disproportion (it's easier to find a new maid than a senior engineer) and her being used to being transparent and prioritizing to not disturb tenants for me it's the other way around. I'm super happy to hastily finish a call or leave my room is she feels the need to disturb me, and if she needs an extra pair of hands I'm happy to help her with anything. After all, I'm more interested with the final result than feeling important.
We have a bucket list of tasks than has to be performed that slightly exceeds her capacity and she has a full right to prioritize things. It took my a while but I eventually convinced her that it's ok to skip things - like cleaning the windows - if she's feeling under the weather or it's cold outside rather than faking it.
Most of the pointy hairs I worked in corporate environments would probably prepare a list of requirements and walked through the apartment with a checklist every time she would finish giving her a full, harsh performance review.
But that doesn't build trust and long term relationship.
And after some time she developed - what people around here call ownership - and sometimes I feel she cares about the household more than I do.
Hope that makes sense.
I forgot where I read it (Steve McConnell?) but the best analogy I've heard for a boss/project leader is to think of your job is moving a house and the bosses job is to be a few streets ahead taking down telephone pole wires so you aren't slowed down.
This.
Or, to give a counter example:
'Management' is not one size fits all. Every company is different. Its needs are different. What a manager is supposed to do is different too. If someone behaves the same way as a manager no matter the company or the people they work with, I think that's terrible.
Being a manager is about listening. It is about tuning into the environment. It is about being there for the team in whatever way they need support. Sometimes that means being a coach. Other times it means fighting for them. And sometimes, when an unpopular decision is made above your pay grade, it means breaking it down for the team in a way that they 'get it'. You want them to understand without completely losing morale or slipping into rebellion.
Brutal honesty sounds great on paper. But not everyone can handle it or is ready for it.
It is a balancing act. Even if everyone "knows", bitch*ng about the company to your reports can only lead to bad outcomes. So you acknowledge the company's shortcomings. At the same time, you try to help the team find purpose and fulfillment in other ways.
Having a bad manager in past roles can be some of the best "manager training."
If one your past managers did something recommended in this article but it caused problems, that's ok! It just means you have seen another failure mode that the author didn't experience.
I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the best managers at a former company. "Why did you originally want to be a manager?" was one of the first questions passed around the circle. The most common answer was, "I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
> I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better.
The only thing worse than being invited to a lot of meetings is not being invited to those meetings.
>"I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."
That doesn't mean that those people are learning from prior bad management. That could instead mean that management tends to be people who are convinced of their own above average competence.
Did anyone ask the reports of those managers whether they were any good?
With "servant leadership" in its current form being attributed to Greenleaf, here is the "source of truth" on servant leadership: https://greenleaf.org/what-is-servant-leadership/
"Growth" of those being led is a key concept it seems, which I would think is really only possible when the leader doesn't do everything by themselves as a die-hard servant, but utilizes the "leadership" part to help subordinates learn to lead themselves.
Granted this realm of ideas can be a gray-area, but it seems like servant leadership as presented by the author here does not incorporate the concept of growing those that they lead -- as indicated by the fact they have self-invented a new "buzzword" which actually seems to be involve the behaviors as laid out by servant leadership -- am I missing something?
I want to reproblematise the word ‘leadership’ here. The phrase ‘servant leadership’ is actually a paradigm shift away from classic ‘out-the-front’ ‘the-boss-knows-best’ ‘dominate-others’ leadership.
What the author is missing is parallelisation. By definition in systems of clear one person in charge leadership the work bottlenecks and power centralises, hard.
In models of servant leadership, it’s possible for multiple people to bring leadership and leadership skills all at once.
In a group of a dozen or more people, huge bottlenecks and ego power crap are resolved as multiple people can bring servant leadership.
It’s single core vs parallel, in the later leadership can then come from all participants, even the very young and vulnerable involved in the group can learn to do this.
The emphasis is on skill sharing and being of service OVER power hoarding.
The problem I've found with servant leadership in large orgs is the direct manager usually has little agency over problems. The best you can get is maybe they can provide additional context on the good intentions behind the bad decisions. This is essentially by design, a critical role they play are to be the scape goats and shock absorbers for the bad machinery above them.
> Servant leadership seems to me a lot like curling parenting: the leader/parent anticipate problems and sweep the way for their direct reports/children.
That's not what "Servant leadership" is. It's about _letting the team lead_ - and they can come to you if they need help - instead of _pushing the team_. So in practice it's the opposite of anticipating problems. If something, servant leadership gets a bad rep for being used as an excuse to let people fall on the sword, instead of protecting them
The rest of the post is just describing the role of "Management".
Looking back at the best leaders I've ever worked for, they all followed that philosophy that was explicitly stated at Netflix: Context not Control.
The goal of the manager was to explain to their reports what problems the team need to solves and why. Make sure the team was aware of any factors elsewhere in the org that might make a difference, and then connect the people on their team with the people on other teams who they need to talk to.
Beyond that the leader's job was to seek out such context from their peers and leadership.
But then it was up to the IC to figure out the how. The manager never told me how to accomplish the task unless I asked, and that was more of a mentorship than as a manager. And when I was a junior, most of that mentorship came from my more senior peers than my manager.
Yeah, this makes sense. What I am missing from both the blogpost and the comments is that the most valuable contribution a manager can provide is information and not some elusive, esotheric, corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo. And when I write information I mean information in advance (you can call this call for comments if you wish), not after the fact when decisions have been already made. 99% of managers rather focus on some self-patting feel good mindfulness guru teachings instead, and I wonder why...?
Between the article and the comments in this thread there is actually some pretty good advice here and reasonable and nuanced takes to management.
Bit surprised by this. Has the hn community aged into management or something?
I guess we are not as young and naive as we used to be...
I've noticed a number of pieces lately that seem to suggest that managers and leaders doing nothing is actually good. It's been this way for a while - "bring me solutions, not problems" is the classic boss's abdication, placing themselves above their teams as judges and deciders rather than leaders - but I wonder if this current glut is caused by AI anxiety. After all, if your job is to just choose between options that other people will implement, why not have Claude do that? But if it's a good thing for your boss to do nothing, maybe he can keep his job.
> “bring me solutions, not problems"
If someone says this unprompted, I’d suspect they aren’t a manager, they aren’t even an employee. They provide roughly the same input one provides while ordering food at a restaurant. Basically they are a customer, but also on the payroll.
That being said, there are some cases where this might be said out of frustration. I’ve seen in my life a few people whose output is mostly finding and bringing issues to the table for someone else (who?) to magically solve them. That still brings some value, and maybe they’d make excellent auditors, but it wears the team and maybe their managers down.
When I say something like this it usually means “I don’t want to dictate your job to you. You’re here because you’re smart, ambitious, and capable. We’ve talked at length in team settings and 1:1 about our goals. What do you think are the problems that need attention, and what solutions do you propose?”
The anti-pattern I’ve seen from some folks is that they never want to propose solutions because then it’s someone else’s fault if those fail. These folks often demonstrate minimal ownership of any decisions, so they don’t feel bad complaining about all the problems they see. Not only is that unhelpful, it can actually be very toxic for the team. (As you mentioned.)
So when I’m saying “bring solutions” what I’m really asking for is some shared ownership of the choices and consequences—I’m asking folks to act like the main character in the story. And don’t worry, I own the consequences of the mistakes in my team to my leadership—this isn’t about throwing them under the bus. (Getting this to work well requires a lot of trust both ways.)
> When I say something like this it usually means…
Yes, exactly. This isn’t “do my job for me”, this is “do the job you have, and solve the problems you should be able to solve”. It’s also, at times, “pointing at fires is junior shit - find a fire extinguisher while you call 911.”
Sometimes bosses will repeat your idea to sound like he solutioned it for you, without taking e.g. workload or priority into account.
I haven't met a boss that wasn't incompetent. Not saying they don't exist, though.
But see, Claude can do nothing even better than it can choose between options. So why should that boss keep his job again?
"Bring me solutions, not problems" can mean "You are a competent, knowledgeable employee, who has identified a problem. You know enough to look at the alternatives and decide which is best, or at least which ones are workable. Bring me that, not just the problem."
And if it does mean that, it's empowering. You with your hands on the situation, you get to tell the boss what you think the best answer is, and the boss backstops you from deciding something that won't work in the bigger picture.
What I am missing from both the blogpost and the comments is that the most valuable contribution a manager can provide is information and not some elusive, esotheric, corporate-speak mumbo-jumbo. And when I write information I mean information in advance (you can call this call for comments if you wish), not after the fact when decisions have been already made. 99% of managers rather focus on some self-patting feel good mindfulness guru teachings instead, and I wonder why...?
I once worked for a guy who'd obviously seen the term Servant Leadership on a bumper sticker somewhere and figured that meant he was the leader and we were the servants. Worst boss I ever had, and I've been doing this 30+ years and have had a bunch of bad bosses.
Why not just 'competent leadership', where 'competent' means 'figure out what your people need you to do and do it'?
I appreciated the parallels in this idea to the concept of wu wei (無為), or achieving by doing nothing. The idea appears in writing attributed to Confucius and Lao Zi, that regarding political leadership, the best leaders can order their group or society even simply by the strong example that they set and correct judgments that they execute. This isn't meant to be carried to its extreme of course, a leader doesn't do nothing all day, and may indeed pitch in to work, but they should be making time to think and reflect. I read it as an ideal (you know when things are good when you can do nothing), not as an instruction (do nothing).
> continuously trains their replacement, and > generally makes themselves redundant.
This is the advice we get from many business books and leadership advices. However, I see more often than not leaders in a company do the opposite to keep their power. There is a missing link to making the good advice actionable: what can the leader do to keep becoming more valuable while making themselves "redundant".
IMO: I think there is a helpful distinction to be made between leadership and management. Leadership provides purpose and inspiration. Management provides, coordination and motivation. I’m not saying one person can’t do both.
I do agree that most management books read like parenting books - but I’d add that whats more important than the method is consistency in whatever approach you believe in. I’m not sure that managers/leaders will ever do that well relying on a book or a special ‘way’ they have read. They really need to have worked this out for themselves.
I think the premise is a little shaky since a good servant leader is already transparent. But there's some good takeaways. Leaders should inform their team of what's happening behind the scenes and allow them to understand why things are playing out the way they are. Allowing people to take on more responsibility, if they want it, is a healthy sign of an organization, but it shouldn't be imposed nor expected if they already have enough on their plates.
I don’t really relate to many comments here stating “my approach is X”, or “I went from servant-leader to process-master-whatever leader”.
I’ve found that trying to be anything but flexible to the environment is unrealistic and even egotistical.
E.g, There are some environments where the CEO is so “command and control” that the “I want us all to bring our authentic selves to the peace circle of work, and from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, we will figure out a synergy that works for all” just won’t ever work.
And for me, being unable to adapt the approach to environment suggests ‘one trick pony’.
‘one trick pony’
Yeah, shallow dismissal of people's effort to try to make a change must be because they are a ‘one trick pony’. Is that all you brought to the conversation?
All these comments are from the standpoint of being managed, with a derogatory view of someone who would stoop so low as to take a management role. I liked the article. Managing people is ass hard. Doing so is a way to make peoples working lives better, anf to tackle problems larger than a single person can accomplish. Thinking about how to do it better is good thing. It takes courage.
I think this is the attitude that most people take issue with that this comment represents.
So please tell us why we are wrong? Because I can just go and claim in the same vein of your comment to say: "Managing people is easy peasy"
It is pleasantly sensible since servant leadership in a sense creates an innocence because of the incents; the underlying reality is that wisdom dwells with prudence. Principles of revelation arise from incentive compatibility. Aiming at the apparent target is good hearted folly.
The biggest omission that immediately stands out to me is: "provides a clear sense of direction".
I've seen so many examples of teams and organizations that experience a lack of clarity, with all sorts of negative downstream consequences - muddled strategies, moving goalposts, fatigue/low morale. Having a leader that can provide that clarity is so important.
Hmmm.
"transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader
coaches people"
So ... why does coaching people require transparent leadership?
I think people can be sneaky and secretive; or transparent. Both can easily be used for coaching and training and teaching people. The other points have a similar issue in my opinion. The article is more like a "feel-good" statement - people subscribe to "be nice and kind". But are all leaders nice and kind? Are evil and mean leaders automatically incompetent and ineffective? I think the analysis part should be decoupled from ethics in regards to "xyz beats abc". One has to define what the goal is.
For instance, some CEO firing 50% of the people will be critisized by many - but greedy shareholders may get more money that way, so for them they may prefer a CEO that is mean-spirited here. That same mean-spirited CEO could be an awesome family guy and super-friendly with his close reallife friends and family, but when it comes to the company, he is ruthless. And so on and so forth.
This article is a great example of the Strawman Fallacy. I suppose it's a method to generate traffic but I would argue a key aspect of servant leadership is being transparent that you are in a role that should collectively support and lead to enable and expand the team.
I feel attributing any sort of parental concepts belittles the meaning here.
I think the author is significantly straw-manning the concept of servant leadership.
The short take presented in the article doesn't match my lived experience with this style, both in secular and faith-based circles. The core idea is absolutely not that of a "curling parent." Instead, it embodies living the walk, walking the talk, and putting the team's needs before your own ego.
In fact, this profound concept goes all the way back to Jesus Christ, who modeled it by washing the feet of his disciples—a task reserved for the lowliest servant of the time. This act was deliberately shocking and context-defying. He effectively "turned the world upside down" by saying, "Anyone who wants to be first must be the very last, and the servant of all."
I'm not trying to proof-text, but this idea is ancient and deep. It's a profound leadership style that is unfortunately often executed poorly or misunderstood by modern practitioners. Poor execution doesn't invalidate the concept itself.
Some good points to think about. But also note that sometimes you can shield and assist a team on things you can't be transparent about with the team.
So a hybrid of the two schools of thought might be better than either one (depending on the larger org).
I've come to define Leadership as
"The ability to smooth things out for everyone while helping them accomplish their goals"
I think it helps differentiate the "authoritarian" leader or the "Servant leadership" from the "legitimate" one. All kinds of leadership (sports, education, business, relationships) come from understanding people's needs and providing more efficient strategies to meet them.
Managing upwards beats being managed in my experience. Seems to work with most managers, and reduces surprises which reduces stress all around and causes course corrections and course alignments earlier.
I tend to do status updates in public channels before anyone can ask me but I've been the fortunate loner for the last couple years where I get to work with a lot of people but outside a lot of process.
The founder of Zingerman's (famous deli and family of businesses in Ann Arbor) description of servant leadership is a bit more complete and overlaps heavily with what the author of this post is advocating for:
https://www.zingtrain.com/article/servant-leadership/
I have a few management tips I think are worth something, perhaps I'll start with this one.
Take all the things you don't like about your former managers, and don't do them.
Then take all the things you thought were good and copy them.
That's it
> Teach a man to to fish
“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Don’t teach a man to fish… and you feed yourself. He’s a grown man. And fishing’s not that hard.”
This is actually not such bad advice for a manager who manages other managers, though I can see why ICs find it very frustrating. If you are giving high level platitudes and counseling-disguised-as-coaching to a junior new hire, they can rightly ask WTF. But managers, especially those recently moved from IC tech roles, often do benefit from this kind of forced introspection. If they have an underperforming employee, they should bounce ideas around with a more experienced manager, but the first line manager ultimately needs to be the one deciding how to rebalance work to maximize learning or to ultimately make the call to part ways with the employee. If a servant senior leader over them is actually doing the slog of working through the hardest issues (interpersonal conflict, serious direction change needed for team, firing people, top performers at risk of leaving), the first line manager is never going to grow. Similarly "cut out the middleman" advice in the article is great for senior ICs/quasi-architects or sub-managers but potentially toxic for junior engineers who may get steamrolled by the classic "1000 urgent requests issue" that managers or potentially very senior ICs need to drive.
Why is forced introspection good for managers but not for ICs?
I’m not saying that the extreme “I do nothing except act as a sounding board and tell my team to solve their own problems” is a good approach. But pushing people to solve their own problems does help them grow. It needs to be a balance.
A good manager should be able to see what someone is capable of solving with zero, a little, or a lot of help and engage accordingly. And sometimes they can’t solve it at all and the manager has to take it in directly or pull in someone else who can.
>transparent leadership. In my book, a good leader ...
I practice this in my day job, as in that is the default mode for continued employment. Not sure how these practices are new. I wonder if it is a generational thing.
That's interesting.
I did everything he mentions in "Transparent Leadership," but also the stuff he talks about in "Curling Parenting."
I did it for 25 years. Seemed to work. I kept my job.
In my company, Personal Integrity and Honesty were very important. Not sure how representative that is, in today's world. It was an old-fashioned Japanese corporation.
If the dishonesty worked, you never know it happened!
So you can never tell how much of it there really is…
> If the dishonesty worked
Try it in an old-fashioned Japanese company, and let me know how it works out. They tend to verify a lot.
I saw some real disasters, when their culture clashed with modern SV culture.
In a world where we've walked away from master/slave, blacklists.. why is servant still being used?
What historical systematic injustice do you associate this word with?
Serfdom.
I can't remember where I heard this, but the moment it flipped for me is when someone phrased this as - "be a heat shield".
A heat shield has some leakage of heat that the people inside know that there's heat, but enough cover that the team is shielded somewhat.
I suspect this is written by someone who stepped into managing a team and no further.
My reflection overall is; he's probably heard of servant leadership but not understood it? It's not about sweeping away problems but more a mindset that your role is to empower. I feel strongly that all new managers should embrace and get good at this because it instills the mindset that the best leaders ultimately only succeed through their team.
A servant leader who becomes overworked is either not doing their job well (delegation isn't contrary to the mindset!) or, more likely, has a poor leader themselvesw.
I actually love the concept of transparent leadership but sadly I can't see it come through in his points. They are all things a good leader, a good servant leader, should also do.
For me transparent leadership becomes more critical as you move up the stack. Once you get to multiple teams or teams of teams leaders must pivot strongly to strategy setting, and in this your servant leadership comes in painting a clear destination for everyone to get to.
At this point I believe the best leaders are genuinely transparent and the worst keep secrets. One of my most respected mentors framed it as deliberately over-sharing. Which I love, even if I get into trouble for it constantly!
(I do like the writers anarchic streak; the best leaders are radicals)
Kind of a weird hyper-literal interpretation of "servant leadership" IMO. Upskilling and empowering your team, not making yourself a SPOF, treating your adult colleagues like adults, all sounds like servant leadership to me...
Coming from the Sales world sometimes I don't want to be taught to fish.
I'm coming to my VP for help because I already tried diff baits, went to diff ponds, and tried diff reels. I'm coming for a fish finder not a lecture on maybe my casting was off
Servant leadership to me always meant that as a manager I am a servant to the team. Pretty sure that was the intended meaning of it.
Can’t wait for AI Slack plugins to replace all low tier middle managers. You can achieve so much transparency since the data is already out there anyway.
There has to be a better way to organize how ICs communicate. More productivity to unlock.
That's not going to fix the social problems. What happens when your team needs something from another team?
We should stop normalizing referring to managers or employers as leaders. These are different things.
I think this has somewhat strawmanned “servant leadership,” which is more about humility in posture than purely intercepting annoyances and blockers, but nevertheless the conclusions are solid.
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is. I identify as such, but I also do just about all of the "Transparent Leadership" things called out in the article. I may have to re-evaluate my orientation.
There's only one place I disagree and that's when it comes to empowering the team to do every last thing within your charge ("become redundant"). Depending on the organization, there are some actions that only a manager is empowered to do. Someone still needs to be present to weigh in on disputes/arguments, break ties, handle performance, reviews, interviews, PIPs, dismissals, and handle _other_ managers when necessary. It's simply not possible delegate these things and in the case of dealing with other managers, can imperil a person's employment.
Also, I would caution anyone to avoid directly comparing management to parenthood, even as a metaphor. A lot of people have terrible parents, and so model the worst behaviors: they can't nurture a houseplant let alone a human being. I've seen people like this bring the worst possible models for management into the workplace this way, and they do a ton of damage to businesses, psyches, and careers in return. Instead, I urge anyone to look to the carpenter/gardener dichotomy and how good leadership requires a bit of both:
https://www.intellicoach.com/ep14/
I must have misunderstood what "Servant Leadership" actually is.
You did not. Or, at least we share an understanding of what the term means which differs substantially from the author's.
Love this, thank you for sharing.
leadership is not a role it is a shared responsibility; an emergent effect we can all nurture.
Comparing leadership to parenting right out the gate tells me all I need to know about this person's management ability.
Your direct reports are not children. You are not raising them out of an altruistic drive to guide the next generation. You are a part of a team of grown adults. You are not above the team, you have a roll on the team. It is an important roll: as a leader you provide high level direction so people are working towards the appropriate goal and confident it is achievable. Likely you are also acting as a manager, coordinating resources and resolving internal and external stakeholder conflicts. This makes the team more efficient, it's important.
But the people you are leading are the ones actually doing the work. They are likely more skilled at their particular role than you, and knowledgeable about much more. You are not leading them because you are better, you are leading them because that's how you can best contribute to the team.
Leadership has absolutely nothing to do with coaching, connecting, teaching, explaining, linking, growth inducing, or training their subordinates. Zero. Zip. Nada. It is the role of more senior practitioners to mentor their more junior colleagues. Leaders often are drawn from more senior ranks, so it's not uncommon for a person in a leadership role to also be in a mentoring role, but they are two separate and unrelated positions. If anything, the most important skill of a good leader is effectively soliciting the right information and wisdom from the right team members so they can most effectively leverage their team's expertise.
You shouldn't be teaching everyone how to communicate with the customer well, you should be identifying the person who is already great at such communication and making sure the rest of the team is giving them what they need to communicate effectively. The person who is great at such communication should be the one teaching that communication to their peers, and not through coaching but by showing everyone how it's done.
A leadership style of getting your direct reports to do your job for you is transparent in the sense that your subordinates will see right through you.
Role*
Sorry
Thanks
Excellent analysis. It’s like: servant of whom (themselves)?
My worst managers were “transparent” as in they were basically a telephone game actor between me and my skip, with a little extra anxiety mixed in. Needless to say, I couldn’t quit those jobs fast enough. Who comes up with this nonsense?
They just described servant leadership and called it something else. It's not about parenting or treating people like children.
Not a great post, I’d not follow it if interested in leading teams long term.
A Self-admitted self taught manager learns the good parts about servant leadership via self-learning (nice!) but figures that is all there is instead of - “this is interesting, this seems to work but have gaps, what is there to this?”
If the author did that, they’d discover a massive body of knowledge to include the specific problem they point out - you solve problems for your team, how do they start to solve their own problems?
Servant leadership works if paired with the following, tuned to the capabilities and maturities of the specific employee:
- servant leadership: resource your team, umbrella your team, let the smart people you hired do smart things, or turn so so employees into great ones by resourcing them to learn, getting them mentorship, and “sun is strong than cold wind” sort of thinking.
- Left/right limits and target outcome: consistently inform your team their duty, in exchange for all the above manager work that’s way past the least-effort bar, is to get comfortable solving problems within the bounds of what the solution does and does not need to look like. Force this issue always, and they start solving their own problems at growing speed, and you have a QA check as a manager via documenting those boundaries per project etc
- train your replacement: part serving your team is reaching there’s probably another sociopath on it who wants to lead teams, wants raw power, and so on. Enable that! Teach them how to lead teams in the above fashion. They’ll realize it works. You’ll train someone who can take over the remaining problem solving. This won’t hurt your own job either.
Put it all together you’ll get very loyal productive teams of employees who’ll respect you outside of work in your industry where it matters for networking purposes, and you can live with yourself after the laptop closes as you know you’re treating your fellow man/woman the right way while surving in crazy corporate environments.
In short, bad advice in that article. There’s a whole corpus to leadership beyond what the author figured out in the side and describes here ha.
Edit - ironically the author then argues for arguably similar as the above, but claims it’s something else of their own invention. Engineers should really grok how there are existing bodies of very useful knowledge for all the things that seem easily dismissible as gaps or weak points from tho social sciences. It’d save them a lot of time.
You see, this only works in orgs that don't suck. It breaks down the moment employees must be manipulated in some way to the benefit of the company and to the detriment of the employees. Unfortunately a regular occurrence even in countries that have employee protection laws.
This is FAANG bro's 'let them eat cake'.
this is so silly. porque no los dos?