[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of...
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Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?
Engineering is a team sport and leadership is a major dynamic
necessary for groups to get stuff done together. What was your
biggest leadership challenge of your entire career? How did you
overcome it? What happened then?
Author : mparkola
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-04-17 22:00 UTC (1 hours ago)
| throwarayes wrote:
| Having an unstable teammate on a project I led. Long story short,
| they:
|
| (a) they tended to see things in terms of them being persecuted,
| and took critique of their work or approach deeply personally
|
| (b) tended to see things as us vs them, and not a two-way street,
| where both sides bore responsibility. And that sometimes crappy
| things happen with no malace.
|
| (c) resented other's success at the company, and thought that the
| 'successful' person was only successful because management
| supported them unfairly in a way my colleague was not supported.
| My colleague perceived themselves as a secret failure for not
| doing what the other person was doing. They also thought others
| telling them they were successful was not genuine.
|
| (d) lacked a kind of self awareness, and tended to take over
| meetings with their grievances and upsetness. They couldn't see
| that other team members needed to discuss their own issues, or
| with the issues she brought up, that other people also had valid
| emotions and points of view on them she needed to hear and
| appreciate.
|
| The time we worked on it as a leadership team went beyond having
| difficult conversations. I've had difficult conversations, where
| you talk about someone leaving a job, or someone's difficult
| behavior. You give it in a loving, compassionate way. Some people
| can get defensive, maybe upset, but will hear the feedback and
| take some time to digest it. Even when they're upset, they take
| some part in the responsibility for the feedback they hear.
|
| This person, assumed off the bat, you were going to attack them.
| They couldn't see the compassion you were trying to bring. They
| froze up and got defensive. They tended to carry their own
| narrative of how they were the victim, and didn't take
| responsibility for their side of whatever they were having a
| problem with.
|
| I give credit to our leadership team that we kept at it. We
| didn't accept this person's sometimes abusive behavior. We tried,
| and frankly, by letting others know it was not OK, and that we
| kept our focus on it, it helped the rest of the team understand
| that "yes we get there's a problem here".
|
| We wanted to help the person. We gave them lots of opportunities
| for improvement and to do the kind of work they said they wanted
| to do. We gave them coaching and their own time to develop their
| own interests into new business directions.
|
| After trying and trying, probably helped a bit through some
| coaching, this person realized the company wasn't a good fit for
| them, and they left on their own accord. This was a good outcome.
| Though I wish there was some way to have accelerated it and/or
| let the person go so they weren't as destructive to the team.
| uh_uh wrote:
| Sounds like quite the nightmare. Was the person at least
| technically competent in their role?
| seneca wrote:
| Having a severely unperforming, and sometimes belligerent,
| employee that couldn't be fired because of HR reasons. His work
| was horrible, and his responses to feedback was to become
| hostile.
|
| Not only was he dead weight, he destroyed the team's morale and
| hurt their relationships with other teams. The team looked to me
| to solve the issue and couldn't understand why he wasn't being
| fired, and I couldn't tell them "I'm not allowed to fire him".
|
| I spent months working with him on improvement plans, coaching,
| and mediating with no improvement, and in the end managed to
| shake him off in a RIF.
|
| I stayed long enough to repair the team's morale and strengthen
| the hiring process, and then quit as I had completely lost faith
| in the company.
| adverbly wrote:
| Follow up question:
|
| What attracted you to our company, and how did you find out about
| our job listing?
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(page generated 2021-04-17 23:00 UTC)