[HN Gopher] Absentee leadership - the most common type of incomp...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Absentee leadership - the most common type of incompetent leader
        
       Author : okl
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2023-05-28 19:36 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hbr.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hbr.org)
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | I worked with a kind gentleman from a previous startup who turned
       | me to HBR's email subscriptions on management. I think they're
       | pretty good as another source of reading for leadership.
       | 
       | Now any time I read HBR I think about his thoughtfulness and try
       | to recommend it to others.
        
         | sieste wrote:
         | Do you mean "Management tip of the day" from
         | https://hbr.org/email-newsletters ?
        
           | andrewmcwatters wrote:
           | Yep! If I remember correctly, they lead into longer reading
           | sessions, but the synopsises usually give you something
           | interesting to think about, too.
        
       | nonrepeating wrote:
       | This article and others like it reappear on HN every few months,
       | and that's a good thing. Absentee leadership is a big problem,
       | especially in tech, where managers have been led to believe that
       | the best way to lead engineers is to "leave them alone." Instead
       | that should be, "leave them alone when they need to work, but
       | provide structure and support when necessary."
       | 
       | There's a similar though different problem in tech, where
       | organizations are kept very flat in the hopes that leadership
       | will simply "emerge." Sometimes a staff engineer will be
       | unofficially implied as the team leader, but without any actual
       | management duties nor reporting lines. It's a way for a company
       | to have their cake and eat it, and it ends predictably.
        
         | justinclift wrote:
         | Ahhh yeah. The "leave them alone" approach is only really
         | suitable after a person has already demonstrated both
         | competence and their own self direction / initiative.
         | 
         | If they're not yet at that stage, leaving them alone will
         | generally make things worse (with a poor outcome) rather than
         | better. :(
         | 
         | This is a very short book that explains the right approach
         | pretty well, and seems based on the reality of how most people
         | work, rather than theory:
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager
        
         | wefarrell wrote:
         | I've been at a few companies that expect leaders to emerge and
         | it always goes terribly. Certain personality types try to
         | assume those leadership roles and they tend to be the last
         | people you want as leaders. And they tend to stop doing the
         | grunt work, prompting the more productive workers to fill the
         | gaps. Those productive workers become demoralized and wind up
         | leaving, and the team hollows out.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-05-28 23:01 UTC)