[HN Gopher] Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
___________________________________________________________________
Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
Author : ibobev
Score : 336 points
Date : 2025-12-04 13:40 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (entropicthoughts.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (entropicthoughts.com)
| dpflan wrote:
| 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?
| kagrenac wrote:
| 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.
| ramon156 wrote:
| 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.
| aranelsurion wrote:
| > "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.
| cgearhart wrote:
| 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.)
| jmye wrote:
| > 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."
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 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.
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| mergy wrote:
| Yes indeed. Thank you.
| rietta wrote:
| 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.
| awb wrote:
| 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.
| phoronixrly wrote:
| 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.
| yet-another-guy wrote:
| 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.
| zeroq wrote:
| "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.
| dugmartin wrote:
| 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.
| CodeMage wrote:
| 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.
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| >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.
| eithed wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| 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
| phil21 wrote:
| 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.
| rootnod3 wrote:
| 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".
| bena wrote:
| 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.
| Forgeties79 wrote:
| Like that metaphor
| dasil003 wrote:
| 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.
| brabel wrote:
| > 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.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Huh? The next sentence is: "The difference lies in what to
| do once one has rendered oneself redundant."
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 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.
| lowboy wrote:
| Being responsible for something while having little/no
| control is so demoralizing & infuriating.
| stego-tech wrote:
| As someone once again in such a role, it really is, and it
| never gets easier.
| nlawalker wrote:
| 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."
| jghn wrote:
| 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?
| indymike wrote:
| 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.
| cracki wrote:
| Please compare and contrast "accountability" and
| "responsibility".
| Spivak wrote:
| 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.
| exogenousdata wrote:
| This is a wonderful, succinct way of capturing this danger to
| businesses as they grow & jump the gap!
| nlawalker wrote:
| 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."
| psunavy03 wrote:
| 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!
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| 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?"
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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/
| citizenpaul wrote:
| > "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.
| pyrolistical wrote:
| Tell the manager you are assuming their authority.
|
| You will force the answer out of them either way
| hyperhello wrote:
| This is really how it's done. Don't go over their head;
| go under their boss's.
| bsoles wrote:
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| 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.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| 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.
| gretch wrote:
| 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.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| 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.
| harrall wrote:
| No I mean you measure after.
|
| Some people just don't seem to measure after though.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| "Can't" is not why people become managers.
|
| At least be thoughtful and say "Won't" (because they prefer
| management)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| 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.
| eecc wrote:
| So basically a crash course in psychoanalysis?
| reactordev wrote:
| 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_.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| > 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.
| jf22 wrote:
| 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.
| parliament32 wrote:
| There's a good chance he was an executive's nephew or some
| other protected class.
| cj wrote:
| 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.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > 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.
| chowells wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| xkcd-sucks wrote:
| 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
| venturecruelty wrote:
| Friendly reminder that management exists to get you to justify
| your expensive pay check. Every employer-employee relationship
| is adversarial. Adjust accordingly.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| >> 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.
| ryoshu wrote:
| 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.
| moogleii wrote:
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| 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.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| 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.
| kentf wrote:
| Love this, thank you for sharing.
| bbstats wrote:
| this is so silly. porque no los dos?
| great_wubwub wrote:
| 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'?
| onion2k wrote:
| "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.
| codingdave wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| f1shy wrote:
| 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.
| onion2k wrote:
| 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.
| phantasmish wrote:
| 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.
| dogman144 wrote:
| 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.
| neilv wrote:
| 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).
| hartator wrote:
| > 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."
| didip wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| That's not going to fix the social problems. What happens when
| your team needs something from another team?
| vinceguidry wrote:
| 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.
| jppope wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| 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.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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
| alwa wrote:
| 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!
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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
| lostlogin wrote:
| > 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.
| sa46 wrote:
| 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.
| positron26 wrote:
| 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.
| cracki wrote:
| > ninety-nine times out of ten
|
| that gave me a chuckle
| adverbly wrote:
| > no-nonsense, no-fluff document
|
| > Links ~100 pages pdf
|
| > US army
|
| Yeah that checks out...
|
| I kid. Thanks for the share though!
| TheOccasionalWr wrote:
| 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.
| taurath wrote:
| 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.
| pragma_x wrote:
| 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/
| alistairSH wrote:
| _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.
| mergy wrote:
| 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.
| chzblck wrote:
| 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
| usernamed7 wrote:
| They just described servant leadership and called it something
| else. It's not about parenting or treating people like children.
| dogman144 wrote:
| 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.
| MrDrDr wrote:
| 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.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| 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.
| wmeredith wrote:
| 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.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| You CAN tell the team it's raining and details of the weather
| without letting them get overly wet.
|
| There's middle ground here.
| kepeko wrote:
| 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
| taurath wrote:
| 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.
| tonyarkles wrote:
| 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.
| zawaideh wrote:
| The metaphor I prefer is to be a transparent shit umbrella.
| Gormo wrote:
| 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.
| simonw wrote:
| "Transparent shit umbrella" is indeed a much more useful
| metaphor.
| lesdeuxmagots wrote:
| 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.
| samwillis wrote:
| > But they need to FEEL the weather
|
| You mean they need to smell it!
| sillyfluke wrote:
| 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.
| cracki wrote:
| Distinguish between "seeing the shit" and "being hit by it
| all".
| dyauspitr wrote:
| 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.
| munchbunny wrote:
| 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.
| RA_Fisher wrote:
| Excellent analysis. It's like: servant of whom (themselves)?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| If the dishonesty worked, you never know it happened!
|
| So you can never tell how much of it there really is...
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> 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.
| ponooqjoqo wrote:
| We should stop normalizing referring to managers or employers as
| leaders. These are different things.
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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.
| derekcheng08 wrote:
| 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.
| weitendorf wrote:
| 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...
| ef2k wrote:
| 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.
| herval wrote:
| > 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".
| siliconc0w wrote:
| 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.
| zetazzed wrote:
| 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.
| dpark wrote:
| 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.
| adverbly wrote:
| 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...
| browningstreet wrote:
| In a world where we've walked away from master/slave,
| blacklists.. why is servant still being used?
| ahoka wrote:
| What historical systematic injustice do you associate this word
| with?
| 9rx wrote:
| Serfdom.
| krosaen wrote:
| 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/
| maxdtroll wrote:
| 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.
| codyb wrote:
| 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.
| lunarcave wrote:
| 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.
| rietta wrote:
| 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.
| trunnell wrote:
| 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."
| Devasta wrote:
| > 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >"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?
| ErrantX wrote:
| 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)
| hintymad wrote:
| > 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".
| jjk166 wrote:
| 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.
| geoffbp wrote:
| Role*
|
| Sorry
| JoshCole wrote:
| 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.
| evolve2k wrote:
| 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.
| geoffbp wrote:
| 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.
| rasengan0 wrote:
| >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.
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| paofii wrote:
| 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?
| justatdotin wrote:
| leadership is not a role it is a shared responsibility; an
| emergent effect we can all nurture.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| 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
| lloydjones wrote:
| 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'.
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