In the book "Turn the Ship Around", these questions are only temporary, and are part of how the leader transforms the team from traditional Leader-Follower into Leader-Leader.

These questions condition people to think ahead, and eventually present the information unprompted.

This ultimately is part of Intent-Based Leadership, where "followers" present the "leader" with their intentions, information and reasoning - and the "leader" just agrees usually. This in essence transforms "followers" into leaders, since they are the ones deciding what happens, when and why.

Marquet goes so far as to even avoid giving orders, instead just approving or questioning the intentions of his team. It took him a long time to get to that point in reality, but it's a really interesting take on leading highly intelligent, skilled teams.

Part of the idea—which requires non-trivial effort from the leaders to build up sufficient trust—is that people should believe that their proposals (for their own work) are accepted by default. People don't have to wait for their idea to be accepted, but they have to communicate enough so that leaders can surface specific issues or mismatches only if they have them.

This approach is great for peacetime and for when the team is already reasonably functional and performing. The really hard leadership problems occur during wartime (the business is in crisis, or shrinking, or responding to a serious competitive threat, or must aggressively cut costs, or must integrate an acquisition, or...) or when the team you have is routinely underperforming at scale.

These two situations require different techniques. Applying peacetime techniques during wartime does not work: you'll rapidly accumulate debt from unsolved organizational problems, politics you've lost control of, competitive pressure you failed to respond to decisively enough, or an underperforming team you've failed to correct enough. Or all of the above.

But, similarly, applying wartime techniques during peacetime also does not work. You'll alienate your high-performing team and suffocate critical innovation that will grow the business.

Confusing the two situations is a major category error that managers often make. It often happens because they've only experienced one of the two categories before, they were successful previously, they don't fully appreciate the extent of the existence of the other category, and when they encounter it for the first time they rely too much on their prior experience and have slowed down their own learning too much (because of said prior success).

A year after starting my current job, I had a conversation with the CEO. We were just 15 people back then, 5 devs.

I can't recall what prompted it, but he said he'd learned early on that the best thing he could do was to ensure us devs were happy and otherwise stay out of our way as much as possible.

I think that's at least part of the reason for the success of the company, which has gone from a small player to dominating our niche in the time I've been here.

Great article, people mix commanders with leaders, leaders main job is influencing while others do it their approach, their style, but still align with the goals you influenced.

> People tend to rise to your level of trust.

One of the companies that I almost worked for, had all the “we trust we empower our employees etc”, good promises, and later they were requiring full uninterrupted camera access while you do the work :)

> People tend to rise to your level of trust.

Yes, this, precisely.

Most people want to be trusted and given autonomy, and they want to live up to your expectations.

There will always be a few who are looking for ways to cheat the system, but they are the exception, not the rule—and the earlier in life you can get to them with a policy of trust and lifting them up, rather than suspicion and tearing them down, the more likely they will be to turn out well.

Sort of true. But then I've worked with people who seem totally unfazed when they mess up through utter carelessness, and for reasons, won't be replaced. Or people who asked to move a button set off redesigning the template engine to be more functional, time after time.

You could say, and I wouldn't disagree, those people shouldn't be on the team. But equally it's often not that easy. Also good people are hard to find and the mediocre one might be the best you have.

It strikes me that the Google statistical results might be getting the wrong end of the stick. The teams where the leader is hands off and empowering are full of people who can be trusted which is basically the same as them doing the job themselves. The teams where the leader feels the urge to descend to micromanagement are the ones where people don't get things done.

You might find Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time interesting - https://jeffreypfeffer.com/books/leadership-bs-fixing-workpl...

Also checkout his other books.

dunbar's number?

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>

Do we all win the same equity vesting schedule?

I worked in an office last year. We had these “Wacky Shirt Wednesdays.” On the first Wednesday I was able to participate, I decided to wear the shirt my mom was wearing when I was born. Now there’s some leftover placenta and uterine lining, so it isn’t the cleanest shirt. BUT it’s the thought that counts. That what momma says.

This f’n Karen decides to come over to my desk and tell me it’s “inappropriate” and “gross” and “ur mom’s placenta will get in my salmon salad”.

Win for me: keep wearing the shirt Win for Karen: stop having me wear the shirt Win Win Win: frame the shirt on my office wall so there’s never a chance of getting placenta in Karen’s salad.

Win Win Win!!

After a couple years I realized the key part of “As an X I want Y so that Z” is the “so that Z”.

When managing teams these days, the only part I keep is the “so that Z” — what beneficial change in the world does this ticket make?

If the ticket name is just “fix this bug” then I’m not certain the engineer knows why it’s important, and knowing the importance of your work is itself important.

Current workplace has cargo-culted this so hard the tickets look like "As a backend foo-server, I need to modify the baz function to create an interface for blargh requests."

> Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.

The article talks about just a few such terms that are a symptom of the mindset of the leader-follower approach. Weak Saphir-Worff applies imo.

For example, I got way better as a dance teacher when I stopped using phrases like "do this", "this is correct", "that is wrong", etc and instead put all that effort into "try this", and "if you do that, this happens". Students were more open, less confused, saw possibilities instead of problems to fix.

But I get it, if I hadn't seen this change myself and heard others talk about it I would also be skeptical. It sounds a bit too good to be true.

Claude

Really?

Some styles may work better in a uniformed military environment than they would in the real world.

In the military, there are strict guidelines on conduct, whereas in the private sector, it's almost anything goes, and workers are often pushing the limits of what they can get away with.

Also, in the military, rank and pecking order are clearly established. Regardless of whether or not the style is "Leader-Leader", everybody knows where they stand with regard to who they need to salute, and who they must obey.

The problem is you have a very different understanding of what a leader is, than what i think is a more correct definition. a person hoarding information is not a leader. making decisions in a way no one else can reproduce how you made decisions, lacking transparency, making it about your ego is not leadership. matter of fact, that sort of mentality where you have an irreplacable tech lead usually results from poor leadership skills on their part, as were as their people manager's. i.e.: leaders are often actually highly replaceable. For tech lead roles, even in a 2 person team, it would be the one that has more experience, but ultimately they are responsible for their technical leadership, they own outcomes so long as their followers trust them to lead and actually follow their direction. They have to be able to for example reject PRs, but do it in a way that doesn't lost the teams' trust of their competence. If they resign tomorrow, the next guy in the line that is most experienced can take over and lead, perhaps with a different style, but they should spend much time making decisions and leading, and less time hoarding knowledge and doing actual work, making them more replaceable.

> "I have a problem, here is my recommended fix, how does that sound?"

Couldn't agree more, I've lived by this principle myself. leaders are not problem solvers though, a leader gets to reject the really good idea of someone that does come up with a seemingly great idea without letting them down harshly, and also encourage that atmosphere of continuing to suggest solutions. They also set the direction (tactically for technical leaders, and strategically for people leaders) of the team, so that the problems an IC does focus on is aligned with the leaders' priority.

If your engineers are making their own decisions, there is the problem of conflicting changes (even in Git the concept of conflict resolution exists, someone has to decide to merge the changes into main/master after resolving conflicts). There is also the problem of ultimately them spending a lot of time on something, only for that being low priority, or rejected outright because it doesn't make sense strategically, that demoralizes people and creates a terrible atmosphere. A very clear chain of command is important at work as it is on the battlefield. And just as in a battlefield, due to the clarity of that chain of command, a general being killed by the enemy does not decapitate a battalion, the person next in the chain of command takes over. Not only should leaders be replaceable by design, they're often rotated from team to team to ensure such an informal dependency on them never forms.

I think what you're describing to the most part is also the problem I outlined in my first post: The spreading of blame by supposed leaders creating an over dependency on them and credits for work they didn't contribute to much, and creation of actual leaders that end up being irreplaceable because their role wasn't formally designated or acknowledged, but assumed, they're not part of the planned structure of the chain of command.

I am interested but don't have time to read a book. However, I don't think any text can change a person's opinion that is derived from experience.

I think what they're trying to describe is the concept of a person being assigned responsibilities as a follower, and owning that responsibility to the fullest, which is a something I agree with strongly. But that isn't them "leading". Ultimately you can have only one #1 priority, if everyone is leading whose #1 priority do you follow? that's where the informal power structure forms. it has the opposite effect of no one really leading, and everyone just saying they are.