From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for."
This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes life easier for the manager, regardless of what the manager's reports really need.
I've seen this whole "I will empower you to do everything on your own" principle in action and it's exhausting. Especially when the word "empower" is a used as a euphemism for "have you take on additional responsibilities".
Look, boss, sometimes empowering me is just what I need, but sometimes I need you to solve a specific problem for me, so I can keep solving all the other problems I already have on my plate.
When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't work, it transitioned to "so how can I help?", which would again eventually be turned around into "now you know how to go help yourself", no matter how direct the request was or how much it really needed management authority behind it.
I get that the point of the strategy is to help people with strong director-style personalities to listen and empathize a bit more, but in my experience it ended up being implemented as "my responsibility to my reports is to listen and nod."
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs.
They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery.
Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and started infecting everything. The only time "coaching" is a valid approach is when both you and a coachee agree that the person has what they need to solve the issue and just needs a sounding board or a rubber duck. There's nothing more infuriating that needing help solving a problem and being told "well how would YOU solve the problem?" Idiot, if I knew that, I wouldn't be asking!
Also makes for a poor metaphor, because coaches in sports are supposed to be absolute experts in absolutely everything about the sport without the physical ability to implement it.
Imagine if a football player told their coach "I'm not sure how to deal with this specific opponent's strategy" and the coach was like "Well have you tried thinking about it more?"
> "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.
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.
If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control.
Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.
Control, responsibility and accountability have to align.
* You should only be accountable for what you are responsible for.
* You should only be responsible for what you have control of.
Bad managers hate this structure because in makes them accountable for themselves and their subordinates and prevents deflection of blame to low level employees.
Being responsible for something while having little/no control is so demoralizing & infuriating.
As someone once again in such a role, it really is, and it never gets easier.
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 âhow much lack of work can I get away withâ. They sounded like an absent manager.
My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done.
I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain projects are high priority, and protecting them from the shit doesn't actually help with that at all.
There's a big difference between protecting a team from all the shit and hiding it from them completely.
It's good to be a transparent shit umbrella. The team should absolutely have visibility into what's going on, and understand why certain decisions are being made, but a good manager does need to step in to avoid the shit hitting them directly.
You CAN tell the team it's raining and details of the weather without letting them get overly wet.
There's middle ground here.
Agree. team needs to know about the shit. It's important information that helps them prioritize their work and motivates them as they know that what they do is important for the bigger bosses. If manager shields me from everything I go apathetic, not knowing why I even do the boring stuff if manager doesn't tell me his manager is giving shit
I'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.
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.
> no-nonsense, no-fluff document
> Links ~100 pages pdf
> US army
Yeah that checks out...
I kid. Thanks for the share though!
Because of the Ukraine conflict, the phrase "mission command" came to my attention. It's about C2 rather than leadership but another one of those gems we might filter out in our "Bay Area" (you're all terminally online Europeans / teenagers jk) bubble.
The idea of mission command is pretty simple. If you see an incidental opportunity that will contribute to the big picture and pursuing it won't compromise the objective of your orders, take it. IIRC they call it something like "scoped initiative."
If you see an incidental opportunity that you can't take because it would compromise your local objective, you escalate. Up the chain, in the larger scope, that incidental opportunity that would compromise the objective of the smaller unit may be addressable using some available resources of the bigger unit.
It works by deduction and beautifully because you get the best of both individual initiative and large-scale coordination. It's an example where from-first-principle CS and pragmatic emergent systems resonate because it's near a morally true optimum.
In the context of OP, knowing the objective of your larger 1-2 organization levels is all the transparency that is every necessary. Neurons aren't smart. Information flows in a network are smart. Don't trust people who start performing and asking for transparency because ninety-nine times out of ten, they can't do better with what they ask for but will make everyone else do worse by breaking the cohesion.
And finally I read OP. It's a vapid feel-good long-form tweet that is nothing compared to the comment section.
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds.
When I left the USG because itâs 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 itâs STILL absolutely garbage.
Thereâs ZERO, and actually most likely negative, incentives to think about and apply ethics in business and politics, because at the end of the day the most ruthless will win in the long run.
It sounds like you have been burnt, badly.
There is surely a business out there that does fit your world view, though the pay and conditions might not.
In my view, the need for growth at any cost is toxic and leads to all sorts of horrible behaviours.
Iâve looked at every possible organization that could theoretically fit including; MSF a.k.a. doctors without borders, swords to plowshares 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 donât 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 âright thingâ 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 donât 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
"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect it to apply to being a leader in a tech company.
Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too.
I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them?
There is a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, but without that contrast in mind, you can easily lose track of what the terms mean. The article does a decent job of trying to find a healthier middle ground, IMO.
The problem is when things evolve we no longer know if someone refers to the evolved form or the original. Or more importantly if the evolved form retains the important parts of the original.
Exactly. And like evolution, what of the millions of species it evolved to are referring to.
IMHO either stick with the original, or say âlike X with following changes/detailsâ or just go with a new thing.
Servant leadership works just fine in business (as in a competitive non-church environment) as long youâre aware you youâre serving and who youâre working peer to peer with/against/whatever.
Another term for it somewhat is being a âplayers coach.â
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 wonât 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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes indeed. Thank you.
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.
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...
Get a daily email with the the top stories from Hacker News. No spam, unsubscribe at any time.