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That is bad leadership. You still need to craft roles and titles in a manner that allows ownership and autonomy. At my large company that I have been with for

by jimmy1 8y ago

That is bad leadership. You still need to craft roles and titles in a manner that allows ownership and autonomy. At my large company that I have been with for 4 years, you are given a title. The title has a certain baseline level of expectations. If you want the next title, you start acting like it. Then you are given it. You are given freedom and autonomy on how to act like it. For example, an expectation of a senior is to mentor. You can mentor in hundreds of different ways: run a workshop, do one-on-ones, pair programming with a junior, have lunch with people, and so on. Seniors are expected to demonstrate technical prowess. The baseline is delivering results on your immediate team, but if you want the next level up, you can branch out and impact the wider organization: you can do this through refactoring a large portion of a legacy system, improving the performance of a current system, adding better test coverage to a project you are not on, contributing to open source, or having a talk accepted at a conference. Just one of many examples. I think this way works the best from my experience with two other systems: the ones as you describe, and then the mythological flat org.

DVassallo 8y ago
Yes, it's bad leadership. IMO, good leadership is seeing what the individuals in your team are good and interested in, and adapt the work to that. Your 2nd paragraph describes the problem I'm highlighting. If for whatever reason someone is not interested in (or good at) mentoring, why expect them to mentor? Expectation from a leader cause people to feel forced to do them. People don't want to let their leaders down, but if they can't or don't like doing what they're expected to, they won't do a good job -- or the job at all. This obviously only applies to creative/knowledge work. I suppose it's less important in task-based/mechanical work.

by jimmy1 8y ago

DVassallo 8y ago

Yes, it's bad leadership. IMO, good leadership is seeing what the individuals in your team are good and interested in, and adapt the work to that. Your 2nd paragraph describes the problem I'm highlighting. If for whatever reason someone is not interested in (or good at) mentoring, why expect them to mentor? Expectation from a leader cause people to feel forced to do them. People don't want to let their leaders down, but if they can't or don't like doing what they're expected to, they won't do a good job -- or the job at all. This obviously only applies to creative/knowledge work. I suppose it's less important in task-based/mechanical work.