3 ms·

Mainly it sounds like a failure to connect with everyone else and read the room. This is "getting kicked out of the tribe" 101 and people are normally very se

Mainly it sounds like a failure to connect with everyone else and read the room. This is "getting kicked out of the tribe" 101 and people are normally very sensitive to this. But as a new leader it's hard to understand all your status relationships (and that the happiness of the people under you on the org chart affects the happiness of the people listed above you). You can disagree with everyone else, you can be overridden (and quit, or disagree and commit or whatever you have to do) but not to see it coming is to live in a fundamentally different reality than your team. One thing I notice is a lot of words devoted to senior leadership and the author's personal leadership experience but not much focus on the experience or input of the (100+) people doing the work. The reason you don't fire a really good leader is because they'll take the team with them! The blog post is a bit of a Rorschach test but for me that's how I parse the blind spot. I actually think it's a great blog post due to the Rashomon effect it seems to provoke among people who read it.

ilteris 5y ago
I have a similar problem in my workplace. I have a hard time reading what's going on in the room or the relationships between ups and downs. It's exhausting. Is there a playbook for this type of thing?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- khafra 5y ago
  The book Moral Mazes is the best guide I know of. The basic takeaway is that if you're in middle management, it's already too late, you poor sucker. https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-managerial-work https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-manageri... https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moral-mazes https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moral-mazes
  - hitekker 5y ago
    I strongly recommend Moral Mazes. It's great reading for anyone who wants to achieve some level of honesty as a manager. It also arouses the ire of dishonest or duplicitous managers, which is another useful social signal to account for.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
le-mark 5y ago
For convenience; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect
dkarl 5y ago
I have had a hard experience with that (as an IC) as well, finding myself isolated at my current job and unable to exert any influence. All the developers I work with have been at the same job for 5+ years and don't have a clue that the team is massively underperforming, their release and operational support processes take much more work and are less reliable than the same processes at other companies, the codebase seems almost intentionally hostile to new contributors (to the point of caricature; any description would come off as comic exaggeration,) but they think they're doing great and have all the answers, and every time I suggest improvements they respond like, "Well, actually, the reason it's better to do it our way is because..." and from that point on they are talking and not listening. All the other developers they hired in the last five years are gone, probably because they weren't listened to. I don't know if the isolation happened suddenly or gradually. I realized it all at once, but by the time I did, it had been happening for so long I don't know how it started. Somehow people stopped telling me what was going on and stopped consulting me on new decisions. I am the last person to find out about anything. One part of their existing pathology is a background churn of unilateral, unannounced, shuffling-the-deck-chairs "improvements" that cause a lot of errors and interruptions without making a worthwhile difference, but this is different. Even the changes that are formally talked about are talked about without me. I know that leadership has my back (they came into the picture more recently and can see that the team is underperforming) and they are planning changes that include me, but other than management, which is detached from day-to-day work, I'm on an island. Reading between the lines, I think I was brought in to try to fix the team, but without any management authority (and management not involved day-to-day) and with the team just ignoring my ideas and trying to assimilate me into their way of doing things, I have accomplished almost nothing on that score. Meanwhile, my social isolation is such that I can't stand to stick around much longer. I am going to go somewhere where I can be part of a team again. EDIT: Reading the article through fully, I think I should learn from his characterization of "swagger" (though I don't think the word is quite right.) When I wasn't listened to after repeated attempts to make the same point with the people who needed to hear it, I shouldn't have stopped talking. I should have kept saying the same thing whenever it was warranted. I should have talked louder. I should have taken my points to venues that included a larger audience than just the people who needed to act on them. I should have pressured management to put their weight behind me. I didn't do these things because I didn't want to be an asshole, and I didn't want to alienate people, and maybe because I was afraid of inviting open aggression against myself, but I should have been prepared to stand up to that. Why was I avoiding confrontation instead of inviting it? Maybe because I wasn't confident in my ability to argue my points in the face of hostility, but if that's the case, I should be practicing it more, not avoiding it.

ilteris 5y ago

I have a similar problem in my workplace. I have a hard time reading what's going on in the room or the relationships between ups and downs. It's exhausting. Is there a playbook for this type of thing?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
khafra 5y ago
The book Moral Mazes is the best guide I know of. The basic takeaway is that if you're in middle management, it's already too late, you poor sucker. https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-managerial-work https://hbr.org/1983/09/moral-mazes-bureaucracy-and-manageri... https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moral-mazes https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/moral-mazes
- hitekker 5y ago
  I strongly recommend Moral Mazes. It's great reading for anyone who wants to achieve some level of honesty as a manager. It also arouses the ire of dishonest or duplicitous managers, which is another useful social signal to account for.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

le-mark 5y ago

For convenience; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashomon_effect

dkarl 5y ago

I have had a hard experience with that (as an IC) as well, finding myself isolated at my current job and unable to exert any influence. All the developers I work with have been at the same job for 5+ years and don't have a clue that the team is massively underperforming, their release and operational support processes take much more work and are less reliable than the same processes at other companies, the codebase seems almost intentionally hostile to new contributors (to the point of caricature; any description would come off as comic exaggeration,) but they think they're doing great and have all the answers, and every time I suggest improvements they respond like, "Well, actually, the reason it's better to do it our way is because..." and from that point on they are talking and not listening. All the other developers they hired in the last five years are gone, probably because they weren't listened to. I don't know if the isolation happened suddenly or gradually. I realized it all at once, but by the time I did, it had been happening for so long I don't know how it started. Somehow people stopped telling me what was going on and stopped consulting me on new decisions. I am the last person to find out about anything. One part of their existing pathology is a background churn of unilateral, unannounced, shuffling-the-deck-chairs "improvements" that cause a lot of errors and interruptions without making a worthwhile difference, but this is different. Even the changes that are formally talked about are talked about without me. I know that leadership has my back (they came into the picture more recently and can see that the team is underperforming) and they are planning changes that include me, but other than management, which is detached from day-to-day work, I'm on an island. Reading between the lines, I think I was brought in to try to fix the team, but without any management authority (and management not involved day-to-day) and with the team just ignoring my ideas and trying to assimilate me into their way of doing things, I have accomplished almost nothing on that score. Meanwhile, my social isolation is such that I can't stand to stick around much longer. I am going to go somewhere where I can be part of a team again. EDIT: Reading the article through fully, I think I should learn from his characterization of "swagger" (though I don't think the word is quite right.) When I wasn't listened to after repeated attempts to make the same point with the people who needed to hear it, I shouldn't have stopped talking. I should have kept saying the same thing whenever it was warranted. I should have talked louder. I should have taken my points to venues that included a larger audience than just the people who needed to act on them. I should have pressured management to put their weight behind me. I didn't do these things because I didn't want to be an asshole, and I didn't want to alienate people, and maybe because I was afraid of inviting open aggression against myself, but I should have been prepared to stand up to that. Why was I avoiding confrontation instead of inviting it? Maybe because I wasn't confident in my ability to argue my points in the face of hostility, but if that's the case, I should be practicing it more, not avoiding it.