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This article and others like it reappear on HN every few months, and that’s a good thing. Absentee leadership is a big problem, especially in tech, where manage
by nonrepeating 3y ago
This article and others like it reappear on HN every few months, and that’s a good thing. Absentee leadership is a big problem, especially in tech, where managers have been led to believe that the best way to lead engineers is to “leave them alone.” Instead that should be, “leave them alone when they need to work, but provide structure and support when necessary.”
There’s a similar though different problem in tech, where organizations are kept very flat in the hopes that leadership will simply “emerge.” Sometimes a staff engineer will be unofficially implied as the team leader, but without any actual management duties nor reporting lines. It’s a way for a company to have their cake and eat it, and it ends predictably.
- justinclift 3y agoAhhh yeah. The "leave them alone" approach is only really suitable after a person has already demonstrated both competence and their own self direction / initiative. If they're not yet at that stage, leaving them alone will generally make things worse (with a poor outcome) rather than better. :( This is a very short book that explains the right approach pretty well, and seems based on the reality of how most people work, rather than theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_One_Minute_Manager
- wefarrell 3y agoI’ve been at a few companies that expect leaders to emerge and it always goes terribly. Certain personality types try to assume those leadership roles and they tend to be the last people you want as leaders. And they tend to stop doing the grunt work, prompting the more productive workers to fill the gaps. Those productive workers become demoralized and wind up leaving, and the team hollows out.