9 ms·

A style of leadership that is direct and forceful, yet also respectful (2023)

37 points by lkrubner 2y ago

6stringmerc 2y ago
This is a good read regarding a stressful yet necessary exchange between people working toward the same goal but through different lenses. Not all managers practice constructive communication with the end result being a “learning experience” has taken place.
MarkMarine 2y ago
Pretty incredible that when pressed on the assumptions the author made about Jerry’s motivations, the author just doubles down on assuming these motivations again in the defense of the first article. Doubly so that the author published this as a rebuttal to a well thought out counter point. You’ve got to question the whole concept of this blog when the author is posting Ls like this and thinking it’s a W
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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jmclnx 2y ago
Why ? Like everything else money, in the last 60 years or so, more people started chasing money at all costs, ignoring the impact on society. Many aspect of modern society now does this, from churches to non-profits to politics to business. Just look at the salaries of the people running these organizations and how they have grown when compared to their employees. Decades ago, at least these "CEOs" would attempt to think of society and employees before making decisions. Now it comes down to "how much can I get and screw everyone else".
throwaway519 2y ago
[flagged]
codr7 2y ago
I've found presence helps a lot in these situations, where perspectives don't align; it's not doable with back and forths from my experience. Get the people who are disagreeing in the same room, virtual or otherwise; preferably before the tone turns sour.
Arnavion 2y ago
It was supposedly Jerry's code that intentionally caused results for Bermuda to not show up for "Caribbean", but the fix for it was to change their search engine config because there was an error copying from the database? The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? Four hours were apparently an underestimate anyway because it took the author "several hours" to fix it. I agree Jerry did a stupid thing too by not testing the queries properly against the previously deployed version of the code. He works remotely so he didn't interact with Sonia enough to take her more seriously. But instead of telling him that so that he can learn, this guy starts assigning him motives and patronizing him, and then pats himself on the back for being a good dad^H^H^H manager who doesn't cuss? Story has holes and the cunt is insufferable. Edit: The author is also the one who submitted this here, and he seems to submit every article from his blog. There are other articles in there like this one about how he deals with people. After reading some of them, all I can say is that the word "cunt" is insufficient to describe him.
- gcarvalho 2y ago
  I agree story has holes but regarding > The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? I think he meant that if the ticket was dismissed in a much shorter time than the allotted then it also needs a good reason. I also believe a bug ticket saying “this shouldn’t happen” is not solved until until “this” no longer happens or everyone involved agrees that it’s okay for it to happen.
deanmoriarty 2y ago
I like to think I am extremely attentive to bug reports (I’m always paranoid about my code possibly containing bugs, so I err on the side of turning every stone), so I would probably not make Jerry’s mistake here, but sure as hell if a manager tried to humiliate me that much I would just quit on the spot. In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”. Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more. That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.
- Herring 2y ago
  Yeah, even just acknowledging the other guy's valid point, like "I agree with you, Bermuda is not part of the Caribbean, so yes it's deceptive to return it in the search results." Sales is often deceptive. I think that's why the author was so defensive, notably about "honesty".
  - kcplate 2y ago
    >>> Jerry: But I made some good decisions about what shows up when. For instance, I don’t like the idea of showing deals for Bermuda when someone searches for “Caribbean” While Bermuda not being part of the Caribbean might be true…it’s really not a valid point in this circumstance. It was an apparent dev assumption that this level of precision was desired even if it wasn’t requested or its absence as a requirement was a mistake. When it was reported as a bug, that should have prompted the developer to clarify with the PM the OG requirement so they were both on the same page. He didn’t, he assumed she was wrong…apparently twice. The PM probably understood that to their lay users the terms “Bermuda”, “Caribbean”, and “Islands” all have a degree of marketing relevance to each other (There is a reason why you might dumb down search results for something like that). Judging by what was information given in the story, apparently dumbed down search results was known and required in the past. Not sure there is any “right” way to gently coach an employee that disregarded proper protocol and requirements, lied about it, blamed a colleague, and initially refused to accept responsibility when it was brought to their attention. That would be damn frustrating. I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer. It least in my opinion.
Hasu 2y ago
The author 1) created the ticket and its estimation 2) assigned it to Jerry without further comment 3) had another ticket created and assigned to Jerry without talking to Jerry about it 4) got mad when Jerry closed what looked like a duplicate ticket 5) told Jerry that he has no agency in his work and he must do only what the product team says 6) took the ticket himself 7) yelled at Jerry about not sticking to an estimate Jerry had nothing to do with 8) finally extracted an agreement with Jerry that Jerry will do no work without explicit authorization from the author This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss. This isn't to say Jerry didn't screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager's authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others' needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It's a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.
- xg15 2y ago
  9) wrote a blog post about it on the internet with a detailed transcript of all the conversations, so that the entire world knows how much of an idiot Jerry and how much of a saint the author was. But no, author never gives in to anger...
aqueueaqueue 2y ago
That is an interesting scenario, I am glad they shared it. Not sure if the problem is fixed though. What are the reasons for thinking the bug was no big deal. It may be hard to get the truth. Some people lie because they need a job and want to keep it. Maybe he has an KPI he needs to keep. Closing the bug as no issue would help a feature based KPI or OKR. Also need to address culture. It should be like a "door desk" (Infamous Amazon cultural thing!) level thing that quality is first. You delay the feature work to ensure quality and investigate bugs. Their manager accepts a feature slips because the team fixes bugs. Not all bugs (you need triage) but definitely the ones that cause real issues for customers. Someone (QA and dev together) do an impact assessment. Understand how bad that bug is.
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torben-friis 2y ago
This reads awfully, as both people seem to be wrong. The coder's just avoiding work and dismissing product, but the manager's just bullying the guy into getting a respectful "yes, sir" like an authoritarian parent. The obvious, glaring issue of broken dynamics between product and devs is never taken care of nor addressed, and it seems inevitable the manager's actions create resentment towards product by the dev, and a "us vs then" culture. Good leaders always see dynamics and patterns, rather than "John is good and Betty is bad".
- silisili 2y ago
  I really don't understand why the two(or even three) of them didn't hop on a 5 minute call to understand what was being asked, instead of whatever hellish version of Chinese whispers this team dynamic is.
cleverwebble 2y ago
"No, I'll do it myself" and "I feel like you aren't listening to me" comes straight out of couple's therapy handbooks on what not to do. You can be direct and respectful, but this was not respectful, this was just aggressive.
- deleted 2y ago
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- abetusk 2y ago
  Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"? Also, this dynamic is one of a boss to employee, not of a relationship peer. The boss in this instance needs to communicate something very clearly: "This is a fire-able offense if this keeps happening." Is it better in this instance to be more aggressive?
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"? The problem with that phrase is it is trivially untrue - the person is listening to him. It would be like me saying "you're not reading what I'm writing"; you are reading it. You might not understand it, you might not agree with it, maybe the writing is even improper in some way. But you can't write a response to it if you didn't read it. The concern he's raising isn't a real one and Jerry can't address it because he's already listening and he has no control over how his manager feels about said manager's misconceptions. You'll notice that Jerry had to spend a few rounds of begging and pleading to figure out he needs to say "Yes, I will be accurate and careful from now on, so you can trust what I say. If I have a concern, I will raise it with you directly and honestly" to get through this and end the encounter. There are two things to note here: 1) Manager should have led with this if that is what he wanted. Not "I’m worried you’re not listening to me" but "To make sure you've heard what I've said, could you please repeat back in your own words". 2) The manager shouldn't be asking for Jerry to repeat stuff back to him in that way in the normal course of events, it is somewhat unprofessional/a stupid power play. Nothing Jerry is committing to in that sentence is a real change in behaviour. He was probably already trying to be accurate and trustworthy. He didn't realise there were any concerns here until his manager exploded. Changes in behaviour would be something like "There was a conflict between X and Y, in this instance I prioritised X. Next time I will prioritise Y." One of the issues is the manager did such a bad job of steelmanning and drawing out Jerry's reasoning behind the behaviour we can't tell what he did wrong. Many of the accusations ("attitude problem", "didn't like Jerry's tone", "not working in good faith", etc) are absurd and ungrounded. In my opinion we can't really figure out what Jerry's mistake was from the article; Manager wanted him to write certain code, he wouldn't because [reasons] and we aren't being told in any depth what [reasons] were. They may have been bad [reasons] but the manager should be interrogating and dealing with them instead of complaining about being "listened to". "I feel like you aren't listening to me" happens to be a pretty classic phrase used by people who are inarticulate by the way. They can't get a message across and they don't think to look at their own communication to find the problem; but they know that they can't accuse the other person of being too stupid to understand (the other classic :[ ). So the problem becomes that somehow the other person just isn't listening.
happytoexplain 2y ago
This is truly psychotic, not as an ad hominem. And I don't mean his behavior, which you can just chalk up to an antisocial "I'm the boss" personality - I mean specifically the fact that he believes he is being respectful.
- Herring 2y ago
  His conscience is bothering him, that’s why he’s publicly reliving every detail lol.
Devasta 2y ago
He seems to have the laughable belief that his conversation with Jerry couldn't possibly be disrespectful because he didn't swear and he didn't raise his voice, but completely ignores that he is repeatedly calling Jerry a liar, demanding in very roundabout ways that Jerry dance like a monkey for him and worst of all ignoring the reality of hierarchy in the situation: The author can have Jerry fired; Jerry does not have the same capability, so all he can do is try to end the conversation. Am I meant to believe that the author would talk to his peers like this, or his own manager? Not a chance. Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn't have the decency to be embarrassed.

37 points by lkrubner 2y ago

This is a good read regarding a stressful yet necessary exchange between people working toward the same goal but through different lenses. Not all managers practice constructive communication with the end result being a “learning experience” has taken place.

MarkMarine 2y ago

Pretty incredible that when pressed on the assumptions the author made about Jerry’s motivations, the author just doubles down on assuming these motivations again in the defense of the first article. Doubly so that the author published this as a rebuttal to a well thought out counter point. You’ve got to question the whole concept of this blog when the author is posting Ls like this and thinking it’s a W

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jmclnx 2y ago

Why ? Like everything else money, in the last 60 years or so, more people started chasing money at all costs, ignoring the impact on society. Many aspect of modern society now does this, from churches to non-profits to politics to business. Just look at the salaries of the people running these organizations and how they have grown when compared to their employees. Decades ago, at least these "CEOs" would attempt to think of society and employees before making decisions. Now it comes down to "how much can I get and screw everyone else".

throwaway519 2y ago

[flagged]

codr7 2y ago

I've found presence helps a lot in these situations, where perspectives don't align; it's not doable with back and forths from my experience. Get the people who are disagreeing in the same room, virtual or otherwise; preferably before the tone turns sour.

Arnavion 2y ago

It was supposedly Jerry's code that intentionally caused results for Bermuda to not show up for "Caribbean", but the fix for it was to change their search engine config because there was an error copying from the database? The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? Four hours were apparently an underestimate anyway because it took the author "several hours" to fix it. I agree Jerry did a stupid thing too by not testing the queries properly against the previously deployed version of the code. He works remotely so he didn't interact with Sonia enough to take her more seriously. But instead of telling him that so that he can learn, this guy starts assigning him motives and patronizing him, and then pats himself on the back for being a good dad^H^H^H manager who doesn't cuss? Story has holes and the cunt is insufferable. Edit: The author is also the one who submitted this here, and he seems to submit every article from his blog. There are other articles in there like this one about how he deals with people. After reading some of them, all I can say is that the word "cunt" is insufficient to describe him.

gcarvalho 2y ago
I agree story has holes but regarding > The guy who wasn't actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? I think he meant that if the ticket was dismissed in a much shorter time than the allotted then it also needs a good reason. I also believe a bug ticket saying “this shouldn’t happen” is not solved until until “this” no longer happens or everyone involved agrees that it’s okay for it to happen.

deanmoriarty 2y ago

I like to think I am extremely attentive to bug reports (I’m always paranoid about my code possibly containing bugs, so I err on the side of turning every stone), so I would probably not make Jerry’s mistake here, but sure as hell if a manager tried to humiliate me that much I would just quit on the spot. In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”. Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more. That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.

Herring 2y ago
Yeah, even just acknowledging the other guy's valid point, like "I agree with you, Bermuda is not part of the Caribbean, so yes it's deceptive to return it in the search results." Sales is often deceptive. I think that's why the author was so defensive, notably about "honesty".
- kcplate 2y ago
  >>> Jerry: But I made some good decisions about what shows up when. For instance, I don’t like the idea of showing deals for Bermuda when someone searches for “Caribbean” While Bermuda not being part of the Caribbean might be true…it’s really not a valid point in this circumstance. It was an apparent dev assumption that this level of precision was desired even if it wasn’t requested or its absence as a requirement was a mistake. When it was reported as a bug, that should have prompted the developer to clarify with the PM the OG requirement so they were both on the same page. He didn’t, he assumed she was wrong…apparently twice. The PM probably understood that to their lay users the terms “Bermuda”, “Caribbean”, and “Islands” all have a degree of marketing relevance to each other (There is a reason why you might dumb down search results for something like that). Judging by what was information given in the story, apparently dumbed down search results was known and required in the past. Not sure there is any “right” way to gently coach an employee that disregarded proper protocol and requirements, lied about it, blamed a colleague, and initially refused to accept responsibility when it was brought to their attention. That would be damn frustrating. I know HN loves to blame the manager, but this is one of those instances where it seems every portion of the problem and its escalation appears to lie solely at the feet of the developer. It least in my opinion.

Hasu 2y ago

The author 1) created the ticket and its estimation 2) assigned it to Jerry without further comment 3) had another ticket created and assigned to Jerry without talking to Jerry about it 4) got mad when Jerry closed what looked like a duplicate ticket 5) told Jerry that he has no agency in his work and he must do only what the product team says 6) took the ticket himself 7) yelled at Jerry about not sticking to an estimate Jerry had nothing to do with 8) finally extracted an agreement with Jerry that Jerry will do no work without explicit authorization from the author This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss. This isn't to say Jerry didn't screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager's authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others' needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It's a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.

xg15 2y ago
9) wrote a blog post about it on the internet with a detailed transcript of all the conversations, so that the entire world knows how much of an idiot Jerry and how much of a saint the author was. But no, author never gives in to anger...

aqueueaqueue 2y ago

That is an interesting scenario, I am glad they shared it. Not sure if the problem is fixed though. What are the reasons for thinking the bug was no big deal. It may be hard to get the truth. Some people lie because they need a job and want to keep it. Maybe he has an KPI he needs to keep. Closing the bug as no issue would help a feature based KPI or OKR. Also need to address culture. It should be like a "door desk" (Infamous Amazon cultural thing!) level thing that quality is first. You delay the feature work to ensure quality and investigate bugs. Their manager accepts a feature slips because the team fixes bugs. Not all bugs (you need triage) but definitely the ones that cause real issues for customers. Someone (QA and dev together) do an impact assessment. Understand how bad that bug is.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

torben-friis 2y ago

This reads awfully, as both people seem to be wrong. The coder's just avoiding work and dismissing product, but the manager's just bullying the guy into getting a respectful "yes, sir" like an authoritarian parent. The obvious, glaring issue of broken dynamics between product and devs is never taken care of nor addressed, and it seems inevitable the manager's actions create resentment towards product by the dev, and a "us vs then" culture. Good leaders always see dynamics and patterns, rather than "John is good and Betty is bad".

silisili 2y ago
I really don't understand why the two(or even three) of them didn't hop on a 5 minute call to understand what was being asked, instead of whatever hellish version of Chinese whispers this team dynamic is.

cleverwebble 2y ago

"No, I'll do it myself" and "I feel like you aren't listening to me" comes straight out of couple's therapy handbooks on what not to do. You can be direct and respectful, but this was not respectful, this was just aggressive.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
abetusk 2y ago
Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"? Also, this dynamic is one of a boss to employee, not of a relationship peer. The boss in this instance needs to communicate something very clearly: "This is a fire-able offense if this keeps happening." Is it better in this instance to be more aggressive?
- roenxi 2y ago
  > Could you elaborate on what better way to communicate "I feel like you aren't listening to me"? The problem with that phrase is it is trivially untrue - the person is listening to him. It would be like me saying "you're not reading what I'm writing"; you are reading it. You might not understand it, you might not agree with it, maybe the writing is even improper in some way. But you can't write a response to it if you didn't read it. The concern he's raising isn't a real one and Jerry can't address it because he's already listening and he has no control over how his manager feels about said manager's misconceptions. You'll notice that Jerry had to spend a few rounds of begging and pleading to figure out he needs to say "Yes, I will be accurate and careful from now on, so you can trust what I say. If I have a concern, I will raise it with you directly and honestly" to get through this and end the encounter. There are two things to note here: 1) Manager should have led with this if that is what he wanted. Not "I’m worried you’re not listening to me" but "To make sure you've heard what I've said, could you please repeat back in your own words". 2) The manager shouldn't be asking for Jerry to repeat stuff back to him in that way in the normal course of events, it is somewhat unprofessional/a stupid power play. Nothing Jerry is committing to in that sentence is a real change in behaviour. He was probably already trying to be accurate and trustworthy. He didn't realise there were any concerns here until his manager exploded. Changes in behaviour would be something like "There was a conflict between X and Y, in this instance I prioritised X. Next time I will prioritise Y." One of the issues is the manager did such a bad job of steelmanning and drawing out Jerry's reasoning behind the behaviour we can't tell what he did wrong. Many of the accusations ("attitude problem", "didn't like Jerry's tone", "not working in good faith", etc) are absurd and ungrounded. In my opinion we can't really figure out what Jerry's mistake was from the article; Manager wanted him to write certain code, he wouldn't because [reasons] and we aren't being told in any depth what [reasons] were. They may have been bad [reasons] but the manager should be interrogating and dealing with them instead of complaining about being "listened to". "I feel like you aren't listening to me" happens to be a pretty classic phrase used by people who are inarticulate by the way. They can't get a message across and they don't think to look at their own communication to find the problem; but they know that they can't accuse the other person of being too stupid to understand (the other classic :[ ). So the problem becomes that somehow the other person just isn't listening.

happytoexplain 2y ago

This is truly psychotic, not as an ad hominem. And I don't mean his behavior, which you can just chalk up to an antisocial "I'm the boss" personality - I mean specifically the fact that he believes he is being respectful.

Herring 2y ago
His conscience is bothering him, that’s why he’s publicly reliving every detail lol.

Devasta 2y ago

He seems to have the laughable belief that his conversation with Jerry couldn't possibly be disrespectful because he didn't swear and he didn't raise his voice, but completely ignores that he is repeatedly calling Jerry a liar, demanding in very roundabout ways that Jerry dance like a monkey for him and worst of all ignoring the reality of hierarchy in the situation: The author can have Jerry fired; Jerry does not have the same capability, so all he can do is try to end the conversation. Am I meant to believe that the author would talk to his peers like this, or his own manager? Not a chance. Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn't have the decency to be embarrassed.