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Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#181

Kudos: Compliments, highlighting successes, lauding positives. Within a 11 year span of working in same but large company, once you’ve mastered the resource management, the hardest leadership skill is kudos ... toward your upper management, ... knowing when to let yourself down and have your boss get the kudos instead. - IMHO, the ADHD workers are the easiest to managed (trick is gaslighting their focus into a hard p…

> Kudos: Compliments, highlighting successes, lauding positives.

I think advices can be without providing proper context can not only be counter-productive, it can also create toxic cultures. I've been part of a company where the CTO was a very self-help guru type "positive" person. There were compliments, positivity, motivation etc. everywhere. There was no bar for excellence. Everything was excellent to begin with. Everyone was congratulating themselves not only for doing the miniscule things, but also for bringing in a good team spirit. The whole culture ended up being a participation trophy culture.

All the good employees left the company, and the medicore ones were still doing the same thing last team I heard. This toxic positivity has become very popular in pop cultures. Unfortunately it's all appearances, underneath the positivity is the thriving mediocrity.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#182
Loneliness, learning how to exert soft/passive power and patience. As you move further up leadership, your social circle of peers necessarily and naturally becomes smaller. For those of us who get a lot out of the social aspects of work (the team sport as you said), this can make something that you'd otherwise celebrate rather bittersweet.

Exerting soft/passive power has been the major long-term challenge, I think. Learning how to exert action at a distance requires a lot of finesse, a lot of listening, and more scanning than printing, so to speak. I'll be the first to admit that I lacked some of that when I began; still do now, really. You have to think about things as an analyst, an evangelist and an investor, rather than a do-er. There's a lot of education, persuasion, and sermonizing involved, even if it's primarily in recruiting others to work your ideas or to join your team to work on theirs. Leadership is about people; people can be messy and fickle, so leadership challenges involve things that can be messy and fickle.

Finally, patience has been the most subtly challenging part of all of the above. When you're more alone and need to exert soft power to be effective, you need patience in spades, and you very likely may lack it. I certainly do. The impatience that was such a virtue to me as an IC has bitten me as a leader. I've had to learn the hard way that patience regarding challenges isn't a nice to have -- it's a necessity, and without it, I'll fail.

That said, I think I have enjoyed a lot of tailwinds that have made much of my early leadership challenges a non-issue. I'm pretty self-aware and am more motivated by winning than being right, so I've not had too many challenges with stupid unforced errors on my end. I like talking to people and enjoy fixing their problems to make them happy, so management and leadership has large component of real fulfillment to it that I don't have to fake just because it takes my career forward. I've spent a lot of time in necessarily cross-functional technical roles at startups in my early career, so it's never been hard for me to empathize with leaders in other divisions and be an asset in effectively translating technology into their business goals.

But even with all of those tailwinds, leadership is /hard/. Beyond the day to day challenge of increased responsibility, decreased agency, and thinner safety nets, it's just plain mentally tricky in so many ways I could conceive of but not fully appreciate until I began my own journey. The highs are high, but the lows are really, really low, painful and traumatic even. I never questioned whether I should be doing what I was doing as an IC. But as a leader, that questioning became a lot more prominent. And it had very little to do with how well I was objectively doing according to the CEO (which was "very well"). I think it is just the nature of the beast.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#183
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that was the correct response. If anything, you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head. He isn't looking to work with you or the team, he's actively seeking to undermine you; at that point his presence is a negative, not a positive.

> you should have fired him intentionally yourself when he went over your head Is escalating an issue a fireable offense?

When done in bad faith, yes.

This wasn't "I have an issue, my manager didn't address it", this was "I have an issue with my manager. He's an idiot. You shouldn't have made him manager. You should have made ME manager", etc.

There is nowhere to go with that. There is no way to fix that. There is no way to ignore that. And the employee is going to be killing team morale more and more the longer they stay at that company.

So your options are to leave the person where they are, killing the team's morale and effectiveness, go to management yourself and ask that the employee be listened to (meaning that now someone as problematic and full of themselves is being put in a management position, which will also lead to the team's productivity dropping to nothing), or you let the person go. Only one of these will leave the team intact.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#184
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CIO and CTO ar quite different roles, so why do you think how your company does it has any relevance to what tluyben2 has done? Why do you think they are talking about your company?

My bad. I see they were responding to the leading question of my post, not the situation part of it.

You are right, I should have quoted the top so it was clearer what I was answering to.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What motivated you to rewrite it rather than fixing the debt in the old product?

It was a ~8 year old mix and mesh of tech was not really fixable. We also got too many requests for enterprise clients for Java. And that would have been impossible. We more than doubled in revenue after the rewrite because now we could go for fortune 500 countries. It was a different time: the product was a combi of perl, php, c++. And then the business world, at least here, went over to java backends.

Cannot edit anymore but: countries is meant to be companies.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people don't deliver what you expected, it's because you did a shitty job of communicating it to them. Why is this necessarily the fault of the manager's communication skills? Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired. If you have a competent person who didn't deliver what you expected, then yes, it's probably the fault of the manager's communication. Not so for the lower-end of that compe…

> Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired. And who does that person report to? Who made the decision to hire them in the first place?

Could be the current manager or could be a past one.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#187
post #120
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. Looking to hate on the first thing because they're successful.. confirm your twisted worldview that success is robbery to make your feel better how you haven't made it. Nice try...

The OP basically admitted to fraud and you're throwing "success is robbery" around? No, but robbery is robbery. What is this "boys will be boys" talk? Well golly gee them boys sure got up to some corporate fraud but gosh darn if they ain't good at heart. Nearly facing consequences sure rattled their jimmies good! Aww shucks I can't stay mad at them; go ahead, give em their million dollar exit! Now get on, ya little r…

Girls will be girls... We don't know if it's a boy or a girl. Haha, well you're certainly passionate about this.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#188
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened to me this past week. I built exactly what the spec said. They came back and said it all looks good, except we expected this to be that. Um, nothing about that was in the spec, nor was it ever mentioned verbally in a meeting. Making the change from this to that will require everything to be redone since it requires fundamental changes. I would have built it differently had it been communicated to me fro…

A key skill of a senior developer is a sixth sense for this kind of unspoken requirements, and asking questions to flush them out. Not always possible, of course.

This is why it’s important for devs to understand the problem being solved with their code, not just blindly executing to a spec that everyone knows doesn’t spell out every last detail the customer is interested in. Stop treating devs as fungible spec builders and more as partners of the business so they can shift from building against specs to solving real problems. The devs who have this “sixth sense” are finding a mismatch between the spec and the underlying business problem problem they know they are trying to solve.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When people don't deliver what you expected, it's because you did a shitty job of communicating it to them. Why is this necessarily the fault of the manager's communication skills? Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired. If you have a competent person who didn't deliver what you expected, then yes, it's probably the fault of the manager's communication. Not so for the lower-end of that compe…

> Sometimes the person sucks beyond repair and needs to be fired. And who does that person report to? Who made the decision to hire them in the first place?

That's why I said "It might still be the manager's fault for hiring that person in the first place"

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest leadership challenge of your career?

#190

(Throwaway account.) The company I own got hacked and our database was stolen, containing basic user and company data for 100,000s of users as well as some partial card data. From the moment I discovered the breach (browsing logs after an unexplained brief outage), for the next 3-6 months, my life did not belong to me, but to insurers, forensic investigators, regulators, the police, credit card companies, press/media…

throwaway78594, that grueling experience sounds horrifying.

I'm working on a way to stop the "compromised vendor" problem. We have no idea what it's like on the inside when this happens. If you ever want to talk about it more I'd love to (sympathetically) have some idea. Not sell you anything, not "interview you" just learn.

You can contact me at dvhw at ABScott.com (not the domain of the company working on this -- really I'm not trying to sell you anything, especially at this terrible time).

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