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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?

#231
post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> do it in a careful way. Sure, that sounds more reasonable. Your initial description could easily be interpreted as “If you go over the head of your immediate manager for any reason whatsoever, you are a liability to the company and deserve to be fired immediately”, which is mostly how I read it. Certainly, an employee must be careful when engaging the company in non-orthodox paths, just as you say, but employers mu…

Very first thing I said - "When done in bad faith". Sounds like you were perhaps arguing against a strawman? I never said don't ever go to upper management, nor that there is never a reason to go to upper management. Just that if someone goes to upper management the way this guy did, the right response is to let them go, that they are a liability to the team, the manager, and the company at that point. Honestly to th…

I responded to what I read into what you wrote. Since you did not seem to mean exactly that, then it’s all good. I certainly did not intentionally misinterpret what you wrote in order to attack it.

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

#232
post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is highly subjective though. Personally, if I'm sick, the last think I want to do is communicate with my manager - it means you have to be careful, you never know if they're digging, or 'professional but not exactly sincere empathy' etc.. 'Adult Professionals' shouldn't need to be coddled. If you're sick you're sick and that's that. If you have something that's a 'big deal' then you have that in a conversation i…

I trust my manager to not be a dick when I'm sick. I also believe he is an empathetic person who cares about me and wants to know what's up. I understand he has a list of tasks that need to be completed by his small team. So I'm happy to let him know whether I expect to be out for a day or a week. If I didn't have such a relation with my manager I'd be looking for a job. If he doesn't look out for me when I'm sick he…

That's the sign of having a good manage. Not everyone has that unfortunately

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

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, there's a gendered pronoun at the end of point (d). Since it looks like you were trying to avoid this, I figured I would let you know so you can excise it if you wish

I found it difficult to read this comment due to the usage of "they", as my brain subconscioisly interprets "they" as a group of people. I am not sure what the goal here was, because revealing the gender does not deanonimize the subject.

It can probably help reduce gender bias - sometimes people will judge the same actions differently based on the person's gender

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

#234

A mark of a good leader is that their team runs really well without them. It should also run just as well when they are around. Always be looking to take your ego out of the situation. You are there to facilitate the success of the team it’s individual members.

This is a very underrated observation. I've seen teams where all code reviews pass through one or two individuals.

The "core developers" become a bottleneck to all changes, even if they offer the best feedback available. The team eventually leans on them as a crutch to catch all problems, progress grinds to a halt as everyone is waiting for their code to be reviewed by X, the core developers don't get any real work done, and the rest of the team never levels up because they don't learn lessons that sometimes are only learned the hard way in production.

Good leaders know how to "let go", delegate, and recognize when they're becoming part of the problem.

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

#235
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like quite the nightmare. Was the person at least technically competent in their role?

They were very competent... and they held together really well with clients. We were a small consulting firm. But I think the 'mask cracked' with us internally, where they had their dysfunctional behavior.

I was in the place of the person described above (or at least, to some degree), and from my perspective, if they work with clients well, then their behavior comes from the good place of caring about the product and customers, but they seem to be overly demanding of their teammates and themselves.

That's why they resented other's success -- they see flaws in others work, and being overly demanding to other people, it seems to them, that those people are not worth of being successful. Also being demanding of themselves makes compliments look not genuine, because they "know" that they are not good enough (in their eyes).

There is also a stress factor, if there were overtimes, or the project is highly demanding (something to do with money, or health, for example), it can be stressful, and multiply that stress by their lack of confidence (because of high demands they put on themselves), and you can get a very stressed out person on the edge of paranoia, therefore some mistakes are found to be acts of war (coz, you know, if you cared about the product at least to some extent, you would have found it, but since you didn't, you either didn't care, so you are the enemy, or you made it because you are the enemy with ulterior motives and it was a diversion, not because you are a human being and make mistakes sometimes).

Also, when they are getting abusive, outline bounds right away! Tell them, that their feedback is more than welcome, but their tone/language does not need to be hurtful, because it actually takes the focus away from the issue they care about, and if they want it addressed, it's their job to keep other's focus on it. BTW, most likely, they have already came up with valid problems, but because of the problematic communication style, they couldn't make other people care about it or even understand it, since no one cared or understood it, or even worse -- said they did, but there were no resolution or even an attempt to resolve, then once again -- "it's all idiots or enemies around with their laziness/stupidity/diversions!". Yes, they got into this vicious circle themselves and don't know about that, but you are in it now, so it's your job to escape it too.

For me, some quality vacation helped, less regular meetings, more written communication unless really necessary (because, it's easier to manage anger over the text, but easier to converse emotion and intent over the call, plus make those calls up to 2-3 persons, since on a meeting of 4 persons, one of them is not paying attention, and we don't want to make our friends think that we brought an idiot or an enemy to the meeting, you know), more casual conversations with teammates, where you don't bring up work at all (drinking beer over Jitsi/Zoom works too!).

Also, I tend to be very accepting on work challenges, so it's not like I would say no to something I don't like, if it needs to be done. I'll do it, even though I probably wont be happy about it, so don't believe that me or such stressed caring person will see your offer to agree or disagree to do something as a genuine offer instead of polite way to demand it to be done.

You may think they would love to do it (even more, they probably brought up existence of the issue to you themselves!), but it's not necessary, that they won't get under even more stress. Instead, try to make lots of small fully defined tasks (don't make them do it, they'll overthink it and there is more stress again, and more problems), put them into backlog, and ask such person to pick which tasks to do themselves. If you see, that they are overthinking/overworking some other tasks instead, make them do those small tasks, at least few a week, small successes help them to overcome stress, see progress, and are unlikely to be scrutinized on code review or QA.

I hope, someone can make TL;DR of this if it makes sense, I'm too tired today. But leaving my long time job soon, where I was working on the project for some years, was this kind of person for some time, and also wasn't, seen a few rotations of the team, multiple managers, and I can definitely tell, that it is a manageable problem, even if not by the ways I tell here. Few good managers worked with me and little by little I've become a better teammate. I still let that side of myself show up sometime in a managed way, when I see someone is cutting corners, and does not listen to reason repeatedly, but anyways, I've heard enough of good feedback, and even raised few other developers to a new level since those times.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him. I wonder how it'd been to be a manager, if he couldn't be fired, and he continued contacting the CEO etc saying you (GGP, whirlingdervish the throwaway) weren't any good at your job. I guess eventually I'd quit (if I was in GGPs position and couldn't do much about it), and he'd become the manager in my place, if the plan hadn't been to hire another one.

> In many countries it wouldn't have been allowed to fire him. I'm in one of these countries. If they have a cause that cannot be legally used to terminate an employee, they just look long and hard for any other misdemeanors and fire them as fast as they gather any plausible "evidence". Creative types can also actively put an employee into a checkmate, i.e. a position where no move or any move is a fireable offense.…

Compare that unfortunate workplace "culture" (until the person eventually leaves / gets fired), with this article about psychological safety:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26860743

I wonder if the lawmakers having made it almost impossible to fire someone, then damages the psychological safety in the company, in that the managers have to start looking for mistakes someone did and using it against him/her. I'd guess this sends bad vibes to the whole team.

Makes me wonder if this holds countries like, was is France?, back, when it comes to startups and innovation, hmm

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

#238
the hardest leadership challenge has also been the hardest professional challenge...

i cofounded a venture-backed startup with my brother. a few years in, i had to fire him.

too many details to unpack here, but, gratefully he's found footing and is happy building something else. i'm still running the venture although we are running out of time / money.

(i'm not sharing that last point for sympathy; i understood the risks and i'm prepared to face the end, just like the beginning.)

overcoming it? honestly, i just pressed on; what else can you really do? i got therapy, counseling, to work through the difficult patches and i invested in myself a bit more so i could find peace with it all. i realized that i had a pretty serious co-dependency issue and now i'm clear-headed in a way i've never been.

so, the result has been net-positive.

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