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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?

#41

Post by refenestrator »

nickthemagicman wrote: post #23
andrew_v4 wrote: post #10

"Non-contrubuting ideation" - people from other groups without real skin in the game who don't want to take responsibility for anything but insist on providing input on how it's done, and often have some political standing to do so. This has come up again and again in many roles. For me personally, I am really bad at handling this. Sometimes it's fine just to meet with people an hear their ideas (which can obviously…

Is political capital a real thing for managers?

If you're taking stands all the time, you're the cranky person who's hard to get along with and you'll be in real trouble the first time something goes wrong.

Have to pick your spots.

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

#42

Post by geoduck14 »

dillondoyle wrote: post #30

My career is young. I'm only (just about) 32 but own a small agency with a partner. This election cycle was tough. We tried to grow in 2019 with more staff than we'd ever had. We've always had a leadership problem of trying to transfer skills from the top down to help lift up employees that don't already 'have it' - especially (braggart time) me and my partners skills as I think our uniqueness as a firm is tied to my…

This was really good to read. Thank you for sharing.

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

#43

Post by throwarayes »

uh_uh wrote: post #5
throwarayes wrote: post #3

Having an unstable teammate on a project I led. Long story short, they: (a) saw things in terms of them being persecuted, and took critique of their work or approach deeply personally (b) tended to see things as us vs them, and not a two-way street, where both sides bore responsibility. And that sometimes crappy things happen with no malace. (c) resented other's success at the company, and thought that the 'successfu…

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.

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

#44

Post by rubyn00bie »

Learning to let my go of my ego and trust...

Understanding that delegating tasks, instead of doing them myself, was of the utmost importance the more people I managed... especially, greenfield work. Literally: do not steal the fun. This also means inherently trusting people, and if you can't do that you shouldn't be working with them. two important notes about that:

1. If you just thought of someone you can't trust instead of thinking about how you can give more trust to people, you just had your ego stand in the way of mutual success. You are a shitty manager, and today is hopefully the first day of you recognizing that and learning to trust.

2. When people don't deliver what you expected, it's because you did a shitty job of communicating it to them. What seems obvious to you after 45 minutes in a meeting with three other people already prepared for the topic will most of the time seem obvious to no one else. If it does, I can almost promise, their vision of it is totally different than yours. Learning to work through the defining the problem (that includes asking "does this problem exist?") and then guiding solutions (we have x days, engineering hours, etc available) to ensure they meet the needs of the business. If no one but you delivers things correctly, you're a shitty manager, and today's hopefully the first day of you recognizing you need to learn to communicate and trust.

Not many people are lucky enough to be told so plainly it's their ego, but it's your ego that causes your team to fail. Maybe it's your boss's ego that's causing you to fail... I was told plainly to my face to not let my ego get in the way of the goal... and yeah it punched me in the gut too, so if you're hurting, or in denial know it's okay. We all have to grow, it's worth it.

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

#45

Post by darkerside »

rubyn00bie wrote: post #44

Learning to let my go of my ego and trust... Understanding that delegating tasks, instead of doing them myself, was of the utmost importance the more people I managed... especially, greenfield work. Literally: do not steal the fun. This also means inherently trusting people, and if you can't do that you shouldn't be working with them. two important notes about that: 1. If you just thought of someone you can't trust i…

As someone who suffers from the same neuroses, I would push back on some of this a bit.

If you haven't built trust with every person on your team, that doesn't make you a shitty manager. The more people you can work with and trust, the more effective you may be as a manager, but don't let a counterexample serve as proof positive that you suck. Trust is a two way street.

Sometimes people underperform for other reasons that have nothing to do with you. They may have a different perspective, or they may just be having a bad day. Or they may have family or health problems affecting them. Or, they may actually just no longer care or not be good at their job.

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

#46

Post by brobinson »

xmprt wrote: post #6
seneca wrote: post #4

Having a severely unperforming, and sometimes belligerent, employee that couldn't be fired because of HR reasons. His work was horrible, and his responses to feedback was to become hostile. Not only was he dead weight, he destroyed the team's morale and hurt their relationships with other teams. The team looked to me to solve the issue and couldn't understand why he wasn't being fired, and I couldn't tell them "I'm n…

What reason did HR give for you not being able to fire him? I think at least some members of the team would be understanding. Also, I'm not sure if you tried this, but I've heard in cases where you can't fire someone, you recommend them for internal transfer and give the other manager good reviews of them. It's a bit scummy but it's the most positive outcome for the team.

I worked at a company in the US where HR would not let us fire an employee who was viciously attacking other employees in public. The employee in question had a medical condition covered under the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). Perhaps OP's case was similar.

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

#47

Post by whirlingdervish »

(throwaway)

I'm a developer at a fairly small company. I never really wanted to be managing people but after some internal drama a bunch of stuff was moved around and I found myself in charge of the team I had been on while we looked for a permanent manager.

One of the devs who now reported to me decided that this was the best time to demand a raise- not just a cost-of-living increase, which are scheduled, but an amount of money that would have made him the highest-paid person on the team by a lot. (He was on the lower end of both seniority and performance.) He was threatening to leave, and after talking to my superiors I basically just said "sorry, you aren't getting that, I don't want you to leave but if you do I will be happy to give you a good reference."

That didn't go over great and he emailed the whole C-suite trashing me and telling them essentially what a mistake it was that I got tapped to lead the team over him. The CEO just forwarded the email to me and said "deal with this." We'd had a pretty good relationship before, (or at least I thought we did) but all attempts to sit down with him and figure out how we could work together ended with him just making it clear that he was not going to play ball.

He stopped showing up to work for awhile and sent his notice not too long after, and eventually we hired a real manager (which was always the plan) and I went back to writing code. Even though I don't know what I could have done differently I still feel bad and think about it a lot.

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

#48

Post by [deleted] »

29athrowaway wrote: post #17
throwarayes wrote: post #3

Having an unstable teammate on a project I led. Long story short, they: (a) saw things in terms of them being persecuted, and took critique of their work or approach deeply personally (b) tended to see things as us vs them, and not a two-way street, where both sides bore responsibility. And that sometimes crappy things happen with no malace. (c) resented other's success at the company, and thought that the 'successfu…

In the "Big five personality traits" model, you have: 1. Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) 2. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless) 3. Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) 4. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational) 5. Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident) Excessive neuroticism (aka emotional instabili…

[deleted]

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

29athrowaway wrote: post #17
throwarayes wrote: post #3

Having an unstable teammate on a project I led. Long story short, they: (a) saw things in terms of them being persecuted, and took critique of their work or approach deeply personally (b) tended to see things as us vs them, and not a two-way street, where both sides bore responsibility. And that sometimes crappy things happen with no malace. (c) resented other's success at the company, and thought that the 'successfu…

In the "Big five personality traits" model, you have: 1. Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious) 2. Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. extravagant/careless) 3. Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved) 4. Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. critical/rational) 5. Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. resilient/confident) Excessive neuroticism (aka emotional instabili…

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by qazxcvbnmlp »

whirlingdervish wrote: post #47

(throwaway) I'm a developer at a fairly small company. I never really wanted to be managing people but after some internal drama a bunch of stuff was moved around and I found myself in charge of the team I had been on while we looked for a permanent manager. One of the devs who now reported to me decided that this was the best time to demand a raise- not just a cost-of-living increase, which are scheduled, but an amo…

Sounds like you did the right thing and they needed to go.
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