Kind of a weird hyper-literal interpretation of "servant leadership" IMO. Upskilling and empowering your team, not making yourself a SPOF, treating your adult colleagues like adults, all sounds like servant leadership to me...
Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
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Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#72Just wanted to provide a useful link on the topic of leadership. The US army publishes its doctrine for free and updates it somewhat regularly: https://talent.army.mil/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/ARN20039_... The doctrine is a no-nonsense, no-fluff document based on 200+ years of military tradition where the effectiveness of the leadership is actually life and death. Definitely worth a read if you are interested in le…
As a multiple time ground force commander both in Iraq and stateside for CI operations, I can firmly state that there is literally zero to be learned about leadership from corporate or political worlds. When I left the USG because it’s fundamentally corrupt, I went into private business thinking there were technical/business leaders that had pro-social incentives, and their heads screwed on. Man was I wrong. The US m…
It sounds like you have been burnt, badly.
There is surely a business out there that does fit your world view, though the pay and conditions might not.
In my view, the need for growth at any cost is toxic and leads to all sorts of horrible behaviours.
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control. Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.
Being responsible for something while having little/no control is so demoralizing & infuriating.
As someone once again in such a role, it really is, and it never gets easier.
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#74I think the premise is a little shaky since a good servant leader is already transparent. But there's some good takeaways. Leaders should inform their team of what's happening behind the scenes and allow them to understand why things are playing out the way they are. Allowing people to take on more responsibility, if they want it, is a healthy sign of an organization, but it shouldn't be imposed nor expected if they already have enough on their plates.
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#75From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for." This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes…
If you ever want to quickly destroy an organization, just separate the ability to control with the responsibility to control. Burnout, infighting, and chaos will ensue.
Control, responsibility and accountability have to align.
* You should only be accountable for what you are responsible for.
* You should only be responsible for what you have control of.
Bad managers hate this structure because in makes them accountable for themselves and their subordinates and prevents deflection of blame to low level employees.
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#76> Servant leadership seems to me a lot like curling parenting: the leader/parent anticipate problems and sweep the way for their direct reports/children.
That's not what "Servant leadership" is. It's about _letting the team lead_ - and they can come to you if they need help - instead of _pushing the team_. So in practice it's the opposite of anticipating problems. If something, servant leadership gets a bad rep for being used as an excuse to let people fall on the sword, instead of protecting them
The rest of the post is just describing the role of "Management".
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#77The problem I've found with servant leadership in large orgs is the direct manager usually has little agency over problems. The best you can get is maybe they can provide additional context on the good intentions behind the bad decisions. This is essentially by design, a critical role they play are to be the scape goats and shock absorbers for the bad machinery above them.
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was a manager I had to take a training based on the book "The Coaching Habit." It left me really sour on the role, and explained some of the behavior of previous managers of mine that I least appreciated, specifically that their approach to management seemed to be to just get me to articulate and explain my problems over and over until I somehow rubber-ducked myself into solving them myself. When that didn't w…
This is a main reason why Agile Coaches often end up with such a bad rap, and the role is on the outs. They're supposed to be people who can work with leadership to ensure the right people are on the right teams working on the right stuff at the right time. And turn around and be able to help teams untangle their QA and CI/CD processes to speed delivery. Instead, the damn "life coaches" got their foot in the door and…
Also makes for a poor metaphor, because coaches in sports are supposed to be absolute experts in absolutely everything about the sport without the physical ability to implement it.
Imagine if a football player told their coach "I'm not sure how to deal with this specific opponent's strategy" and the coach was like "Well have you tried thinking about it more?"
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#79From the post: "The middle manager that doesn't perform any useful work is a fun stereotype, but I also think it's a good target to aim for." This is the kind of argument that makes people come up with middle manager stereotypes in the first place. In fact, the whole post is a great example of why middle manager stereotypes exist: it starts with a straw man argument and comes up with a "better alternative" that makes…
For me the worst of this is organizations where employees have to write their own performance reviews. Eff that. You're the boss, you tell me how I'm doing. If there's one thing a manager should be accountable for it is the development and evaluation of the people the manager is responsible for.
Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership
#80This is actually not such bad advice for a manager who manages other managers, though I can see why ICs find it very frustrating. If you are giving high level platitudes and counseling-disguised-as-coaching to a junior new hire, they can rightly ask WTF. But managers, especially those recently moved from IC tech roles, often do benefit from this kind of forced introspection. If they have an underperforming employee, they should bounce ideas around with a more experienced manager, but the first line manager ultimately needs to be the one deciding how to rebalance work to maximize learning or to ultimately make the call to part ways with the employee. If a servant senior leader over them is actually doing the slog of working through the hardest issues (interpersonal conflict, serious direction change needed for team, firing people, top performers at risk of leaving), the first line manager is never going to grow.
Similarly "cut out the middleman" advice in the article is great for senior ICs/quasi-architects or sub-managers but potentially toxic for junior engineers who may get steamrolled by the classic "1000 urgent requests issue" that managers or potentially very senior ICs need to drive.