Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

‘one trick pony’

Yeah, shallow dismissal of people's effort to try to make a change must be because they are a ‘one trick pony’. Is that all you brought to the conversation?

There is a bit too much emphasis on the relationship between the manager and individual subordinates as the only thing a manager does. It's certainly the relationship that programmers have with their manager, but it ignores the reason why managers exist at all. In the end, managers are part of the translation layer between the company's top-level goal of acquiring customers and improving profitability and code that gets written and deployed.

The day-to-day responsibilities of a manager vary by company, but in essence can be boiled down to: Take priorities that are handed down from above -> apply those priorities as efficiently as possible to the team -> assist in execution.

The manager might be part of the discussion of priorities and clarify them before relaying them to their team, they may actually have quite a bit of freedom of interpreting the priorities, or they may literally just be a task-assigner-and-enforcer. The manager might also have technical leadership authority, architecture responsibility, or anything else, but these are still all in service of coordinating a team to produce the best output possible.

How a manager relates to their subordinates is important, of course, and the best managers treat their subordinates as individuals that have different needs. There's a responsibility to give them room to grow, keep them happy, and keep them productive as part of the job, but that alone isn't the job.

We’re not talking about preventative actions.

Choosing to park my car correctly because I used get tickets is a reactive action. Helping someone because they asked for help is a reactive action. Being late and then doing things to stop being late is also reactive.

I’m not talking about preventing hypothetical consequences for events that could happen but have not even happened.

'Management' is not one size fits all. Every company is different. Its needs are different. What a manager is supposed to do is different too. If someone behaves the same way as a manager no matter the company or the people they work with, I think that's terrible.

Being a manager is about listening. It is about tuning into the environment. It is about being there for the team in whatever way they need support. Sometimes that means being a coach. Other times it means fighting for them. And sometimes, when an unpopular decision is made above your pay grade, it means breaking it down for the team in a way that they 'get it'. You want them to understand without completely losing morale or slipping into rebellion.

Brutal honesty sounds great on paper. But not everyone can handle it or is ready for it.

It is a balancing act. Even if everyone "knows", bitch*ng about the company to your reports can only lead to bad outcomes. So you acknowledge the company's shortcomings. At the same time, you try to help the team find purpose and fulfillment in other ways.

From Ira Glass:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste.

But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.

A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.

And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”