Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

idiallo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 146 posts

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#11

Post by wahnfrieden »

Aurornis wrote: post #10
ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #5

"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer. Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals. In that case, it's *your dut…

This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally. It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years…

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere.

Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences.

https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#13

Post by Herring »

wavemode wrote: post #6

> I often get "eye rolls" when I say this to developers: You are not going to convince anyone with facts. True in technical leadership and true in life. Engineers are especially prone to this sort of frustration, where you're technically right but socially aren't speaking the right language for your audience.

You need to get a better audience. I recently met a good developer who still thinks Covid was a hoax. Doing my best to avoid him.

You think you can just politely work around him -- that's how you get vaccine skeptics dismantling the CDC.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#14

Post by dmos62 »

ahmedfromtunis wrote: post #5

"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer. Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals. In that case, it's *your dut…

Steve Jobs was also known to lock teams in a room until they arrived at a common vision. It's a difficult task, to align everyone, but in my limited experience not doing it resulted in extremely inefficient execution. What's more, people feel belittled and rejected if you disregard their viewpoints. Sometimes you need to get things done regardless of what people feel or think, but you can't sustain that for a long time.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#15

Post by tux3 »

everdrive wrote: post #9
wavemode wrote: post #6

> I often get "eye rolls" when I say this to developers: You are not going to convince anyone with facts. True in technical leadership and true in life. Engineers are especially prone to this sort of frustration, where you're technically right but socially aren't speaking the right language for your audience.

This is a difficult lesson to swallow, but must be understood. I do still retain some frustration that there does not seem to be more effort to correct for this problem locally. For instance, in general you must speak to your audience and make emotional appeals. But me, your boss, should understand how to look past that and work with the facts, at least to the degree possible. I don't see much of that.

There are places that have this norm, but it's exceedingly rare, and it's not some perfect utopia. We're all susceptible to emotional appeals to different degrees, and emotions aren't some inconvenience that you should try to eliminate in favor of pure cold calculations, they also have a place and a reason to be.

People care about different things, so trying to focus just on facts can end up with people talking past each other, because they have different goals, value systems, or other fuzzy human feelings that can't be graphed in an Excel spreadsheet and compared numerically.

I'm not saying that emotional appeals and sophistry are fine, but I find that often when people accept an emotional appeal over a cold purely factual argument, it's because the factual argument is missing the point. A more important part of the discussion is understanding what other people actually care about to make sure we're not all talking past each other, or spending hours arguing details that won't matter in the end.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#16

Post by hn_throw_250915 »

Herring wrote: post #13
wavemode wrote: post #6

> I often get "eye rolls" when I say this to developers: You are not going to convince anyone with facts. True in technical leadership and true in life. Engineers are especially prone to this sort of frustration, where you're technically right but socially aren't speaking the right language for your audience.

You need to get a better audience. I recently met a good developer who still thinks Covid was a hoax. Doing my best to avoid him. You think you can just politely work around him -- that's how you get vaccine skeptics dismantling the CDC.

[dead]

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#17

Post by AnimalMuppet »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #11
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally. It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years…

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere. Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

Interesting. For that to work, though, it has to be true consent, not "it's the boss's idea and I don't dare to object out loud".

But I guess, if that's the environment you're in, then you're stuck with autocratic leadership (no matter what label it claims for itself), and your only choice is to leave or not.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#18

Post by wahnfrieden »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #17
wahnfrieden wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere. Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

Interesting. For that to work, though, it has to be true consent, not "it's the boss's idea and I don't dare to object out loud". But I guess, if that's the environment you're in, then you're stuck with autocratic leadership (no matter what label it claims for itself), and your only choice is to leave or not.

You can also try to organize your peers in those environments (or even from the outside if so inclined)

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#19

Post by cowthulhu »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #11
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally. It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years…

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere. Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

I don’t think that is a practical framework for situations where people aren’t already very closely aligned. What happens when a few people are very vocal (and firm) in opposition to basically every change? Having dissenting views is valuable, but not when they have veto power. Additionally, I think that framework is vulnerable to what I refer to as “death by yes but” - when everyone is just piling on amendments and precursor conditions, oftentimes conflicting, that result in a decision taking months (maybe even years) to make or scuttle.

I’m basing these comments out of experience - one example is a workgroup/committee operating under a similar model that was completely unable to do anything due to decision paralysis. The committee grew significantly more effective when we reformed the decision making process to have a small group of owners to handle pitching and (potentially) implementing the decision, then had approval be a simple yes/no majority vote.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#20

Post by homeonthemtn »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #11
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally. It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years…

You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere. Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences. https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/

It's not autocratic, it's not a form of government at all.

Each role is a module to take in inputs, process them, and produce outputs. it is effectively a program.

Define your roles, and expectations of each role, then run the program and edit as needed.

Post reply on HN