Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

Having a bad manager in past roles can be some of the best "manager training."

If one your past managers did something recommended in this article but it caused problems, that's ok! It just means you have seen another failure mode that the author didn't experience.

I remember being in a meeting with a bunch of the best managers at a former company. "Why did you originally want to be a manager?" was one of the first questions passed around the circle. The most common answer was, "I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better."

In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power.

I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power.

As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders.

Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists.

> I had this one really bad manager and I figured that surely I could do better.

The only thing worse than being invited to a lot of meetings is not being invited to those meetings.

I suspect this is written by someone who stepped into managing a team and no further.

My reflection overall is; he's probably heard of servant leadership but not understood it? It's not about sweeping away problems but more a mindset that your role is to empower. I feel strongly that all new managers should embrace and get good at this because it instills the mindset that the best leaders ultimately only succeed through their team.

A servant leader who becomes overworked is either not doing their job well (delegation isn't contrary to the mindset!) or, more likely, has a poor leader themselvesw.

I actually love the concept of transparent leadership but sadly I can't see it come through in his points. They are all things a good leader, a good servant leader, should also do.

For me transparent leadership becomes more critical as you move up the stack. Once you get to multiple teams or teams of teams leaders must pivot strongly to strategy setting, and in this your servant leadership comes in painting a clear destination for everyone to get to.

At this point I believe the best leaders are genuinely transparent and the worst keep secrets. One of my most respected mentors framed it as deliberately over-sharing. Which I love, even if I get into trouble for it constantly!

(I do like the writers anarchic streak; the best leaders are radicals)

Comparing leadership to parenting right out the gate tells me all I need to know about this person's management ability.

Your direct reports are not children. You are not raising them out of an altruistic drive to guide the next generation. You are a part of a team of grown adults. You are not above the team, you have a roll on the team. It is an important roll: as a leader you provide high level direction so people are working towards the appropriate goal and confident it is achievable. Likely you are also acting as a manager, coordinating resources and resolving internal and external stakeholder conflicts. This makes the team more efficient, it's important.

But the people you are leading are the ones actually doing the work. They are likely more skilled at their particular role than you, and knowledgeable about much more. You are not leading them because you are better, you are leading them because that's how you can best contribute to the team.

Leadership has absolutely nothing to do with coaching, connecting, teaching, explaining, linking, growth inducing, or training their subordinates. Zero. Zip. Nada. It is the role of more senior practitioners to mentor their more junior colleagues. Leaders often are drawn from more senior ranks, so it's not uncommon for a person in a leadership role to also be in a mentoring role, but they are two separate and unrelated positions. If anything, the most important skill of a good leader is effectively soliciting the right information and wisdom from the right team members so they can most effectively leverage their team's expertise.

You shouldn't be teaching everyone how to communicate with the customer well, you should be identifying the person who is already great at such communication and making sure the rest of the team is giving them what they need to communicate effectively. The person who is great at such communication should be the one teaching that communication to their peers, and not through coaching but by showing everyone how it's done.

A leadership style of getting your direct reports to do your job for you is transparent in the sense that your subordinates will see right through you.