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Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

entropicthoughts.com

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Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#141

Post by awb »

alistairSH wrote: post #4

I was never taught that servant leadership should be some weird "manager as parent" relationship. Instead, servant leadership implies the manager serves the team (as the name implies). That includes removing impediments, but also includes empowering the team, ensuring their careers are growing, etc.

Exactly.

It’s the concept of a management chart as an inverted pyramid with each layer holding up and supporting the layer above them. If you imagine a promotion as working your way down the corporate pyramid, then it’s easier to see how the managers at the bottom are carrying more weight and deserving of higher pay.

As opposed to a pyramid where it’s visually represented as the broader management layers supporting the layers above them.

In a pyramid, it looks like the CEO has a cushy, overpaid job. In an inverted pyramid it looks like they have the weight and responsibility of the company on their shoulders.

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#143

Post by munchbunny »

simonw wrote: post #50

My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done. I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain proje…

You do need to expose your team to some of the shit that's getting flung or else your team gets used to operating under clean conditions and loses its tolerance.

For better or for worse, politics and randomization is just a thing in our jobs, and for at least some people in your team that means part of career growth is learning to handle it. If you, the manager, are the sole person capable of being the "shit umbrella" for the team, that's another way that your team gets a bus number of 1. (I learned this the hard way.)

In an ideal world you have some senior engineers who are more of the "don't bother me and let me cook" persuasion, and then you have at least one who is probably on track to become a manager, and they are your backup when you can't be in two places at once.

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#144

Post by mrguyorama »

trunnell wrote: post #122

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 q…

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

That doesn't mean that those people are learning from prior bad management. That could instead mean that management tends to be people who are convinced of their own above average competence.

Did anyone ask the reports of those managers whether they were any good?

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#145

Post by taurath »

kepeko wrote: post #61
simonw wrote: post #50

My first few years as an engineering manager were heavily influenced by my idea that I needed to be a "shit umbrella" - I needed to protect my team from all of the shit raining down around the organization so they could focus on getting stuff done. I eventually realized that this is a terrible management philosophy! Your team would much rather understand what's going on, why things are happening and why certain proje…

Agree. team needs to know about the shit. It's important information that helps them prioritize their work and motivates them as they know that what they do is important for the bigger bosses. If manager shields me from everything I go apathetic, not knowing why I even do the boring stuff if manager doesn't tell me his manager is giving shit

I hate having to rely on my own sense of what happened in a meeting, or which executive is upset about something. While its usually accurate, it's been borne out of chaotic leadership and shouldn't be necessary, especially if its to try to get off the tracks when a freight train is coming.

Sometimes the culture of poor management is so ingrained and normalized people really don't understand what the problem is. That usually ends with me looking elsewhere, as taking on the responsibility other's won't while not having authority has lead to multiple full years lost to burnout.

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#146

Post by chowells »

jjk166 wrote: post #133
cj wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing one end of an extreme. The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene. E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then your boss comes to you to ask why you left the comments in the PR, instead of the author coming to you directly. Obv…

> The opposite extreme is you have someone on your team who is only able to resolve conflicts by having their boss intervene. What's wrong with that? Resolving conflicts is the boss' job. So long as the team mate is doing their actual job appropriately, that's all that matters. > E.g. you leave some critical feedback in a PR review. The author of the PR doesn't like your comments, so they tell your mutual boss, then…

Handling negative feedback on a PR is a necessary skill for a developer. A manager should only get involved if it becomes hostile. Negative is very far from hostile.

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#148

Post by jedberg »

Looking back at the best leaders I've ever worked for, they all followed that philosophy that was explicitly stated at Netflix: Context not Control.

The goal of the manager was to explain to their reports what problems the team need to solves and why. Make sure the team was aware of any factors elsewhere in the org that might make a difference, and then connect the people on their team with the people on other teams who they need to talk to.

Beyond that the leader's job was to seek out such context from their peers and leadership.

But then it was up to the IC to figure out the how. The manager never told me how to accomplish the task unless I asked, and that was more of a mentorship than as a manager. And when I was a junior, most of that mentorship came from my more senior peers than my manager.

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#149

Post by taurath »

jppope wrote: post #25

Just 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…

Last published 2019.

I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:

> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect

Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.

Re: Transparent leadership beats servant leadership

#150

Post by onion2k »

codingdave wrote: post #16
onion2k wrote: post #12

"Servant Leadership" is a term was coined by Robert Greenleaf in his 1977 book "Servant Leadership: A Journey into the Nature of Legitimate Power and Greatness", which is very specifically about being a church leader. Many of the more generic ideas are applicable in any leadership scenario but if you read the book it's very clear that it was not designed with business leadership in mind. You shouldn't really expect i…

Many terms and frameworks evolve beyond their original intent, so I'm not too worried that this has evolved, too. I've always found it is easier to understand servant leadership as the opposite end of the spectrum from autocratic leadership: Is the leader primarily concerned about growing their own power/success, or growing the power/success of those who work for them? There is a lot of middle ground between those tw…

The problem with servant leadership is twofold:

Firstly, in 'proper' servant leadership as taught by Greenleaf the leader is supposed to put the church before their own needs and wants. It is not about serving the people who report to you; it's about serving the organisation first. In a business context that's horribly toxic and a great way to spend years being exploited by a company that will grind you to burnout for very little money. Thankfully most people don't actually follow what Greenleaf teaches because they think it's about the people.

Secondly though, people don't bother to read much about it. They hear the term and a basic summary, and then fill in the blanks based on their own biases and assumptions. Consequently when someone says they practise servant leadership you can't know what they mean unless you know them well. People who practise their version of servant leadership assume other people mean the same thing by it, and automatically align themselves with that person based on (probably) false assumptions. It is not a helpful term because it's used for a huge range of leadership styles.

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