I am being in such a team and I tell you this is great. We are pretty flat, you can pick whatever title you want on your resume but here we are all engineers. My manager insists that he usually cannot make better decisions than we do, because we usually understand the problems better than him. His major request is that if anything gets stuck we need to raise it immediately so that it can be solved quicker and doesn't block others.
An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
41–50 of 64 posts
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#42Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…
I say this as an engineering director and someone who takes a lot of pride in my ability to do all the good things you describe: what's wrong with it is that bad management is hard to dislodge.
Bad managers will never admit they're bad; they have bad employees. It's really hard for upper management to tell the difference. The early signs of bad management look a lot like bad employee performance. It takes time for a pattern of behavior to emerge, and in the meantime projects and employees are getting ruined.
That said, traditional management, like democracy, is the worst form of management, except for all the others.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#43Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…
I say this as an engineering director and someone who takes a lot of pride in my ability to do all the good things you describe: what's wrong with it is that bad management is hard to dislodge. Bad managers will never admit they're bad; they have bad employees. It's really hard for upper management to tell the difference. The early signs of bad management look a lot like bad employee performance. It takes time for a…
I have never seen a "bad" manager exist under a "good" manager/director. Every single "bad" manager was able to survive and thrive because the environment was set up to encourage and reward the "bad" behavior.
If you are hiring and managing bad people, then the problem is not with them. It is with you. If you are unable to identify bad people under you, then you are failing at your most basic responsibility.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#44Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…
> If you want to be liked, just be nice.
If only it worked that way.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#45The challenge with this is when you have a team with members that, by and large, wants to be led for various reasons (lacking motivation, does not want to lead, distracted with other priorities, etc.). In a team like this, there needs to be someone that “calls the shots,” as it were, while giving every team member enough of a voice to feel like they are heard and enough autonomy to do the right thing (provided they h…
I don't know if someone like that (the follower) is really capable of significantly contributing.
There are many, many people that love solving problems, but have no desire to get mired down into politics and power struggles.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#46Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…
> Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions.
This right here.
I will lead if you want. But then stop second guessing my decisions, and stop taking credit for my successes.
If you want to lead, fine. But then stop blaming me for failures, and admit when you screw up.
I am sick of being micromanaged and then blamed for when things go wrong.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#47Regarding all these alternative ways of organizing, what's wrong with a leader taking responsibility, delegating it where feasible, and selecting for team members to whom they can delegate responsibility with confidence? Taking direction or orders from a manager is only ever stressful if that manager doesn't take accountability for their decisions and directions. I'm not sure the solution to that is a new framework w…
How about the counterargument that 10 heads are better than 1?
Not always. In many cases 10 heads = 9 people criticizing/undermining 1.
Effective teams are built on people who trust and respect each other. Leadership must be recognized by a majority of group members for any person to take the lead - and any person can lead at any time if they have the group's best interests in mind and are able to demonstrate that.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#48The places I’ve worked at where “everyone is a leader” ends up with 1 person feeling adamant about something. And everyone else disagreeing, but then saying: sure whatever, we will do it that way. Nobody wants to have conflict and nobody is in charge. Leads to a lot of very bad decisions imo.
"Flat" organizations I've worked at, the day-to-day works alright since we could actually be "Agile" and chop features off to deliver on time and make other decisions like that. Now big picture items like which projects we do - it was all decided by a small group of founders/early employees who had a lot of political and informal power which was very frustrating.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#49The challenge with this is when you have a team with members that, by and large, wants to be led for various reasons (lacking motivation, does not want to lead, distracted with other priorities, etc.). In a team like this, there needs to be someone that “calls the shots,” as it were, while giving every team member enough of a voice to feel like they are heard and enough autonomy to do the right thing (provided they h…
I don't know if someone like that (the follower) is really capable of significantly contributing.
I strongly disagree. What even is a company or a product where no one decides on a direction?
What if I don't know the industry? What if I don't know the customer expectations of this product? Ideally you'll learn all that eventually but it can take a few years.
Re: An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader
#50Everyone is a leader implies a more flat organization, this isn’t that. This is just talking about effectively delegating and having layers of organization within a team. Ie manager splits up the projects to project teams and a project leader and the leader with the team gets autonomy to run the project their own way with mentoring.
I think it’s a good approach and for me at least orders of magnitude better than top down micromanagement. But the title I think just confuses things.
Imagine that instead of “leaders” the smaller projects were their own teams and replace the leader with manager title and it’d be the same thing.
EDIT: btw I see the lack of clarity around accountability play out at organizations. Where for instance on practice responsibility is split. Maybe the “leaders” set the direction and the team executed. But when it comes to accountability, like when something goes wrong, fingers get pointed to only the team or only the leaders without examining which piece (direction vs execution) failed.