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

61–70 of 146 posts

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#61

Post by DrewADesign »

homeonthemtn wrote: post #20
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/

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.

Right, and some people’s role is to organize people and orient the group’s efforts by taking in big-picture problems and outputting direction.

There’s rarely a single correct answer— lots of good solutions have trade-offs— but there are often various wrong answers. Do the best you can to avoid the wrong answers, and when you inevitably run into the business end of one of your trade-offs, take comfort in knowing the other good options probably also had trade-offs, and tell the smug know-it-alls to cram it.

People working effectively towards a non-optimal solution is far more useful than sitting around arguing about the best way to do it.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#62

Post by stuartaxelowen »

fladrif wrote: post #38
physicsguy wrote: post #37

> When the product team requests a "simple" feature, I'm thinking about the 3 teams that need to be involved to update the necessary microservices. God I hate modern web sometimes

What's the alternative?

I love the distribution of answers to this.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#64

Post by w10-1 »

There's both less and more to making decisions than ensuring they get made.

First: get others to actually decide. Jean-Louis Gassee at Apple (componentized mac's in the late 1980's) said that when dueling managers brought him a decision to make, he would always come up with a decision both of them hated, so they would scurry away and work together with an alternative they could live with.

Second: be sure to get everyone really on board - you first. This is really hard for managers who are following the wind. Law students are often careful and analytical, hedging every evaluation, but lawyers have to be assertive. Although they understand the precariousness of the legal position, it only works if you convince everyone (on your side and theirs) that this is how it will be. That transition is typically what weeds out new attorneys, and distinguishes partners from associates.

(Before you object to the attorney analogy: it's nice when you achieve collegial scientific consensus, but it can be a luxury. Then you have to figure out how to compel people do want they don't want to do, without straining authority. Usually it works to focus on picking a customer, or a definite time for results to appear; a more concrete objective/goal explains the decision and focuses follow-through.)

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#65

Post by 9rx »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #48
9rx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have a phd and I assure you it'll come up later. Will it? One would have to dig pretty deep into one's personal life to learn about that. Someone who thinks COVID was a hoax isn't going to be one to dig deep. And, well, if he really did somehow dig deep enough to find that information, you can just laugh it off as a hoax.

> Someone who thinks COVID was a hoax isn't going to be one to dig deep. This is kind of a side point, but people with fringe beliefs tend to dig a lot deeper to validate those opinions than those with a mainstream view. You can bet that someone who thinks that the moon landing was a hoax to the point that they would tell someone about it will know more about the moon landing than a random person who believes it was…

> but people with fringe beliefs tend to dig a lot deeper

Do they actually, though? Or do they just look for endless superficial surface claims?

I mean, if they actually dug deep they're going to encounter all kinds of information that would indicate that the moon landing was real. Which, then, if they still maintain that it was a hoax in light of that then they have to believe that the deep information is also a hoax. So if someone really was digging deep into personal details of your life, then what they read about you must also be a hoax, naturally.

Which, given the concern, one may as well solidify by putting fake information out there about themself. No sane person is going to be searching high and low for details about your personal life anyway. A moon landing hoax believer isn't going to buy into a published academic paper or whatever breadcrumb you accidentally left as a source of truth to prove that you have a PhD when a random website with a Geocities-style design says that you never went to college!

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#66

Post by ori_b »

oncallthrow wrote: post #59
ori_b wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, my preferred method: "You're the one doing the work. Tell me what your decision is." Your job as a leader isn't necessarily to make the decision, just to be sure that the decision was made.

In my opinion this advice is quite fatuous, because it skips over the actual difficult bit, which is figuring out what to do when you have a problem that can't simply be decided by the person directly responsible for the the work, either due to complexity/scale of the problem, or because that person is not capable of making the decision.

If you don't think they're capable of listening to the same things as you are, taking into account team guidance, and coming to a reasonable decision, why would you trust them to implement something?

If they're not getting the same inputs to their decisions as you are, why are you hamstringing them?

And if they're not capable of understanding the inputs to their decisions, why are you keeping them around?

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#67

Post by AdieuToLogic »

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…

> "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.

Taking this approach with skilled people paid to think can easily be interpreted as being dictatorial and often stifles future contributions.

> Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice.

This implies a rigid hierarchical structure, one lacking collaboration. Again, this approach might work with assembly line workers but won't fly more than once or twice with people paid to solve problems.

> In that case, it's your duty as the leader to play the dictator and impose order.

And it will be soon your duty to find people to backfill those who have better opportunities to pursue.

> If it happens though, don't forget to re-establish trust with your team members and make sure they understand the circumstances that led you to act in that way.

There is no "re-establishing trust with your team" when this form of "leadership" is employed. Once trust is broken, the only employees who remain are those with no better options.

Re: How to Lead in a Room Full of Experts

#70

Post by cgio »

I have my claim to a minute expertise in this domain. Was assigned to lead an initiative for something that was not achieved in 3 prior attempts. I was given the 6 strongest, most genius engineers from 6 different teams. Everyone, including me, was quite opinionated and with a great explanation for their opinion. It was not an explicit credo, but I made it my position to leverage the mirror of the saying “don’t interrupt your enemy when they make a mistake”. For us it would be, “don’t interrupt your friend when they make something great” with the corollary “do something else, and make it great”. There were other important parts to that like finding the organic separation of duties and teasing or nudging directions, accepting suboptimal valleys in places, etc. But it worked, and I am as proud as I can be for being lucky. Rooms of geniuses are challenging but also such a great opportunity to learn from each other and learn how to collectively optimise the boundaries to focus on disagreement only where it makes sense.
Post reply on HN