It's not a framework, and it requires no diagram. It's just trusting and empowering people to do the job, then getting out of their way. People tend to rise to your level of trust.
I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works:
https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/
Great article, people mix commanders with leaders, leaders main job is influencing while others do it their approach, their style, but still align with the goals you influenced.
> People tend to rise to your level of trust.
One of the companies that I almost worked for, had all the “we trust we empower our employees etc”, good promises, and later they were requiring full uninterrupted camera access while you do the work :)
I thought I’d be annoyed reading this, as the blog seems to brazenly rip off name recognition from the significantly more popular and presumably preceding “Practical Engineering” channel/blog… and to some degree that feeling did cheapen the content.
But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.
Is an interesting idea but don’t think it scales. Once a company gets beyond like 100 people you need some structure and past 1000 is chaos is everyone is a leader.
i clicked thinking he was mocking this! I hate it so much. no, dude, not everyone can be a leader. no we're not all "leaders"?!?!?
come on. this is such a dilution. it screams refusal to take responsibility for anything. diversifying responsibility so that no one is held accountable. Or a massive lack of understanding why and how naturally humans organize using a hierarchical structure.
This is a cowardly way of managing people, a leader blaming those under him/her for not also being "leaders" when they fail, that's what it seems like to me, and how I've seen this mindset abused.
I don't care if you're a two person team, one follows and the other leads. the problem is actually the opposite of what this guy describes usually. A refusal to accept hierarchy, and an immaturity resulting from not being able to understand, that leadership comes with responsibility, not just rights, as does following.
There is this massive ideological disease in corporate america that I won't rant about here, but what is needed is managers with balls (regardless of their sex) and gumption, who can say "they buck stops with me, I'm responsible for the outcome". Not everyone else because "we're all leaders" not hired consultants you hired to c.y.a., not the "lack of talent",etc..
If you're in a team where someone says "all reviews and prs go through me" and they have they seniority and experience to back that up, count yourself fortunate!
It's not secret for example that most successful open source projects are run by a BDFL (not the least of which is the Linux Kernel).
Everyone in the car can't be responsible for driving it, same as they can't for navigation. With the approach in this post, my guess is instead of driving the car, proponents will be back-seat drivers.
Two more things: everyone in a team must trust each other to do their part, that includes the leader when they lead, and team members when they fulfill their tasks. In order to lead, you have to know where and how to lead others, the problem is people are put into leadership positions in corporate america using the system of "promotion until incompetency", where if a person is competent at all they are promoted, and they end up in positions where they have the least amount of competency, earn the most, and thus are at the highest risk of elimination, and this breeds: the modern middle manager that strives to spread responsibility that comes with their position so that they can take credit for success of their team, but have plenty of blame they can throw around for failures. Even when they want to do the opposite of that in earnest, it becomes impractical.
For everyone to be a leader, the way human psychology works needs to change. what you end up with is informal hierarchy immune from accountability, transparency and scrutiny by outsiders. Good people getting frustrated and leaving your team, and those who can manipulate the informal power structure well and help with the blame spreading, succeeding and staying
Failing upwards as some call it. And then enshittification. I haven't solved the part where things are actually working in a repeating cycle and will all be good some day.
The foundation of this approach is non-controversial: Don’t micromanage, be a good coach, don’t force work to go through the manager, and other simple truths.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
It’s a flat management style, I love it and I appreciate people who are doing it, but throughout all the years I have only seen it done twice properly, of the already rare occasions of using it anyway. The vast majority are your typical corpo hierarchal BS, or even worse, a small early stage startup trying to pull the same corporate style, while mixing it with startup one resulting in the downside of both. In one company, the engineering manager wanted to have a daily standup with scrum style (apparently he wanted it because his wife was working in a remote silicon valley job and just knew about it..) for a team who none of them is working in the same product, and most aren’t even software, and got offended when get told it’s stupid and it’s better to use other approaches, of course he refused because it’s about power dynamics now, I left shortly with other 3 engineers in the same month due to bad management style.
Some styles may work better in a uniformed military environment than they would in the real world.
In the military, there are strict guidelines on conduct, whereas in the private sector, it's almost anything goes, and workers are often pushing the limits of what they can get away with.
Also, in the military, rank and pecking order are clearly established. Regardless of whether or not the style is "Leader-Leader", everybody knows where they stand with regard to who they need to salute, and who they must obey.
> Regardless of whether or not the style is "Leader-Leader", everybody knows where they stand with regard to who they need to salute, and who they must obey.
It's not a framework, and it requires no diagram. It's just trusting and empowering people to do the job, then getting out of their way. People tend to rise to your level of trust.
I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works: https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/
Great article, people mix commanders with leaders, leaders main job is influencing while others do it their approach, their style, but still align with the goals you influenced.
> People tend to rise to your level of trust.
One of the companies that I almost worked for, had all the “we trust we empower our employees etc”, good promises, and later they were requiring full uninterrupted camera access while you do the work :)
We're the employees taking advantage of that trust? Seems a strange thing to mandate unless that trust has been severely broken.
I thought I’d be annoyed reading this, as the blog seems to brazenly rip off name recognition from the significantly more popular and presumably preceding “Practical Engineering” channel/blog… and to some degree that feeling did cheapen the content.
But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.
I think everyone can be their own leader.
If everyone is a leader, who is doing the work?
Really?
Is an interesting idea but don’t think it scales. Once a company gets beyond like 100 people you need some structure and past 1000 is chaos is everyone is a leader.
dunbar's number?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>
The difference here is with a win-win-win approach, we all win.
Do we all win the same equity vesting schedule?
i clicked thinking he was mocking this! I hate it so much. no, dude, not everyone can be a leader. no we're not all "leaders"?!?!?
come on. this is such a dilution. it screams refusal to take responsibility for anything. diversifying responsibility so that no one is held accountable. Or a massive lack of understanding why and how naturally humans organize using a hierarchical structure.
This is a cowardly way of managing people, a leader blaming those under him/her for not also being "leaders" when they fail, that's what it seems like to me, and how I've seen this mindset abused.
I don't care if you're a two person team, one follows and the other leads. the problem is actually the opposite of what this guy describes usually. A refusal to accept hierarchy, and an immaturity resulting from not being able to understand, that leadership comes with responsibility, not just rights, as does following.
There is this massive ideological disease in corporate america that I won't rant about here, but what is needed is managers with balls (regardless of their sex) and gumption, who can say "they buck stops with me, I'm responsible for the outcome". Not everyone else because "we're all leaders" not hired consultants you hired to c.y.a., not the "lack of talent",etc..
If you're in a team where someone says "all reviews and prs go through me" and they have they seniority and experience to back that up, count yourself fortunate!
It's not secret for example that most successful open source projects are run by a BDFL (not the least of which is the Linux Kernel).
Everyone in the car can't be responsible for driving it, same as they can't for navigation. With the approach in this post, my guess is instead of driving the car, proponents will be back-seat drivers.
Two more things: everyone in a team must trust each other to do their part, that includes the leader when they lead, and team members when they fulfill their tasks. In order to lead, you have to know where and how to lead others, the problem is people are put into leadership positions in corporate america using the system of "promotion until incompetency", where if a person is competent at all they are promoted, and they end up in positions where they have the least amount of competency, earn the most, and thus are at the highest risk of elimination, and this breeds: the modern middle manager that strives to spread responsibility that comes with their position so that they can take credit for success of their team, but have plenty of blame they can throw around for failures. Even when they want to do the opposite of that in earnest, it becomes impractical.
For everyone to be a leader, the way human psychology works needs to change. what you end up with is informal hierarchy immune from accountability, transparency and scrutiny by outsiders. Good people getting frustrated and leaving your team, and those who can manipulate the informal power structure well and help with the blame spreading, succeeding and staying
Failing upwards as some call it. And then enshittification. I haven't solved the part where things are actually working in a repeating cycle and will all be good some day.
The foundation of this approach is non-controversial: Don’t micromanage, be a good coach, don’t force work to go through the manager, and other simple truths.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
It’s a flat management style, I love it and I appreciate people who are doing it, but throughout all the years I have only seen it done twice properly, of the already rare occasions of using it anyway. The vast majority are your typical corpo hierarchal BS, or even worse, a small early stage startup trying to pull the same corporate style, while mixing it with startup one resulting in the downside of both. In one company, the engineering manager wanted to have a daily standup with scrum style (apparently he wanted it because his wife was working in a remote silicon valley job and just knew about it..) for a team who none of them is working in the same product, and most aren’t even software, and got offended when get told it’s stupid and it’s better to use other approaches, of course he refused because it’s about power dynamics now, I left shortly with other 3 engineers in the same month due to bad management style.
Some styles may work better in a uniformed military environment than they would in the real world.
In the military, there are strict guidelines on conduct, whereas in the private sector, it's almost anything goes, and workers are often pushing the limits of what they can get away with.
Also, in the military, rank and pecking order are clearly established. Regardless of whether or not the style is "Leader-Leader", everybody knows where they stand with regard to who they need to salute, and who they must obey.
> Regardless of whether or not the style is "Leader-Leader", everybody knows where they stand with regard to who they need to salute, and who they must obey.
So it's just bullshit then effectively.