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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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Leadership is hard. Really hard. It is very easy to be a bad leader, hence the common perception of bad managers. Everyone can identify bad leadership, but ask someone what makes a good leader. It is hard to define and hard to do.
Leadership also requires taking responsibility for others. Many people do everything they can to avoid responsibility.
Put these two factors together and it becomes pretty obvious why most people shy away from leadership. It is hard and when something goes wrong it is your fault.
Even this I think is a little questionable. People frequently mistake their failures as failure of leadership.
You’re absolutely right. That’s a third point that I could have mentioned. Very good point.
Word. I think you're correct and I think a big part of things is that leadership truly requires taking responsibility. So they often mistake their own failures as bad leadership because people have a much easier time blaming the problem on anyone but themselves. Talk to just about anyone about why they didn't get a good review or got fired or got passed by for a promotion, and very rarely do they take ownership of the problem and instead blame just about anything else.
This is also I think tying into your idea that it's easy to be a bad leader and the common conception of bad managers (especially middle managers.) Bad leaders blame the team or the market or the next level up in management, and rarely take ownership for the failures of the team because again, people just aren't wired to do that very well.
These sound sort of contradictory, but I think that the ideas can coexist. A person might fail that has a good leader, but if they really are a good leader, they're going to be asking themselves if they could have done something differently to help that person under them succeed. And if they are a good leader, that person's failure won't be allowed to become the team's failure.
Parents used to read a quick story out of Guideposts every morning at breakfast. Think of it as a nondenominational, "I believe in god" sort of publication. Extraordinarily useful stories, didn't require much, if any, religion.
One story about a pilot stuck with me then, and has for 40-years. Pilot's telling his buddy how he's responsible for everything on his aircraft.
"Yeah, but what if the ground crew gives you bad fuel."
"I should have checked that."
"Fine. But what if an engine fails?"
"That's on me. I should have checked maintenance records."
"FINE. What if terrorists hijack the plane?" (This was the 80's when such events were hilariously common.)
"All me. The safety of my plane, my crew and my passengers is my responsibility alone."
I'm doing an awful job retelling the story, but you get the gist. No matter what his friend threw at him, the answer was, "I could have done $X."
Imagine the world we could live in if everyone thought, "I could have done something differently", instead of whining. I'd be hard pressed to describe a bad spot in my life where I could not have made a different decision.
Related:
President at my last job came to my office and said, "Look. You're going to fuck up at some point. All I ask is that you don't lie, deflect responsibility or try to hide it. Just come to me, tell me about it and we'll figure out how to fix it and make it not happen again." Good as his word.
One time our biggest client's managers figured a way to see each other's salary in the new system. My fault? Meh, I could have blamed the software, it really was their oversight. OTOH, I could have found the bug myself with a little more diligence.
Pulled him out of a meeting, shaking in my boots, explained the issue. He just chuckled and said, "Don't worry about it. Let's go look."
That's the kind of attitude that makes you a trusted leader, on both our parts.
(Someone who had abusive parents is going to object to all this. I can't help that. Taking responsibility, no matter what, has worked quite well for me in life.)
This is pretty much what I was getting at. There are always circumstances and things that hold you back, but foregoing your own agency is the one that will hold you back the most.
Got my first taste as a kid leading the pack, alpha nerd.
Summer mornings I'd pick up the phone and school phone book and start dialing, or I'd get called first. It was on me to decide what we would do that day and get it together. Herding nerds is a hella chore. If we had fun, great! If the day didn't work out? All on me. And guess who was the default dungeon master?
It quickly got to the point where I was responsible for our fun. Now translate that into leading a company's success.
Lemmy: "CEOs are useless and should die in a fire!"
Hey, I’m pretty darn leftist (democratic socialist, not tankie) and pretty opposed to the current state of affairs regarding CEOs, so I feel this is targeted at me… and yet totally misrepresents the position.
CEOs are not useless. CEOs absolutely set the “tone at the top” and create the entire culture for a company. At the same time, CEOs do not work 400 times harder than the average worker, yet that is what they are paid. CEOs are also capable of doing great abuse to those beneath them, and have next to zero accountability for it. CEOs are kings in their little fiefdoms, and I say down with all monarchy. Note that “down with kings” does not mean “down with leaders”, nor does it say or even imply that kings aren’t leaders, or that leadership is useless to have.
Yep people complain about CEO salary when they don't realize that is how much it cost to pay them to leave their current (successful) situation in order to take on that role elsewhere. Not always the case, some come from within and get paid well to stay, too.
Salaries are definitely too high in a lot of cases, but you're paid based on what you can command on the market and not a penny less. But yeah it fucking sucks haha.
For sure, and I failed to really get at this more in the OP, but it's because of those difficulties that in part made me wonder, "Well, what's an alternative look like?"
Individual leadership in particular seems primed for either abuse from above or below (i.e. a scapegoat for people's avoidance of responsibility).
Yep, well said. For OP's question... It's pretty common to see a leader bring his whole group with him/her wherever they go and people follow because having a good leader is pretty tough to come by. I know a lot more people loyal to a particular person than a particular company.