
An Engineering Team Where Everyone Is a Leader - fagnerbrack
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-a-leader/
======
motohagiography
Regarding 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 where managers can direct
without responsibility or accountability. Set a bar for managers that includes
ownership, and the ability to delegate responsibility while persuading staff
to willingly take on their own level of ownership.

This "manager as peer," approach I have seen in a number of organizations is
dishonest and seems to just mean forfeiting responsibility, while
opportunistically cherry picking successes to take credit for.

Team members don't need to be "heard," or need sympathy from managers, they
need confidence that their leadership understands the environment they work
in, takes responsibility for decisions, and gives them direction based shared
competence.

Of the problems to solve for, improving the quality and selection of managers
seems smarter than contorting ourselves into new frameworks to work with ones
who avoid responsibility.

If you want to be liked, just be nice. If you want to be respected, take
responsibility.

~~~
madrox
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.

~~~
GreenJelloShot
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.

~~~
madrox
Taking your argument to its conclusion, if there's a bad manager, then the
director is bad, then the VP is bad, all the way up to the CEO. A single bad
employee means the CEO is bad. I think we can both agree that stretches the
definition of bad so far as to be meaningless.

Personally, I've seen bad managers under good directors. It's complicated.
Anyone can make a bad hiring decision. My point is that even if you are able
to identity bad people under you, that identification process takes time. The
higher you go in a hierarchy, the longer the time horizon you tend to be
evaluated on. To say it should be obvious on a very short time horizon is
disingenuous and only covers the most egregious cases.

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kstenerud
> I suggested two options to them:

> 1\. Either we have another person do the project management - and they have
> no say in how this will be done. Perhaps we even entertain the idea of an
> external hire - who is not an engineer. They won't have the engineering
> context, so they'll ask for more frequent updates, and have more regular
> check-in meetings. Also, anytime something seems to be delayed, they will
> have to come to the engineers to ask them how and what can be mitigated.

Not listing his "option 2" since the description for "option 1" is already so
loaded that it's obvious the correct answer is "anything but option 1". I
can't say I'm a fan of such manipulation.

> After this chat, everyone went with option #2.

Surprise, surprise.

Ultimately, the problem with these kinds of wisdom posts is that they suffer
from the "everyone is the same, given the right chance or push" fallacy. We
love it when the parts are all the same because it reduces our cognitive load,
but that just doesn't happen in reality, especially with people. We can see
from his "options" that he ran up against this problem, and solved it by
forcing people to adopt the mold he'd set for them. Now everyone's a leader!
Problem solved.

------
eschneider
After thirty years in this industry, I've learned that in a good environment,
almost any process or team organization will work, but in a bad environment,
nothing will help. :/

~~~
Ididntdothis
Very true. In the end it comes down to respect, trust and honesty with each
other. For some reason organizations always want to build a layer of processes
on top of a rotten foundation.

A simple question to ask would be “do you trust your leadership and your
colleagues “? And for leadership “do you trust your people?” If the answer is
“no” you already have identified the problem and no process or organizational
structure will help.

Obviously these questions will never be asked because the response will be
inconvenient.

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zackify
The 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.

~~~
redisman
"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.

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dev_hacker
My first dev job saw this fad come through the department one season. It went
from "Here's your feature for this week, please implement it" to "Here's your
feature for this week, you're the leader for development on this! Please
implement it.". I understand that middle management has basically nothing to
actually do, so it invents shit like this, but it pisses us off that actually
do something to have this weird changing layer of bullshit smeared over what
is a feature factory job. You can't shine shit with buzz words.

~~~
babycake
Well if you're team lead now, then that comes with a title & pay bump right?
If not, then management is just passing added responsibility to you without
any additional risk to themselves.

------
dangerface
Title is a bit bs

Their is a difference between ownership of a project and leadership. When they
asked senior developers with experience to lead they had the vision granted by
experience to do so. When they asked the juniors to lead they lead the project
into trouble as they don't have the experience to see problems and judge risk
well.

The success came from giving every one ownership, a stake in the project and
work. But when making every one the lead they ran into the too many cooks
spoil the broth problem, the solution was to give the juniors the same
responsibility (ownership) but more leadership in how to achieve.

------
PragmaticPulp
This is the type of article that new engineering managers should bookmark and
re-read every few months. Is the advice perfect? No, but it will probably
bring some new perspective to some problems you'll have along the way. There
is no one size fits all management strategy that works in every situation, but
every manager should be aware of the common pitfalls on the growth path of
engineering managers.

In my personal experience as an engineering manager and in mentoring new
engineering managers, this is the tipping point where managers either succeed
or spiral into burnout:

> I found myself and our product manager becoming the bottleneck in planning
> out who will work on what project, next, and who will be the lead.

If you find yourself bottlenecking the team, you're either micromanaging or
your team has grown too large for a single level of management. You need to
take the time to develop a new system that removes you as the bottleneck.
Don't try to push through the issue by putting in more hours. That's not
sustainable. Find a new system.

The "everyone is a leader" strategy described in this article is a good
perspective on what every manager should be doing: Clearly defining ownership
boundaries and expectations, while avoiding micromanagement. It's a common
mistake to assume that because the manager is responsible for the success and
failure of a project, the manager should also micromanage the critical
decision making. That's the first trait that needs to be trained out of almost
every engineer promoted to manager in my experience.

Some engineers instinctively reject anything that feels like a management
responsibility. Others will demand promotions or raises for taking on basic
ownership tasks. Often, these engineers started their careers in toxic
environments where accountability was synonymous with "you're going to be
fired if this fails". It's important to show these engineers that your
environment really is safe, and that good things come from taking ownership.
You have to back up your words with your actions, of course. IME, most
engineers truly enjoy autonomy, ownership, and leadership once they can
reasonably expect that it won't be used against them.

And of course, it's important to screen for these traits during the hiring
process. It's also important to filter out engineers who can't or won't learn
to take ownership of their work.

------
nunez
The 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 have the skills).

Speaking of skills, this leadership approach fails hard when you are handed a
team of people that are low-skilled, for whatever reason. Some of these folks
can’t be let go (too expensive to do so, usually). Micromanagement usually
works in this instance, especially if you can’t train

~~~
swiley
I don't know if someone like that (the follower) is really capable of
significantly contributing.

~~~
redisman
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.

------
atlgator
In my experience, high-performing teams arise when every member has expertise
that is acknowledged and respected by the rest of the group. As soon as you
add skill+experience redundancy, performance will be hindered by jockeying to
"be better than the others." If there is little growth opportunity in this
skill area, it will have a much greater effect on performance as internal
politics take over.

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thrower123
Clearly defined hierarchies are underrated, at least in this space. I really
do not want to have seven bosses, or to be responsible for being part of some
amorphous Valve-like leadership blob.

Setting up a clear chain of command, and, most essentially, following it,
would perhaps stifle a few, but it works, and it works well, and it is a
considerably less anxious and stress-inducing arrangement for everyone
involved.

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hcarvalhoalves
> where everyone can be a leader - and everyone would act as an owner

I suspect these are different things.

Everybody can have a sense of ownership? Sure (e.g. common goals, employee
owned companies, options, etc).

If everybody is leading (at the same time), nobody is. It's good if anyone can
_assume_ leadership at any given moment, though.

Tacit leaders are more important (and respected) than explicit ones.
Appointing a leader rarely works.

~~~
jdmichal
> Tacit leaders are more important (and respected) than explicit ones.
> Appointing a leader rarely works.

There are different use-cases for intrinsic and extrinsic leadership. Some
actions work better when executed by one or the other.

------
UncleChis
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.

------
zackmorris
I've switched to saying "I'd vote for XYZ".

The most empowering form of leadership is pure democracy. I'm a bit dismayed
that for all of our brilliant insights and expertise, we're so quick to
replicate authoritarian power structures in our careers. There are some talks
by Richard Wolff on YouTube about democracy in the workplace and I'd urge
everyone here to watch them.

------
titzer
Any management strategy that is based on the assumption that everyone is the
same and wants the same things and can act the same way is doomed to fail. I
didn't see a single sentence about this person listening to and adapting to
his team members as individual people. Some people might mumble the words, but
aren't really interested in being leaders at all.

> Initially, my team was a team of eight engineers, from juniors to more
> senior members. Two years later, I have a team of triple the size, where
> most people have led a significant project, with mentorship/coaching support
> from a more experienced leader.

Huh. Two years. TBH that is not long enough to understand the sustainability
of this approach. It's frustrating that people shout from the rooftops after
one success like this.

There _is_ some good advice in this post, but its hubris is galling. I would
encourage the author of this post to continue growing and learning, maybe go
through a failure or two, before speaking up.

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yibg
Everyone 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.

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linsomniac
Reading this article I was reminded of the book It's Your Ship, the motto used
by one navy captain to empower the crew to turn around a poorly performing
ship. Then I see that part of the inspiration for this post was... a book
about a different navy ship.

I often think back to It's Your Ship, I'd highly recommend it.

------
ericalexander0
Dee Hock, the founding CEO of Visa, described a similar approach as chaordic
leadership.

[http://www.griequity.com/resources/integraltech/GRIBusinessM...](http://www.griequity.com/resources/integraltech/GRIBusinessModel/chaordism/hock.html)

~~~
aloisdg
> By chaord, I mean any self-organizing, self governing, adaptive, nonlinear,
> complex organism, organization, community or system

What a strange word to avoid using anarchism.

------
cryptica
It's better for everyone to be a leader than for the company to select the
wrong leaders. But if the company is capable of picking leaders well, then
that's better. But it's much harder than it looks and most companies get it
completely wrong.

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marcinzm
I wonder how this works for large scale engineering architectures and unified
approaches. Seems like it'd lead to a lot of disjointed projects and pieces
each with a different approach. That in turn adds cognitive overhead to an
organization and lowers the bus factor.

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beardedwizard
The replies here are so telling, many would not survive on such a team.
However, their perspective is critical to understanding who you must exclude
to make this system work, and the kind of passion required for people to feel
the sense of ownership needed.

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ksec
Isn't this the same as DRI (Directly responsible individual ) at Apple?

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techslave
this is a repost from less than 3 months ago. sorry i don’t have the url.

and sorry, but if you don’t have accountability you aren’t a leader.

