Totally agree. The idea that was should all strive for some nebulous quality called "leadership" and all talented people should want to be in charge of other people, rather than doing interesting work, drives so much needless workplace suffering.
"Leadership" has to be one of the biggest scams in the history of civilization, because it is actually really hard not to buy in, even when you don't want to. Are there great leaders? Maybe, I guess? Or are we all just propagandized (by the shitty leaders we actually have) to think that they exist? I've certainly never met one, and the only examples that seem plausible are far enough in the past (Lincoln, FDR), or so tied up with other, ideological identities (Moses, Martin Luther), wealth and power (any President, CEO, etc), or traumatic/dramatic events (military leaders) that nobody alive can remember them personally or objectively.
We're a hagiography-driven species and it gives the impression that you're somehow a failure unless you're one of the lucky apes with enough "leadership" to get one written about you.
There are plenty of great examples of modern day leaders versus poor ones. I would argue that tech has the best, and most clearly defined spectrum of leadership. This ranges from the moronic, buzzword-driven MBA's to the CEO's cultivating trillion dollar companies. Even a changing of hands for CEO at Microsoft has shown clear, well-defined improvements for the company over the past few years.
That said, I'd definitely agree with you about people being a species driven by dominance hierarchies more than capacity or will to lead. Achieving management status is a reward, not a role that requires its own skill sets and ambitions. Which is probably where much of the white collar work place suffering comes from.
But do these people posses something called "leadership" though, or are they just in control of a lot of capital (either by the lucky success of their app, or by being crowned by VC firms) and people. I don't know that we, as apes, can really disentangle the two.
Even Nadella turning around Microsoft is arguably just down to business strategy, which is a technical skill like anything else, but we imbue it with this aura that defines it as something more valuable than merely coding, building something mechanical, dispatching subway trains, or comforting a sick person.
In my view, it's not. There are two categories of business leaders: capitalists who are looking after their own assets, and paid managers. Neither deserves any more respect than any other rich guy or technocrat, respectively.
People organize themselves into hierarchies. I'd say this isn't because of any biological predisposition, but because hierarchies are the most efficient power structure for decision making among large groups of people. This is only because the alternative of weighing everybody's opinion equally is chaotic, and prone to poor decision making due to lack of education and experience among an entire set of people. Look at any election, and the consequences of letting everybody have a voice become evident (that said, there are other tremendously good qualities of elections that make us keep them around).
Leadership is the ability to make decisions on behalf of the group under you that are good. It's seen as being altruistic because it can enhance, or detract from the quality of work, and the quality of life of everybody beneath you. The effect of good decision making is multiplicative based on how great the scope of your 'leadership' is. A good decision maker in charge of 100,000 people will therefore bring a lot more productivity and positivity to society than a good decision maker in charge of only 100 people.
Moving forward by replacing 'leadership' with the term 'decision making' - which is really what it is - there are a lot of individuals who have consistent history of good decision making. These individuals exemplify good decision making far too often for it to be a function of luck or random chance. Of course, there are definitely some people who got lucky and were mistakenly labeled as 'good decision makers' (lest we forget November 2016). I'd also say that because we don't live in anything remotely close to a meritocracy, some people achieve leadership and management only because they come from a position of privilege in society. Nevertheless, the concept of good decision makers bearing great importance in society should not be dismissed, because historically the human race has excelled, or completely grinded to a halt based on how, and who we let make decisions.
Exactly. Hierarchies aren't inherently bad (though I think newer forms of organization are increasingly ripe to displace the largest hierarchies. Amazon's success in moving to computer-mediated APIs between departments rather than strict up-the-org-chart, down-the-org-chart communication, "networked" companies like Uber or Bird, etc).
My objection, or I guess social critique, is that we have a lot of undue reverence for decision-making. It's important yes, and can have a big impact, but it's just a skill, not fundamentally different from other skills, and isn't especially more difficult than most.
The Little Dutch Boy had a huge impact too, because of the leverage of the situation he found himself in, but we don't seem to imbue sticking your thumb in things with any special reverence.
Ha! You're right. But at the same time, The Little Dutch Boy is looked up to with reverence because he made a significant impact. As far as leadership goes, I'd argue that the skill is polarizing in terms of reputation because of your responsibility. Good decision makers contribute highly to society, but bad, or even mediocre decision makers are seen with disdain. Middle management is hated because it's associated with barely-experienced decision makers. So I'd say that the net sentiment towards leadership isn't that high (once you factor out those noisy MBA's and middle managers on LinkedIn who obviously have a bias, that is).
The brand of leadership which gains actual reverence in society seems to be top performers. And top performance in any role is revered. Brain surgeons, athletes, "rockstar programmers", investment bankers, etc. all possess a certain 'aura' about them that makes people idolize them, perhaps disproportionately or unfairly in some cases. But I would say your "Steve Ballmer" brand of CEO does not get much reverence in society whatsoever.
> ...this aura that defines it as something more valuable than merely coding..."
In purely financial terms, Nadella probably did more for Microsoft's stock price than any one person "in the trenches" could have. Business decisions have enormous consequences.
Microsoft can't survive without it's coders, but none can make or break the company. Making billions of dollars for a company is a real accomplishment, and being able to lose billions of dollars is a huge amount of responsibility. Much as I love to code, maybe respect should* correlate with those things, and maybe it's worth aiming for those things personally if we think it'll move the needle further than what we're doing now.
(Of course, if there aren't a large number of decisions of consequence to be made then the leader-quality/impact correlation will be loose, and it probably has to be measured against companies in similar sectors too.)
Nadella can only "move the needle" and have a big impact because of the high leverage of the position he's in. That has little to do with the skill required to pull it off, unless high-stakes decision-making is inherently more difficult than low-stakes decision-making.
In sports, the ability to perform especially well in high-leverage situations is called "clutchness" (as in "comes through in the clutch") and it's a real debate whether or not it exists at all. I'm of the opinion that it probably doesn't (good pitchers are just good pitchers, regardless of the leverage of the pitch), which effectively is the same opinion that leads me to believe that "transformational leadership" is a scam and the whole C-suite is vastly overpaid basically everywhere.
"How difficult" isn't really at issue -- value is.
If Nadella provides 1% more value than the next guy, that's a lot of money (from leverage, as you say.) Why wouldn't Microsoft pay top dollar for him if it means not settling for a lower market cap?
And sure, 20% of idiots and 12.5% of fair coins might have made all the great decisions Nadella did, but as a board of directors, do you want to sample from coins or idiots or second-best CEOs when billions of dollars are at stake?
Well first, I'm not talking about pay necessarily, though executive compensation is (IMO) out of control. I was more referring to the intangible "respect" afforded to decision-makers (aka "leaders").
As far as pay goes, you can say they have a "big impact" all you want, but that's not how any other labor market works: it doesn't matter how much value my labor provides. Plumbers are paid the same to fix the toilet in the Louvre as they are at the gas station down the street from it. Leverage or no, my salary is determined by how little other, similarly skilled people are willing to take. If you can find somebody as skilled as Nadella in the technical skill of managing a software company, but for much less money, then you should either hire that other person or make Nadella take the lower salary.
But again, I'm not talking about money. These corporations have shareholders, and the shareholders are free to overcompensate whichever of their employees they choose too, even the C-suite. My point is that we revere "leaders", our "history" classes (unless you actually study history at a univesity) are mainly hagiographies of past "leaders," and every societal norm tells us that "leadership" is this powerful, ineffable magic. It's not. There's no such thing. Some people are in charge. They might even be powerful. They might get incredible things done. That doesn't mean that people who could have gotten the same things done given the same power or leverage are scarce.
Management is a technical speciality, probably one that's less difficult than, say, being a good welder. We pay good welders tons of money too. I'm not trying to say either is overpaid. I'm just trying to say "leadership" (i.e. directing the work of others, business strategy, and decision-making) is over-valued in terms of respect and esteem.
I think we have different views of what leadership, and it'd be interesting to compare them.
To begin with, in my opinion, leadership isn't stopping doing, but reaching the point where the interesting work isn't humanly doable by a single person, and at this point deciding the only way to keep going is finding people to do the stuff with you.
At no point do I think leaders aren't doers : a CEO takes on a mission of finding money (be it through fundraising, having an actual product, or pretty much any mean), and never ceases doing that, he just gradually stops doing pretty much everything else.
A great developer may start leading technical project, and will develop the most complex (and in his mind, interesting) part of the code while trying to delegate the parts he doesn't find as interesting. Cf. the large number of open source projets with "available for beginner bugs" documented, or calling for help with documentation.
And this is what, I think, defune find great leaders : some person will at the same time continue their mission, federate people and will make you them great for helping them, because they'll feel adequate at the scale where you're working.
And when this happens, they start federate always more people because working for/with them is a rewarding experience.
So, I'd contest that :
- leaders are people "who want to be in charge of people". There are definitely people who want explicitly that, but they're not what I'd call leaders but rather managers.
- everyone who is "in charge of people" is necessarily a leader. And ultimately the shitty "leaders" we have sometimes aren't leaders at all, be they President or w/e. They may very well be here through other means than aligning people wills.
But I find there are plenty of people, at all levels of society who just at some point say "I want to go forward, but I can't do it alone, so let's go together and I'll go in front because I'm too damn curious and passionate and I wanna know what's out there, and here's why it's exciting", and it's always great to embark on a journey with them !
TL;DR : the "details" in the original citation I think aren't the intricacies of your core product/mission, but rather everything that's in the end noise disturbing the path forward.
I have been coming around on RMS. When I was younger I thought he was awesome, then I started to think he was unrealistic, now I'm coming back to awesome (if extremely cantankerous).
I dunno man. RMS-styled leadership can only work in very narrow markets. And even in his market (free software), I'd argue his success has been hampered by his complete lack of pragmatism. Being an unchanging, unbending visionary has a very high risk of losing relevancy and/or pissing a good swath of people off.
RMS is a something, but not exactly what I'd call an excellent role model for leadership. Especially for anything outside of the narrow niche of Free Software. His leadership style would never, ever work in a for-profit company or, especially, a startup. There is no room for unbending, unwavering principled stands in a startup--you'd completely lose your shirt and go bankrupt if you never changed your startup.
I agree with you. I think his style of leadership is as a movement leader, not a corporate leader. Whether he is effective as a movement leader is a question, but I think he is starting to be more relevant again with the kinds of questions we are asking these days about control and privacy.
Movement leaders often become unpopular for a time before they become relevant again. For instance, MLK was exceedingly unpopular after his anti-Vietnam speech until his death. I don't mean to put RMS on the same level as MLK, he's just the prominent example of that pattern that springs to mind.
"Leadership" has to be one of the biggest scams in the history of civilization, because it is actually really hard not to buy in, even when you don't want to. Are there great leaders? Maybe, I guess? Or are we all just propagandized (by the shitty leaders we actually have) to think that they exist? I've certainly never met one, and the only examples that seem plausible are far enough in the past (Lincoln, FDR), or so tied up with other, ideological identities (Moses, Martin Luther), wealth and power (any President, CEO, etc), or traumatic/dramatic events (military leaders) that nobody alive can remember them personally or objectively.
We're a hagiography-driven species and it gives the impression that you're somehow a failure unless you're one of the lucky apes with enough "leadership" to get one written about you.