Leadership is a hell of a drug

I recently went through two instances of three-full-day versions of the author’s Monday meeting, in the context of academic “research leadership”, organized by a team of people who never wrote a single research article in their lives (let alone an actual thesis) and headed by an actual “leadership coach”. My conclusion after this nightmarish experience is that “leadership” has become a meaningless buzzword, like “freedom”: it means something at its core, and used to mean something (I guess), but its potential to be misused is so great that anyone who actually mean it should avoid using it (as for ex. I avoid using the “freedom” even if I think it’s one of the most important things in life).<p>I also concluded that doing meaningless administrative&#x2F;management work is addictive and those who engage in it will actively and constantly try not only to overemphasise their importance but also force themselves on top of those who they know are doing actual important work. This is in my opinion a form of understated and poorly understood violence, but also a natural survival instinct for those who feel themselves useless (maybe correctly) and must then fight to remain relevant at all costs.<p>Sorry for those 1% of you out there who are actually useful and efficient leaders&#x2F;managers; you know who you are and this is not for you.

There&#x27;s definitely something a little weird about people who proclaim themselves a &quot;Leader&quot; on their LinkedIn title.<p>I can&#x27;t even imagine how that happens. Did they wake up that day, intending to do that before they even opened their laptop? &quot;Today&#x27;s the day!&quot; Or, were they just dropping by the Edit form, when they were struck by such a brilliant idea?<p>Every time I see it, I just hear Tywin intoning the same old lesson:<p>&quot;Any man who must say &#x27;I am the king&#x27; is no true king.&quot;<p>I guess it sounds a little less dramatic when you swap in &quot;Product Leader&quot; for &quot;king,&quot; but I think the point still holds.

This person sounds like an energy vampire. I don&#x27;t disagree with some of the points, but the way they&#x27;re conveyed and the writing style make it hard to empathize with them.<p>It&#x27;s also easy to jump on the &quot;management sucks&quot; bandwagon.

My theory is that this is the new blog of michealochurch. It’s entertaining reading, but the underlying message of this entire blog is “everything that’s wrong is everybody else’s fault, my job sucks and this is systemic so getting a different one won’t help”. While I love the humor here, I think the conclusion is awful.<p>In case the author reads this: I recognize that happiness will make your writing suffer, but there <i>are</i> companies out there that don’t completely suck and that actively want driven competent independent thinkers to come work for them.

&quot;Leadership in the absence of a skill is just aspiring to run a cult of personality.&quot;<p>Great line, and it&#x27;s true outside of work too.

I feel a bit smug that I thought &quot;this must be an Australian&quot; about 5 paragraphs before I found out :-D It&#x27;s the rejection of authority that&#x27;s so characteristic. I am in a Japanese owned company where I must seem far more extreme to them than the OP seems to me so I&#x27;m not criticising.<p>IMO actual leaders are just people who think ahead so when other people don&#x27;t know what to do they have some sort of answer. They may not be in positions of authority at all.<p>They have to stick their necks out a bit otherwise their forward thinking is of no use. That requires a bit of arrogance and some people have lots of arrogance of course but without it how could we deal with uncertainty?<p>In real life who really @#$# knows what will happen or what we truly need to do to succeed? Success may be more accidental than planned. If one is to get people to work together however, there has to be a degree of belief in what they&#x27;re working on and that starts with &quot;leaders&quot; - who are forced to bullshit just as politicians are and then get blamed for doing so. If they didn&#x27;t nobody would begin to listen to them. Then the group would not work together and no goal would be accomplished.<p>Authority is another matter. Who is going to take responsibility? There&#x27;s a problem - who is going to take time out of their day to solve it? Who should have made sure it didn&#x27;t happen in the first place? Authority is just the supposed answer to these questions. And at the end, who will be able to get everyone to a decision so that discussion doesn&#x27;t go on for ever. At the end when their decision turns out to not save the day, who will accept the risk of blame for a failure?<p>You do get people who &quot;don&#x27;t believe in leadership&quot; or authority or whatever but I am a bit suspicious that they are the ones who in practice do a lot of leading and pushing people around and are successful at doing so whilst avoiding responsibility. So they want more of that obviously. To be fair I probably do a bit of it. Nobody is wholly wonderful.

The problem is that management is one of the best places to hide. What do I mean by that?<p>You typically get paid more, and you get a degree of autonomy that you can use to arrange your own time. So, big incentive.<p>But you also get to hide, in the sense that it&#x27;s hard to call out an incompetent manager like you can call out a dev who doesn&#x27;t know how git works. After all, a manager needs to interact with a bunch of people, and any one of those people could hold up the show. This is why people feel thrown under the bus, their manager needed an excuse that wasn&#x27;t incompetent management.<p>It&#x27;s nebulous. If someone delivers a project well, was it them, or was the project not ambitious enough? If they don&#x27;t deliver it, did they not have enough resources, was the timeline unrealistic?<p>So there&#x27;s a massive incentive to manipulate the baseline. You want people to feel like you are personally delivering way over expectation.<p>This is where leadership comes in. Nobody can know the nuts and bolts of how you manage your weekly standups, but everyone can see your TED Talk. You must be really important, why else would you be at Davos? You&#x27;re clearly very up to date on modern management techniques, that&#x27;s why you have an agile coach for your team.<p>It&#x27;s not all smoke and mirrors. I do think that leadership means imparting some sort of overarching goal in a business, along with direction like &quot;we want to exit any business where we&#x27;re not number 1 or 2 within 5 years&quot;. That&#x27;s not stupid, but it also isn&#x27;t time consuming. Mostly what they need is a lot of experience in the trenches, but by the time you&#x27;re a senior leader, you already have that.<p>I get the feeling a lot of these made-up things that leaders come up with is precisely because they don&#x27;t do anything during the day. The decisions they make don&#x27;t take that long, since they are baked into experience and organizational momentum, and getting the updates from subordinates doesn&#x27;t take much time either, but they feel like they need to be seen to be always busy.

&gt; Larry, I&#x27;m on ducktales<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=76HijAoXi6k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=76HijAoXi6k</a>

&gt; There is something genuinely scary about the idea of people so caught up in their own self-image that they think leadership is turning up on stage to dispense divine corporate manna unto the huddles masses, then expectantly waiting for the choir to raise their voices in sickly-sweet supplication: &quot;That&#x27;s a great idea, boss.<p>Amen, amen. Let us rejoice for a prophet has arisen that cuts through the corporate image.

I suspect that leadership is unlikely to be found in places with at will employment. That is because much of the work of leadership is learning how to lead different personalities and align people with different goals. In a company with at will employment there is no need to do that. You simply get rid of anyone who doesn&#x27;t naturally fit in with your preferred personality.

While I agree with the author, I also don&#x27;t think I want to work with this person.<p>People in orgs that groan and complain are sometimes their own kind of difficult. They find ways of reducing overall morale by constantly making fun of the work and devaluing what everyone else is doing.

Just reading the quoted email started a histamine reaction in me. I now have itchy hands.

This person is a fantastic writer, and they quote one of the best authors ever to boot.

A leader shows direction(s) and has followers i.e. those that execute.<p>To show direction, one needs to know his stuff well. Many qualify for this. Getting followers that execute is very hard. Mountains have been written about this, with a lot of them being the typical business school stuff ridden with survivorship bias from following the success stories.

I really liked this post and the way it was written.<p>My critique is that it feels a little idealistic. That might not be the best description, but it&#x27;s like railing against the way the world just is. I&#x27;d love to see counter-examples of successful companies that do things right, but it feels to me like what most companies turn into is just the best of a bad bunch of options.<p>At the end of the day, we&#x27;re all uniquely flawed people trying to work together in increasingly sized groups. It feels like some amount of dysfunction is to be expected. Having leadership flow between people depending on the problem being solved has the potential to make many people very uncomfortable day to day and in turn, erode the benefit of optimising competency for each task.<p>At the end of the day, though, that&#x27;s why many of us tend to aim at small companies: the pain is not amplified. The advice I used to give colleagues at large companies was not to try and fight the ocean; you just need to let it wash over you. Bottom-up change is so rare at large companies that it just burns out those who try and alienates the people they need to impress to move up and actually effect change. The truth is that even at a high level very people can really change things fundamentally.<p>But maybe that&#x27;s for the best. Fundamentally changing the way things work for thousands of people&#x27;s livelihoods should be hard.

The author works at some pretty shit companies if these bozos are the leadership there.<p>Or he has been working at profitable companies where he is working in a cost center vs. a profit center and thus doesn&#x27;t really matter.<p>Tech in Australia is bleak, the place who&#x27;s top tech company is Atlassian, creator of some of the most loathed software in the world forced on others by such as described here. Does he work there? Wouldn&#x27;t be surprised that a place that made JIRA would do this to their own staff. #2 is Canva, a mail order print shop.<p>The internet is some of the shittiest and expensive in the developed world because it&#x27;s so captured by the local telecom monopoly. It&#x27;s the place with the worse anti-espionage laws. It&#x27;s the country that the other ones in the 5 eyes go to do the most unethical spying because even their own fig leaf laws prevent them from doing so. Bleak bleak bleak.<p>Get out and go somewhere competent, like the US west coast or western europe. You obviously have taste, go to somewhere with some taste.

Bout to show my hand here, but do you folks really sit down after a day of work and read a book about leadership? I might kill myself before I do something like that.

Guess what. Based on the success of your blog, not only are you a leader - you&#x27;re a _thought_ leader now!<p>Good luck.

Based on what you said I think that you should change jobs. Too much toxicity and obvious incompatibility with the company preferred approach to working.

I think you have to be very immature and foolish to want to be a leader (I get that in some cases you may feel it&#x27;s your duty or you have no choice, but that&#x27;s different from wanting it). Leadership is a huge burden.

Leadership will eat themselves alive at the cost of valuable talent. I think leadership often needs to consider how valuable they are as a unit and work together and not build martyrs for causes. The number one problem in the failure of businesses is the ability to lead and do it effectively. Then something stirs up the dynamic the company faulters and loses that momentum. Then a divide forms where now they pit talent against each other this talent becomes a martyr for the leadership. This is a systematic problem when hirer level leadership fails to lead and creates rifts.

&gt; If someone doesn&#x27;t have the ability to award someone else status or money, they&#x27;re told they&#x27;re a good manager. This is usually a person whose job it is to hover in the air, screaming, while the organization channels all their dysfunction like bolts of Atlassian-branded lightning into their twitching, smoking mortal coil.<p>To the author: did you use this line before, in another post? I&#x27;m pretty sure this is not the first time I&#x27;ve laughed uncontrollably at it.

&quot; This will be an all-morning meeting so arrive energized as we hit the ground running on Monday morning&quot; 100% this is written by ChatGPT. It gets very excited.

There’s two leaderships.<p>There’s the people in the highest management jobs - they aren’t necessarily leaders but they call themselves leadership. They can actually be terrible at their job (or good).<p>Then there’s leaders - people in various levels and roles who empower others, build teams, drive successful change, know shitloads about their company and are sought out to help by all kinds of colleagues. Be one of those regardless of your level.

Do OP and I work in the same place?<p>I can&#x27;t stand the linkedin-depth-level of leadership anymore. Deep concepts like systems thinking are introduced, workshops are held, but nothing really of depth ever comes: concepts are introduced at blog-post level. There&#x27;s nothing to learn from these people, they can only &#x27;manage&#x27;, they have no domain expertise. Yet they out-earn me by a factor of 2 or 3...

&gt; &quot;why did you need someone from outside the organization who doesn&#x27;t know a damn thing about our work to come in and tell you how you&#x27;re screwing up? I&#x27;ll tell you for free! That is a breathtaking level of disconnection.&quot;<p>There are times where external advice can be helpful, but it can also be a form of plausible deniability. Managers can display a &quot;willingness&quot; to improve a situation, without engaging with their team or changing their actions.<p>I think a big part of this is ego, as stated in the post, but a lot of the times it&#x27;s piss poor communication skills.<p>The worst manager I&#x27;ve ever dealt had been very skilled engineer, but he suddenly found himself in a position where he had to actually listen to subordinates and mediate conflicts between departments. He simply did not. Mind you, this is not a large organization. Departments almost never talked to each other, even if they were on the same floor. Feedback was futile and met with hostility. Bright and motivated employees were quickly demoralized and retention was low.

The title was intriguing. The setup, too. But then another 3,500 or so words that amounted to not much more than a rant and to conclude with “see, I was right!” Author isn’t wrong to be upset with the sorry state of leadership in the business world. But it should be a two-way street - you get what you give and the tone in this piece doesn’t sound like someone willing to give anything, not even four hours of their already-shortened workweek.<p>I was happy to see the distinction drawn between leadership and management. Leaders manage but not all managers lead. Sometimes that’s just fine - a good manager who stays in their lane will be effective. Sometimes they will even turn into decent leaders without knowing it. But the ones who are oblivious to the distinction will probably fail in both.

&gt; Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I&#x27;ve had a 1:1 with at a big company?<p>That one is easy! The sort of metacognition and reflection exhibited by the lawyer makes one a bad politician. Good politicians get the C-level seats.

I think a lot of the discussion in comments describes the &quot;how&quot; to be a good (people) leader rather than define &quot;what&quot; is a good leader. From a sociological point of view however, isn&#x27;t the most broad definition of &quot;leadership&quot; simply the ability to get a bunch of people to do what is best for the collective (or more cynically the corporation&#x2F;country), rather than what is best for the individual?<p>Or taking the logical inverse position, can one be considered a good leader if they cannot inspire that kind of decision-making?<p>I do think there is some truth around all people managers wanting to be considered good leaders... and very few of them actually conforming to that definition. But that&#x27;s a different topic.

&quot;Why does a practicing lawyer have more thoughts on programming than every CTO I&#x27;ve had a 1:1 with at a big company?&quot;<p>I mean, it&#x27;s sort of outside the point of this article (which i understand and agree with), but as a person who once set his job description as &quot;C++, Lawyering, C++ Lawyering&quot; i&#x27;m going to offer the answer to this question may be simply that<p>1. Programming lawyers often are trained at being self-reflective<p>2. Big-company CTO&#x27;s have bigger issues to worry about than programming languages, and have to delegate very effectively. So the answer the big company CTO should give you should probably be &quot;I probably should <i>not</i> have thoughts about them, but this highly qualified person x who <i>I</i> ask to help me understand this area when i need to is who you should talk to&quot;<p>If the article said &quot;small company CTO&#x27;s&quot;, I think it would make more sense.

As a kid I was in a military youth program and learned about leadership and had the opportunity to practice it.<p>It’s ruined me by setting an unattainable standard for most people and makes me afraid of the future.<p>Management is not leadership.

When I someone says &#x27;leader&#x27; I think another suckass follower yesing their way to the top. The environment, morals, humanity has nothing to do with their actions.

<i>The leader, for example, has a passion for equality. We think of great generals from David and Alexander on down, sharing their beans or maza with their men, calling them by their first names, marching along with them in the heat, sleeping on the ground, and first over the wall. A famous ode by a long-suffering Greek soldier, Archilochus, reminds us that the men in the ranks are not fooled for an instant by the executive type who thinks he is a leader.</i><p><i>For the manager, on the other hand, the idea of equality is repugnant and indeed counterproductive. Where promotion, perks, privilege, and power are the name of the game, awe and reverence for rank is everything, the inspiration and motivation of all good men. Where would management be without the inflexible paper processing, dress standards, attention to proper social, political, and religious affiliation, vigilant watch over habits and attitudes, and so forth, that gratify the stockholders and satisfy security?</i><p>— Hugh Nibley, <i>Leaders and Managers</i>

While this article resonates with my experience, it makes me want to consider trying to move into “leadership”.<p>Like the author said, it’s usually a bunch of clowns who are paid way too much money to do jack. Sounds cushy if you’re willing to sell your soul.<p>Which leads me to ask. How exactly do you begin such a journey? It doesn’t seem as if there’s a particular (useful) skill you need to have.

&quot;You don&#x27;t work at SpaceX - the largest project we&#x27;re working on right now is a big spreadsheet that is nonetheless six months behind schedule. Sleeping is higher energy than that.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dontbuildsaas.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dontbuildsaas.com&#x2F;</a>

Man I need to work with leaders again.

Oh my, I’m conflicted about this post.<p>(Disclaimer - I’m CEO of a small company and also adore the Turn Your Ship Around book and partly base my leadership style on that book. )<p>I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.<p>Human beings are wired in a particular way; being physically present together in a room at least occasionally should have strong benefits, if enough other caveats are met.<p>So - I wonder if the baby is going out with the bath water?<p>Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly.<p>Maybe we could say that resources need to be managed and people need to be led, but the average manager&#x2F;leader doesn’t understand the distinction, or perhaps doesn’t have any desire to.<p>One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.<p>And that manager is a superstar if their team members are able to regularly grow into new roles (or switch into a new role that is a better fit, as happened today.)<p>~ Edit ~<p>I just read the blog post that the author linked to, about Pivotal Software. We have a very similar philosophy. In the blog post he describes the hiring process has being designed to filter out assholes and that, for me, has to be one of the most successful parts of our approach, too.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.simplermachines.com&#x2F;mr-reciprocity&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.simplermachines.com&#x2F;mr-reciprocity&#x2F;</a>

Pretentious leadership that only howls orders and no execution is toxic.

In your leadership team&#x27;s defense, they are all probably on blow.

OP, I love this post and topic. I hate the term leadership. Leadership teams that have never shown leadership, or any expertise or skills, drive me mad.

This made me laugh a lot. You know how to write.

If programmers can call themselves engineers, managers can call themselves leaders.

heh<p>&quot;..dragged to the office..&quot;<p>a very recently invented company policy stated that any company device for home office (just ordered new or old, all the same), should be hand-picked from the office. Which coincided (?) with ordering some monitors.. and in my case, is 600 kms away. And there are two of us to travel that distance.. over not the-safest roads. And we are on the critical path of the new project (?). And i was the So called &quot;cto&quot;..<p>i am not any more. That was the last straw.<p>What a Fresh breath.<p>so i am Looking for mentoring a team. &quot;Leading&quot;.. is a loaded word.<p>links, e-mail etc in profile (also in recent HN-who-wants-to-be-hired [0]).<p>have fun<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39573993">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=39573993</a>

When did the term &quot;leadership&quot; get this so widespread use in such contexts? I have studied and worked in universities, and I used to know the head of the department as the head of the department. Now in my last department the head of the department is &quot;the leadership&quot; and the bunch of managers and admin people around them is &quot;the leadership team&quot; and this is how they go around, introduce themselves and sign their emails. They radiate all the madness and narcissistic vibes that the author describes. And the talk has become all this corporate blah blah void of real content stuff, with all that jargon as if they forgot how to talk like actual people and as we have all forgotten what we actually do. It is all madness. I have heard similar from other departments, so I do not think we are the only ones.<p>So, anyway, when has the word &quot;leadership&quot; started becoming more widely used to describe essentially &quot;management&quot;?

“And I&#x27;ve never formally held a position of leadership in an organization.”<p>It shows. Whoever wrote this is very immature. Management isn’t making a big ask here.

This feels like it was written in 1993

You mentioned narcissism, and here is an article about narcissism and leadership: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;cutting-edge-leadership&#x2F;201212&#x2F;are-all-leaders-narcissists" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.psychologytoday.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;blog&#x2F;cutting-edge-leaders...</a>

Another week, another cliched rant against &quot;leadership&quot; that throws out all the usual tropes. You know, it would be much more worth reading for someone to write about great leadership and acknowledge it exists and in fact isn&#x27;t all that uncommon, call out great leaders, and try and understand what makes them great.<p>Any shlub can rant about &quot;muh bad management&quot;, annoying meetings, the Peter Principle, &quot;terrible middle management&quot;, it&#x27;s become so frequent in comments on Hackernews that my eyes automatically start rolling as soon as I read the same tired old crap.<p>Does gibbering out the same old criticisms make anything better or just perpetuate the myth that all managers are somehow shitty and horrible people or somehow never wrote a line of code in their lives?<p>What does the author intend by writing out this sort of sophormoric rant? Is it just for the clicks? To try and big up their own profile? I suggest doing something better with their time that would actually make the world a slightly better place.

Thank you for the reminder that management is not the same as leadership.<p>Management is something you do by mostly moving your lips and typing text, leadership is something you actively do and are that inspires others to put in their best work.

You nailed it by pointing out to narcissism.

Nod of the hat to the title.

tldr

Toxic

&gt;That level of self-regard is narcissistic to such a degree that I have screeched so far past horror that I&#x27;ve looped around to arrive at a grudging respect.<p>It&#x27;d be nice to find someone complaining about narcissism at some point who doesn&#x27;t also have too much self-regard to proofread their opening paragraph.

Wow, if I was the leader of this person&#x27;s company I would immediately terminate them.<p>It is so toxic to work with people who are this entitled. Getting this upset over a mandatory meeting? What a nightmare. You know this is just the tip of the iceberg for their bad behavior if they are the type to publish a seething screed over something so banal.<p>I don&#x27;t like four hour meetings either. But give me a break. Running companies is hard, keeping teams aligned is hard. Sometimes keeping things going requires doing things that we don&#x27;t like. That&#x27;s just called being an adult.