A style of leadership that is direct and forceful, yet also respectful (2023)

I like to think I am extremely attentive to bug reports (I’m always paranoid about my code possibly containing bugs, so I err on the side of turning every stone), so I would probably not make Jerry’s mistake here, but sure as hell if a manager tried to humiliate me that much I would just quit on the spot.<p>In my opinion, there are ways to share feedback that allow another person to save face, letting them process it on their own terms instead of pounding them like this in a single session until they are “defeated”.<p>Such feedback can then be politely repeated, if the issue reoccurs later on, and formally documented as part of a performance warning, simply letting the other person know, once again without insisting, that this is a serious behavioral issue that will have repercussions if not actioned, and that you are there to provide any context should they want to talk about it more.<p>That is, in my opinion, a way for a leader to show that every team member is treated as an adult and responsible for their own actions and outcome.

&quot;No, I&#x27;ll do it myself&quot; and &quot;I feel like you aren&#x27;t listening to me&quot; comes straight out of couple&#x27;s therapy handbooks on what not to do.<p>You can be direct and respectful, but this was not respectful, this was just aggressive.

This is truly psychotic, not as an ad hominem. And I don&#x27;t mean his behavior, which you can just chalk up to an antisocial &quot;I&#x27;m the boss&quot; personality - I mean specifically the fact that he believes he is being respectful.

This reads awfully, as both people seem to be wrong. The coder&#x27;s just avoiding work and dismissing product, but the manager&#x27;s just bullying the guy into getting a respectful &quot;yes, sir&quot; like an authoritarian parent.<p>The obvious, glaring issue of broken dynamics between product and devs is never taken care of nor addressed, and it seems inevitable the manager&#x27;s actions create resentment towards product by the dev, and a &quot;us vs then&quot; culture.<p>Good leaders always see dynamics and patterns, rather than &quot;John is good and Betty is bad&quot;.

Pretty incredible that when pressed on the assumptions the author made about Jerry’s motivations, the author just doubles down on assuming these motivations again in the defense of the first article.<p>Doubly so that the author published this as a rebuttal to a well thought out counter point. You’ve got to question the whole concept of this blog when the author is posting Ls like this and thinking it’s a W

It was supposedly Jerry&#x27;s code that intentionally caused results for Bermuda to not show up for &quot;Caribbean&quot;, but the fix for it was to change their search engine config because there was an error copying from the database?<p>The guy who wasn&#x27;t actually going to work on the issue decided the time estimate of the bug, and then expected the guy who actually worked on the issue to stick to it? Four hours were apparently an underestimate anyway because it took the author &quot;several hours&quot; to fix it.<p>I agree Jerry did a stupid thing too by not testing the queries properly against the previously deployed version of the code. He works remotely so he didn&#x27;t interact with Sonia enough to take her more seriously. But instead of telling him that so that he can learn, this guy starts assigning him motives and patronizing him, and then pats himself on the back for being a good dad^H^H^H manager who doesn&#x27;t cuss?<p>Story has holes and the cunt is insufferable.<p>Edit: The author is also the one who submitted this here, and he seems to submit every article from his blog. There are other articles in there like this one about how he deals with people. After reading some of them, all I can say is that the word &quot;cunt&quot; is insufficient to describe him.

The author 1) created the ticket and its estimation 2) assigned it to Jerry without further comment 3) had another ticket created and assigned to Jerry without talking to Jerry about it 4) got mad when Jerry closed what looked like a duplicate ticket 5) told Jerry that he has no agency in his work and he must do only what the product team says 6) took the ticket himself 7) yelled at Jerry about not sticking to an estimate Jerry had nothing to do with 8) finally extracted an agreement with Jerry that Jerry will do no work without explicit authorization from the author<p>This is just a chain of management failures. I hope Jerry got a new job with a better boss.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say Jerry didn&#x27;t screw up. He did. But this method of dealing with it is about the manager&#x27;s authority over the employee, not the business outcome. When I was a team lead, I had an issue with my direct reports not having empathy for the internal stakeholders we were building for. I fixed that with meetings directly between my team and the stakeholders where we all came to an understanding of each others&#x27; needs and constraints. But that requires effort and awkward conversations and being a human being. It&#x27;s a lot easier to just yell at Jerry.

That is an interesting scenario, I am glad they shared it.<p>Not sure if the problem is fixed though. What are the reasons for thinking the bug was no big deal. It may be hard to get the truth. Some people lie because they need a job and want to keep it. Maybe he has an KPI he needs to keep. Closing the bug as no issue would help a feature based KPI or OKR.<p>Also need to address culture. It should be like a &quot;door desk&quot; (Infamous Amazon cultural thing!) level thing that quality is first.<p>You delay the feature work to ensure quality and investigate bugs. Their manager accepts a feature slips because the team fixes bugs.<p>Not all bugs (you need triage) but definitely the ones that cause real issues for customers. Someone (QA and dev together) do an impact assessment. Understand how bad that bug is.

I&#x27;ve found presence helps a lot in these situations, where perspectives don&#x27;t align; it&#x27;s not doable with back and forths from my experience. Get the people who are disagreeing in the same room, virtual or otherwise; preferably before the tone turns sour.

This is a good read regarding a stressful yet necessary exchange between people working toward the same goal but through different lenses. Not all managers practice constructive communication with the end result being a “learning experience” has taken place.

He seems to have the laughable belief that his conversation with Jerry couldn&#x27;t possibly be disrespectful because he didn&#x27;t swear and he didn&#x27;t raise his voice, but completely ignores that he is repeatedly calling Jerry a liar, demanding in very roundabout ways that Jerry dance like a monkey for him and worst of all ignoring the reality of hierarchy in the situation: The author can have Jerry fired; Jerry does not have the same capability, so all he can do is try to end the conversation. Am I meant to believe that the author would talk to his peers like this, or his own manager? Not a chance.<p>Awful article, just abject incompetence from start to finish from an author that doesn&#x27;t have the decency to be embarrassed.

Why ? Like everything else money, in the last 60 years or so, more people started chasing money at all costs, ignoring the impact on society.<p>Many aspect of modern society now does this, from churches to non-profits to politics to business. Just look at the salaries of the people running these organizations and how they have grown when compared to their employees.<p>Decades ago, at least these &quot;CEOs&quot; would attempt to think of society and employees before making decisions. Now it comes down to &quot;how much can I get and screw everyone else&quot;.