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Comment by sharkweek | Hacker News Reader

I have a confession to make - I'm not a particularly good leader. I don't like managing people, and I'm not terribly interested in learning how to do this. I have seen good managers in action, and have been under a few on occasion; I am not one of these people.

I do, however, have some very solid skills and have deployed them repeatedly at the handful of companies I have worked at in the past.

My main concern is knowing that down the road I'm probably going to get "stuck" in my career when I'm not interested in moving up and running a team. It seems like a trend lately to praise the IC and promise them the moon and stars, but I think this is mostly lip service to keep them around.

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It's more likely you will get stuck under incompetent leadership, as your understanding of how to run a team increases, and eventually you'll be so frustrated, you'll agree to be the manager.

I'm fairly sure the idea of a natural leader is a myth. Just about everybody has to learn how to do it. Everyone starts out bad at it and they work and work and work until they're better, then everybody starts crowing about how natural they made it look.

It has to look natural for it to be effective. This requires a lot of art.

I would say I'm a natural leader. I am constantly scanning for order and when I see chaos, I am forced to take charge. Otherwise if I recognize competent decision-making, I am content to observe and go along. I cannot help it, as this is a compulsion, and it has been a part of my personality for as long as I can remember.

I have often been praised for my charisma and my confidence, but therein lies the problem: because I cannot allow dysfunction to perpetuate, I sometimes butt into situations where it is not my business, or I act impulsively because something must be done. But this problem can also be compounded because the people around me who cede leadership for the sake of ensuring action can sometimes get absorbed into my confidence and charisma, believing my conviction to be equivalent to the validity of my decisions, and thus enabling poor decisions that may as well turn out to be worse than no decisions.

I see where these problems with incompetent leaders arise even when they are not intentional. At best, one can hope that these leaders are capable of recognizing and humbly accepting their own limitations.

I would not call this trait of yours leadership, I would simply call it a personality trait. It, by itself won't make you a good leader.

I'm still wrapping my brain around the concept, but I conceive of leadership as a broad collection of social skills oriented around driving an organization of people towards a goal. One needs vision, persuasion, strategy, a certain ability to see and work with the darker side of human nature, emotional maturity, and probably more. All of these need to be identified, worked on, and refined over the course of a lifetime.

There's just so much to being a leader that it can literally be a life's work. It's so fascinating to watch different organizations being led by different people. Anybody can run an organization, effectively leading it is another thing entirely.

You can see the leadership style of Donald Trump just doesn't work very well at all in the Office of the President of the United States, it's essentially causing a mutiny in the rest of the executive branch.

Organizations are products of the people at the top, and develop inertia of their own. Leaders have to manage this inertia, Trump is used to operating very quickly, but the Executive Branch of the US Government is a massive ship to steer. Time will tell if Trump is up to the task of getting the ship in order.

I think it is more than a single personality trait -- it's more like a combination of personality traits. It definitely exists in various forms, and it is not all learned.

The converse is also true. There are some people who lack the personality traits required for leadership, and who probably could not be taught to become leaders, even if they desired to become one.

When people say "so and so is a natural leader," what they mean is that people tend to follow them. That is, after all, the essence of leadership. How well they do at keeping people following them and how efficient they are in producing results are just a couple of the various qualities of leadership, but the essence of it is that people follow them, and want to follow them.

Some people just naturally have that quality without any formal training. You can even see it in some very young children when they're among their peers, if you look.

but i think this is not the relevant observation. The question is whether one enjoys leading and is willing and motivated to learn. The question is not whether one can learn how to do it, but instead who wants to learn how to do it. And high-performers (in my experience) have a higher motivation to learn (they don't have magic superpowers, at least most ;) ), so i would guess they are better at leading because they care more about learning to lead. I think "natural leaders" just enjoy leading and have been practicing it since kindergarten.

Disclaimer: pure speculation ;)

I feel like the terms leadership and management are often used interchangeability in business, but they aren't the same thing.

You can provide leadership without being a manager. In your case, it sounds like a team could benefit from your past experiences. You could easily mentor and teach others, and provide guidance for projects. That doesn't necessarily require performing traditional "management" functions.

It would all hinge on what your corporate culture supports and expects from people in charge.

I am a good leader, trained by a father who--I kid you not--had his children up before dawn to listen to the same motivational/management how-to tapes he listened to. Only, perhaps because of this, I have no interest in a management gig, mainly because (money aside) I'd rather be coding/writing/producing, and doing it well, than overseeing the production of others. And I've moved to larger companies as a producer because I also had successful managment experience at smaller orgs. But now I'm topped out--and to not accept the next level is a career DNR. I'm demonstrably good, but am I 3x salary better than a replacement? Good luck making that case. Meet the new boss...

Abandon the concept of a career and contract? That helps with ageism too.

I'm not sure the concept of a career track exists outside management.

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