Comment by primitur | Hacker News Reader

Comment by primitur | Hacker News Reader

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I just went through an episode with this kind of 'leader' - he basically demonstrated everything described in this article, with the end result being I no longer am employed at his company.

Unfortunately, leadership is not something that younger (<30) generations of people are learning to embrace, or even understand. There is such a narcissistic bent going on in the modern, Western world, that this should be no surprise - but it is really shocking to be faced with a CTO who absolutely has no idea how to foment team spirit, how to motivate his juniors, how to get people to enjoy doing the often-times-mundane-inane, boring, work that has to be done in modern times.

Perhaps it has always been that way, perhaps I - as a ~50 year old - am getting very jaded/off-my-lawn type, but I think there were definitely differences in the generations of managers that went through the hoops in the 80's, compared to all the new-school cargo-cult startup circus hijinks that pass as 'business' these days.

I truly believe that if you can't do the job of the people below you: you're not qualified to lead them. If you can't motivate people to work harder to solve the issues that they're stumbling on: you don't deserve leadership. If you can't get your team together to coordinate their activities in a way that makes Russian ballet seem like a circus full of bears - you need to get out of the way and get someone in who can handle the machine-like precision needed to coordinate an organization and start making real headway to building the business.

Alas, a lot of the startup-/venture- cult movements that are currently enjoying mainstream status don't really focus on this angle. We've become a selfish, materialistic, narcissistic species - at least in the tech world - which doesn't really pull much off except individual reward above all else. The desire to be 'new and not like our parents' is really getting in the way of civilization-building.

At least, having just suffered immensely at the hands of an absolutely incompetent, dufus manager, whose company has far too much money to waste on the build-vs-buy equation of startup building .. I just feel like we're devolving, yo.

This has everything to do with problems with authority (if you get instant bad reaction from the word , you know the problem intimately.) How how human society or organization deals with authority determines how well it can organize.

In the industrial society large power distances and strong authority made things work but also created problems.

In the post-industrial society old ways simply don't work. As a result there has been understandable and healthy backlash and distrust against authority since the 60's. Where this correction went wrong was treating authority as innately bad thing that must never be recognized.

If a person has a healthy relationship with authority, they can both take leadership role or give it to others easily without sacrificing their dignity or feeling less or more than others. They understand the limit of authority but give it a good change to work.

Absentee leader culture comes from people who don't think they should be leading or that they don't' have the right to do so. They think themselves as managers and not as leaders.

I agree, but it has something to do with very basic differences between people, how they view business, how they understand its goals.

Basically, in start-ups, the main goal and driving force is the desire to get rich, and this is how "success" is defined. Whereas for managers in bigger companies, especially more traditional ones, success is very much related with people, and especially workforce cuts are considered as a failure - of the company and of managers, regardless of the financial outcome for the shareholders.

I'm tempted to say it started in the 80s, as corporate raiders ran around.

This lead to a shift in focus from continuation of the corporation to a focus on shareholder dividends.

Then later the raider mentality turned into the VC mentality, in both cases focusing on a boom-or-bust approach.

There is a reason that it stuck around though, it is a successful strategy in an economy where the prevalence of strategies is highly, if not exclusively, correlated with their ability to make ROI.

The main question is: successful for who?

I truly believe that if you can't do the job of the people below you: you're not qualified to lead them. If you can't motivate people to work harder to solve the issues that they're stumbling on: you don't deserve leadership. If you can't get your team together to coordinate their activities in a way that makes Russian ballet seem like a circus full of bears - you need to get out of the way and get someone in who can handle the machine-like precision needed to coordinate an organization and start making real headway to building the business.

I disagree that if you can't do the job of the people 'below' you, you're not qualified to lead them. When I first lead a team, I worked with people that were a lot more competent in specific areas than I ever will be. In turn, I could still learn from my 'managers', but in different areas than where I have my skills. So everybody learns from one another.

I do agree that motivation is very important. I had to think of theory X or Y. Do you distrust (X) or trust (Y) people to do their work well? These believes tend to be self-fulfilling, but can still be useful in different situations. Distrust tends to lead to a lot of control and micromanagement, which imho for knowledge workers does not work. Trust has advantages and for me leads to a better working culture, but can also lead to the issues described in the article.

I learned a lot from an online version of Harvard's Psychology 1508: The Psychology of Leadership given by Tal Ben-Shahar. If you can find it somewhere (there are some classes on youtube), highly recommended!

>I disagree that if you can't do the job of the people 'below' you, you're not qualified to lead them.

+

> Distrust tends to lead to a lot of control and micromanagement, which imho for knowledge workers does not work.

=

To each their own, and I have had this argument elsewhere before, but I will say this: brittle organizations are built on the basis of competency; if you cannot do my job, why should I trust you to understand my issues?

I'm just going to go out there and say that Leadership isn't something that "people under 30" are going to be great at. This isn't new or "kids these days" this is life skills. It's the same reason you rarely see amazing writers who just finished the bachelors. Leadership is a skill that has to be cultivated just like anything else, that takes time.

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