It's not a framework, and it requires no diagram. It's just trusting and empowering people to do the job, then getting out of their way. People tend to rise to your level of trust.
I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works:
https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/
I thought I’d be annoyed reading this, as the blog seems to brazenly rip off name recognition from the significantly more popular and presumably preceding “Practical Engineering” channel/blog… and to some degree that feeling did cheapen the content.
But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.
Is an interesting idea but don’t think it scales. Once a company gets beyond like 100 people you need some structure and past 1000 is chaos is everyone is a leader.
I worked in an office last year. We had these “Wacky Shirt Wednesdays.” On the first Wednesday I was able to participate, I decided to wear the shirt my mom was wearing when I was born. Now there’s some leftover placenta and uterine lining, so it isn’t the cleanest shirt. BUT it’s the thought that counts. That what momma says.
This f’n Karen decides to come over to my desk and tell me it’s “inappropriate” and “gross” and “ur mom’s placenta will get in my salmon salad”.
Win for me: keep wearing the shirt Win for Karen: stop having me wear the shirt Win Win Win: frame the shirt on my office wall so there’s never a chance of getting placenta in Karen’s salad.
The foundation of this approach is non-controversial: Don’t micromanage, be a good coach, don’t force work to go through the manager, and other simple truths.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
It’s a flat management style, I love it and I appreciate people who are doing it, but throughout all the years I have only seen it done twice properly, of the already rare occasions of using it anyway. The vast majority are your typical corpo hierarchal BS, or even worse, a small early stage startup trying to pull the same corporate style, while mixing it with startup one resulting in the downside of both. In one company, the engineering manager wanted to have a daily standup with scrum style (apparently he wanted it because his wife was working in a remote silicon valley job and just knew about it..) for a team who none of them is working in the same product, and most aren’t even software, and got offended when get told it’s stupid and it’s better to use other approaches, of course he refused because it’s about power dynamics now, I left shortly with other 3 engineers in the same month due to bad management style.
It's not a framework, and it requires no diagram. It's just trusting and empowering people to do the job, then getting out of their way. People tend to rise to your level of trust.
I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works: https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/
I thought I’d be annoyed reading this, as the blog seems to brazenly rip off name recognition from the significantly more popular and presumably preceding “Practical Engineering” channel/blog… and to some degree that feeling did cheapen the content.
But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.
Is an interesting idea but don’t think it scales. Once a company gets beyond like 100 people you need some structure and past 1000 is chaos is everyone is a leader.
dunbar's number?
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number>
If everyone is a leader, who is doing the work?
Really?
The difference here is with a win-win-win approach, we all win.
Do we all win the same equity vesting schedule?
I worked in an office last year. We had these “Wacky Shirt Wednesdays.” On the first Wednesday I was able to participate, I decided to wear the shirt my mom was wearing when I was born. Now there’s some leftover placenta and uterine lining, so it isn’t the cleanest shirt. BUT it’s the thought that counts. That what momma says.
This f’n Karen decides to come over to my desk and tell me it’s “inappropriate” and “gross” and “ur mom’s placenta will get in my salmon salad”.
Win for me: keep wearing the shirt Win for Karen: stop having me wear the shirt Win Win Win: frame the shirt on my office wall so there’s never a chance of getting placenta in Karen’s salad.
Win Win Win!!
The foundation of this approach is non-controversial: Don’t micromanage, be a good coach, don’t force work to go through the manager, and other simple truths.
When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.
Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.
It’s a flat management style, I love it and I appreciate people who are doing it, but throughout all the years I have only seen it done twice properly, of the already rare occasions of using it anyway. The vast majority are your typical corpo hierarchal BS, or even worse, a small early stage startup trying to pull the same corporate style, while mixing it with startup one resulting in the downside of both. In one company, the engineering manager wanted to have a daily standup with scrum style (apparently he wanted it because his wife was working in a remote silicon valley job and just knew about it..) for a team who none of them is working in the same product, and most aren’t even software, and got offended when get told it’s stupid and it’s better to use other approaches, of course he refused because it’s about power dynamics now, I left shortly with other 3 engineers in the same month due to bad management style.