Thoughts on Leadership

Someone asked me recently about my leadership style and how I approach building great teams.  That’s not a question answered in a few minutes – there’s a lot to the subject, as far as I am concerned.  I have blogged before about “How to Build Fantastic Engineering Teams” but I wanted to add a few thoughts.  First of all, leadership is a learned skill.  You might disagree, thinking that leaders are born, not made.   That’s partially true, I admit.  But non-leaders can learn leadership skills and become better leaders, and those with natural attributes for leadership can accomplish a lot with pure talent.  But apply some practice and learned skills to that talent and you have a winner.

I think the most important trait a leader can have to ensure long-term success in leadership is integrity.  I’ll post a lot more on that another time, but if folks cannot trust you – if they don’t believe that you can be trusted to do the right thing, to be level with them, to have a wider view of what’s best for everyone – then no amount of skills will make you a good leader.  You’ll sabotage yourself and then you’ll have no chance at all to repair it at that organization as a leader.

The second most important trait you’ll need is good judgment.  You cannot learn that.  In my experience you either have good judgment or you don’t.   Most people can learn from their mistakes, but when you most need your judgment is when something totally new comes up – and it’s often in the heat of a fire with customers breathing flames down your neck and serious money on the line.  You either have it or not.  Spotting this trait in others and cultivating those people is a major part of being a good leader.

Leadership requires constant learning – especially as you move up the ladder.  First you have to lead yourself, then others.  Moving into line management is the natural first step:  the direct management of other people. This can be a very difficult stage for some people since the natural tendency is to fall back on what you know best: the skills that likely got you noticed and promoted.  Only those individual contributor skills are not what makes for a great manager (or even a mediocre one).  Learning to manage others is a new skill, and it exercises parts of a person that are different than they might have learned before.

Moving to the Director level – managing managers – is *really* hard.  It requires a whole new set of leadership muscles in order to get results.  I think of it in old C programming terms: it’s pointers to pointers thinking.  You are not working directly with the folks actually doing the work, but rather with an indirect entity: their manager.  If you fall back on your newly acquired manager skills you cut off the line manager and you suddenly *lose* the line manager.  That’s going to undercut their authority and you’ll end up confusing the whole staff – and that will affect the productivity and efficiency over the long term.  Worse, you’ll end up losing the manager skill development in the manager you cut off.  And you’ll need that to scale.

I’ll write more later about the transitions needed to go from the Director level to the Functional Manager level.  It’s a whole new set of skills and approach to solving problems.  In the meantime, the excellent book I got all this learning from is available from Amazon.  I highly recommend it for anyone interested in really mastering the skills needed to become a better manager – and in building an organization around you that reinforces you as well as grooming your replacement.

After all, you want to move up, right?  That’s a lot easier to do if the organization has qualified folks in place to take your spot.  Dedication to this approach requires that you not be afraid of growing qualified staff around you. If you are afraid that they might overshadow you and take your job then you probably are not a good candidate for real leadership anyway.