<story><title>Why Fair Bosses Fall Behind</title><url>http://hbr.org/2011/07/why-fair-bosses-fall-behind/ar/1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>j_baker</author><text>The thing about #1 is that they probably &lt;i&gt;aren&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; trying to help the company succeed.  It&apos;s more likely that they&apos;re trying to take the company for a ride to meet their own ends.  Any success they have is only going to be in the short term and only in the interests of posturing.  Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can get away with this because their companies by and large &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; theirs.&lt;p&gt;While #2 isn&apos;t a very effective leader, their heart is usually at least in the right place.  Plus, given the right people, it&apos;s amazing what you can get accomplished by simply leaving them alone and letting them do their job.&lt;p&gt;But then again, I&apos;m of the opinion that we focus too much on the leadership and not enough on the people.  Maybe I&apos;m just naive. Great leaders are like surfers riding a big wave.  It&apos;s easy to get distracted by the surfer and forget that the wave is really the important part.</text></item><item><author>axiom</author><text>I&apos;ve had 3 kinds of bosses:&lt;p&gt;1. Hardass who pushes everyone to the limit, tends to micro-manage, frequently overrules consensus with his own views.&lt;p&gt;2. Total pushover who agrees with everything. Constantly seeks consensus and rule by democracy, never pushes anyone and just tries to be everyone&apos;s friend.&lt;p&gt;3. Somewhere in between the two above. Seeks consensus and lets people make mistakes in order to help them learn. Sometimes overrules people in order to make sure things don&apos;t get too far off track. Doesn&apos;t try to be people&apos;s friend, but is sensitive to people&apos;s needs and gives a reasonable amount of leeway.&lt;p&gt;The somewhat counter-intuitive thing is that #2 is by far and away the worst kind of boss to have. It&apos;s fun for about a month, and then everything falls apart. The teams never seems to get anything done. All the best people eventually leave because there is never any consequence to incompetence and so tons of people just default to being lazy (think: working in government.)&lt;p&gt;Although #1 is tough and often unpleasant, he tends to get things done (albeit with higher turnover and more grumbling) and most often at least ensures that the company succeeds (think guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who are notorious for being insanely demanding and insensitive.)&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;insanely&lt;/i&gt; hard to hit the right balance between #1 and #2. Really it&apos;s damn near impossible and requires some kind of magic innate talent to be able to inspire and push people to work hard without crushing their spirits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jerf</author><text>&quot;Great leaders are like surfers riding a big wave. It&apos;s easy to get distracted by the surfer and forget that the wave is really the important part.&quot;&lt;p&gt;I used to think that. I&apos;ve recanted. I&apos;m still not 100% sure why leaders are so important, but the evidence I&apos;ve personally seen over the years is pretty clear.&lt;p&gt;My best guesses are some combination of:&lt;p&gt;1. It is true that the performance of a team is given an upper bound by both the quality of the team and the quality of the leadership, but people tend to badly underestimate how much quality and talent there is in the world. The average person is above average in some significant way. I would agree world-class results require a world-class team, but I think in general, for a given &quot;random&quot; [1] selection of team and task, it&apos;s a rare time when the core problem is a true lack of talent. Don&apos;t get me wrong, I&apos;m sure it happens, but I&apos;ve never personally witnessed it in 15 years. Whereas, I&apos;ve personally witnessed many teams failing to live up to their obvious potential because of bad leadership. So, in a sort of mathematical sense it is true that neither leadership nor team talent is more important, in practice, leadership is the thing for which demand is much higher than supply, not team talent.&lt;p&gt;2. It is true the team is who provides the day-to-day progress on a problem, but it&apos;s generally the leadership making a lot of little decisions that add up over time; little words that affect morale, small key decisions that affect efficiency by a few percent, that little bit of vision-from-experience that avoids blowing a few days on a bad path, the careful selection of problems to personally take on. It adds up to a lot, and especially when the leadership is blowing these little calls consistently, no team is good enough to undo the damage... especially when the leadership actively prevents it!&lt;p&gt;I do agree that it&apos;s important not to fetishize leadership and never to forget the team gets much credit too, but over the years my estimation of the importance of true leadership has been going consistently up, not down.&lt;p&gt;[1]: By &quot;random&quot; I don&apos;t literally mean five people uniformly randomly chosen from everybody on planet Earth, but something more like, go out to a random company and get a random team working on some problem, and it is unlikely that the most pressing problem the team has is a raw lack of talent to complete the assigned task. Again, totally non-zero of course.</text></comment>
<story><title>Why Fair Bosses Fall Behind</title><url>http://hbr.org/2011/07/why-fair-bosses-fall-behind/ar/1</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>j_baker</author><text>The thing about #1 is that they probably &lt;i&gt;aren&apos;t&lt;/i&gt; trying to help the company succeed.  It&apos;s more likely that they&apos;re trying to take the company for a ride to meet their own ends.  Any success they have is only going to be in the short term and only in the interests of posturing.  Steve Jobs and Bill Gates can get away with this because their companies by and large &lt;i&gt;are&lt;/i&gt; theirs.&lt;p&gt;While #2 isn&apos;t a very effective leader, their heart is usually at least in the right place.  Plus, given the right people, it&apos;s amazing what you can get accomplished by simply leaving them alone and letting them do their job.&lt;p&gt;But then again, I&apos;m of the opinion that we focus too much on the leadership and not enough on the people.  Maybe I&apos;m just naive. Great leaders are like surfers riding a big wave.  It&apos;s easy to get distracted by the surfer and forget that the wave is really the important part.</text></item><item><author>axiom</author><text>I&apos;ve had 3 kinds of bosses:&lt;p&gt;1. Hardass who pushes everyone to the limit, tends to micro-manage, frequently overrules consensus with his own views.&lt;p&gt;2. Total pushover who agrees with everything. Constantly seeks consensus and rule by democracy, never pushes anyone and just tries to be everyone&apos;s friend.&lt;p&gt;3. Somewhere in between the two above. Seeks consensus and lets people make mistakes in order to help them learn. Sometimes overrules people in order to make sure things don&apos;t get too far off track. Doesn&apos;t try to be people&apos;s friend, but is sensitive to people&apos;s needs and gives a reasonable amount of leeway.&lt;p&gt;The somewhat counter-intuitive thing is that #2 is by far and away the worst kind of boss to have. It&apos;s fun for about a month, and then everything falls apart. The teams never seems to get anything done. All the best people eventually leave because there is never any consequence to incompetence and so tons of people just default to being lazy (think: working in government.)&lt;p&gt;Although #1 is tough and often unpleasant, he tends to get things done (albeit with higher turnover and more grumbling) and most often at least ensures that the company succeeds (think guys like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, who are notorious for being insanely demanding and insensitive.)&lt;p&gt;Lastly, it&apos;s &lt;i&gt;insanely&lt;/i&gt; hard to hit the right balance between #1 and #2. Really it&apos;s damn near impossible and requires some kind of magic innate talent to be able to inspire and push people to work hard without crushing their spirits.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>larsberg</author><text>&amp;#62; their heart is usually at least in the right place&lt;p&gt;I&apos;ve normally seen that people in role #2 are just not prepared for the hard conversations that come with being a manager. Sometimes, you have to call people out on poor or below-potential performance. If you do, I&apos;ve found that most people will either pick up the pace or quit. If you don&apos;t, well... things get bad.&lt;p&gt;The unfortunate chaps in role #2 leave poor performers around to poison the team (most coworkers slack off when they see somebody else slacking, particularly if you have the corporate-standard opaque compensation schemes), avoiding dealing with negative actions until either somebody else comes around and fixes it or the team is killed. I was in this situation once, where a string of #2s had been managing a decently-sized development team I was merging with and it took several months for me to sort through the people, clean house, and build a functional team again.&lt;p&gt;You know the worst part? There were a few fantastic people who had utterly languished due to being surrounded by mediocrity. On the other hand, that was also the &lt;i&gt;best&lt;/i&gt; part, because the &quot;let&apos;s talk about how we&apos;re going to get you working on bigger and better things&quot; talk is much more enjoyable than the, &quot;concretely, we expect you to be doing X, Y, and Z at your level, none of which you are&quot; talk.&lt;p&gt;Type #2 managers leave a trail of broken teams and wasted potential in their wake. I respect few things as well as working for an upper-manager who can pick up on that behavior and nip it in the bud. At least, I think I would, if I&apos;d ever seen it :-)</text></comment>