Leaders should engage in the higher level requirements, risks, and concepts, not on details.
- Leaders should engage in the higher level requirements, risks, and concepts, not on details.
- All of the details emerge in higher pace layers built on top of those lower pace layers of concepts, requirements, etc.
- When a leader dives into a detail, the likelihood the right solution is discovered is orders of magnitude less likely.
- The leader will likely be busy and have limited time.
- The expert with experience in the details will likely have a calibrated gut that is extremely expensive to serialize into words.
- As the expert struggles to distill a succinct summary, the leader will think the expert isn't hearing them.
- The expert will think the leader is out over their skis in the details and lose trust in their technical details.
- The leader outranks the expert and will win, all else equal.
- This makes the expert existentially nervous, and puts them more into a defensive crouch.
- As the expert gets more defensive and closed, the leader thinks less of them, and is more incentivized to make a decision by fiat… that will likely be the wrong one.
- This is one of the reasons why micromanaging is bad.
- Diving into details that the leader can't know in sufficient depth, with a massive power imbalance.
- The leader is a giant; each twitch reverberates through the org, causing whiplash at the edges.
- The leader should speak softly at the more conceptual / requirements layer.
- My worst manager (by far) got into this mode.
- I had come up with an elegant and clever solution to the problem at hand, navigating dimensions he didn't even realize existed.
- He pressured me to come up with a different solution that fit a sketch he had created.
- I couldn't see how to steelman that solution; it seemed to fundamentally miss out on key dimensions and not be viable.
- I am unstoppable when I see a viable solution to a complex problem, but can't motivate myself to execute on a plan I know for sure will not work.
- As he pressed harder I got more fearful and got into a deeper defensive crouch.
- That defensive crouch made me less likely to be open to what he was saying.
- In retrospect, he saw an additional dimension in the internal politics above us that changed the calculus; his sketch wasn't right but had I known the additional high-level constraint I could have come up with an improved plan that would satisfy that constraint, too.
- As I crouched, he got more frustrated that I wasn't absorbing the (implied) high-level constraint he saw but had not communicated.
- What he should have done is focused not on the details of a plan to force upon me, but on better clarifying the constraint.
- I like to think that if that happened again my response would not be to hunker down and get fearful and defensive but instead push to clarify the higher-level constraint he was seeing that I didn't yet understand.
- It's on the leads to clearly extract and communicate the high-level constraint.
- You can't blame the team if they execute in a way that violates the constraints you never bothered to unpack for them.