When the tech lead blames the code, look for the person missing from the sentence.
A project slips, and the technical lead writes the post-mortem: “We couldn’t get the program working.” That is easier to write than the other true sentence: “I wasn’t skilled enough to help Jack become better.” Why does the first come so naturally to someone just promoted for being good at programs?
Gerald Weinberg’s answer is that the new leader still treats the task as the real thing and the people as the medium it passes through. He reverses that: If you are a leader, then the people are your work. There is no other work worth doing.
The task is made of people
The task/people split, Weinberg argues, is the second greatest obstacle to motivation because it pretends that tasks are as real as people, rather than deriving from people. When we realize we cannot do everything for others, we are ashamed, and pretending the work is separate from the people turns that interpersonal failure into a mechanical one. So the post-mortem blames the program.
The same split shapes how a leader thinks about power. The threat/reward leader locates power in the role and invokes authority when things get tough. Weinberg’s premise is different: Power is not a possession but a relationship. In his organic, or seed, model, The job of a leader is getting people in touch with their own inner harmony. That is Rogers’ conditions for growth applied to a team.
Helping Jack
Helping is harder than it looks, because almost every offer to help is intended to do something for the helper, and Attempts to help are often interpreted as attempts to interfere. So the leader checks whether Jack wants help. And before deciding Jack is the problem, the leader has to accept this: Everyone is always doing the best they can. If you don’t think they are, you don’t understand the circumstances. The only way to learn to be helpful is by learning to be helped. A leader who has never let anyone help them has little idea what Jack is going through.
When helping fails, the tempting move is to stop dealing with Jack and write procedures instead. The leader who organizes through written procedures soon loses touch with the people.
Why experts find this hard
The people promoted into technical leadership were usually the best at avoiding errors, and school trained them for it. School taught Weinberg a litany of wicked things: error, theft, and working together — the very things that generate ideas. Leadership then puts every action on display. If you can’t tolerate being a public fool, you’re not going to succeed in a role where all your actions are studied by everyone else. Since you can’t reliably know your effect on people, the best strategy is to accept that you’ll sometimes be a laughing stock.
Even a leader who learns all this can stall. The typical feeling in the middle of a plateau is smug satisfaction. But if you never meet problems you can’t solve or people you can’t reach, More likely than being fully developed, it means someone is protecting you from growth. Perhaps it’s you.
Illusions about leadership can be devastating, but illusions about yourself are the worst form of addiction. A book can expose the first kind; only you can dissolve the second. The first test is whether you can write Jack’s name into the post-mortem, because Becoming a leader means shifting the focus from your ideas to the ideas of other people.
References:
- Gerald M. Weinberg, Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach