"I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer.
Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals.
In that case, it's *your duty* as the leader to play the dictator and impose order. "If you want to make everyone happy, don't be a leader. Sell ice-cream", Steve Jobs reportedly once said.
If it happens though, don't forget to re-establish trust with your team members and make sure they understand the circumstances that led you to act in that way.
This is a lesson I learned the hard way. When I was a first time manager I had the naive idea that I was going to build consensus for everything and get everyone to come to an agreement naturally.
It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years ago. I wasted too much time letting them stonewall everything while thinking we’d eventually reach a consensus.
Then at some point you realize you have to put your foot down and pick a direction after they’ve had a chance to state their position.
What are the odds that the older know-it-all engineer actually knows better than you? I would say they're pretty good.
That's not to say that consensus always works. But it does mean the group needs to understand the objections and make decisions the team can live with. The most toxic of engineering situations is the manager making decisions without understanding consequences and without taking responsibility for the outcomes.
Sometimes there is time pressure or difficult people but the base assumption should be that people actually want to make the right decision, being difficult generally makes your life harder. Who would be responsible for executing on the decision and who would be responsible for the outcome? What are the consequences of strong arming the team into solutions they don't agree with?
You could learn from consent based decision making, a hallmark of sociocratic worker coops that is underrated and can be applied elsewhere.
Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences.
You can build consensus around the decision making process and build a culture where the outcome of that process is widely accepted. As long as people have the time and pathways to make their case and input, and understand there will be some verdict that may or may not align completely with their opinion. Then its just the decision makers duty to synthesize things in good faith but probably has bought themselves some leeway.
The know it all engs were probably right though and you just added the self imposed productivity, performance, and TCO tax that everyone else adds by default
It took a while to emerge but a couple years into my F50 gig we ran into a situation where we had a bus number if 3 in a domain, we all knew that solution A sounds good on paper but is a shitshow in practice, but the rest of the team was still enamored of it and our reasoned explanations just weren’t being persuasive enough.
The popular vote was going to load us up with little emergencies that were going to slow several divisions down and we ended up talking to the bosses and ignoring the vote.
In trying to smooth this over, I realized that the problem is that the people who would be dealing with the consequences of a decision wanted solution C and everyone else wanted solution A. And I think it’s something worth remembering for future indecisions, that the people with skin in the game need to be able to veto a popular vote. If you don’t want the project to lose momentum.
Generally on a large project you will have a bunch of leads all dealing with different domains, and they will reach quorum on major architectural decisions, particularly cross cutting concerns and interfaces between Conway’s Law modularizations. The boss only needs to break ties when a consensus does not emerge. And I mean NEEDS. Second worst boss I ever had refused to break ties and we had an even number of leads, so it happened half a dozen times. We wasted hours every month venting to each other about what we hated about him and one of the regular attendees just about wanted to murder him for that, and have us help him hide the body.
Steve Jobs was also known to lock teams in a room until they arrived at a common vision. It's a difficult task, to align everyone, but in my limited experience not doing it resulted in extremely inefficient execution. What's more, people feel belittled and rejected if you disregard their viewpoints. Sometimes you need to get things done regardless of what people feel or think, but you can't sustain that for a long time.
Very good point. There’s a big difference between “everyone gets heard” and “everyone gets a veto.”
Breaking ties is part of the leader’s job.
Of course if every issue requires the leader to break the tie, then perhaps there’s either a management issue, and incentive issue, or people don’t understand the strategy.
In my opinion this advice is quite fatuous, because it skips over the actual difficult bit, which is figuring out what to do when you have a problem that can't simply be decided by the person directly responsible for the the work, either due to complexity/scale of the problem, or because that person is not capable of making the decision.
Make sure people understand why you're making the tradeoff you're making, and also make sure they know you're taking the fire for it if you were wrong and they were right, not them.
I like that a lot. My favourite leaders haven't sought out my opinions much, but they made their intentions and basis clear. If I wanted to change something in their plan, I could do the work of making an argument from their basis. Most people aren't going to do the work of actually making an argument, so they get brushed aside. The few people who do bother to make an argument are the ones with a lot of conviction and motivation toovercome the new obstacles.
100%. I worked for a brilliant lead, he had a team of excellent engineers. But he was stuck on the socratic method, determined to lead by asking thoughtful questions and letting us sort it out. Important discussions would go in circles a lot, frustratingly so. Sometimes you have to be the decision maker.
“If you want to make everyone happy, don't be a leader.”
This is the most important line. You shouldnt be afraid to hurt some peoples feelings (though not intentionally and as kindly as you can of course). Absolutely nothing will get done if you want everyone to be happy
> "I'm the lead, and we are going to do it this way": avoid it for as long as you can, but do NOT hesitate to use it when it's the appropriate answer.
Taking this approach with skilled people paid to think can easily be interpreted as being dictatorial and often stifles future contributions.
> Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice.
This implies a rigid hierarchical structure, one lacking collaboration. Again, this approach might work with assembly line workers but won't fly more than once or twice with people paid to solve problems.
> In that case, it's your duty as the leader to play the dictator and impose order.
And it will be soon your duty to find people to backfill those who have better opportunities to pursue.
> If it happens though, don't forget to re-establish trust with your team members and make sure they understand the circumstances that led you to act in that way.
There is no "re-establishing trust with your team" when this form of "leadership" is employed. Once trust is broken, the only employees who remain are those with no better options.
I've worked with engineers like this, who have a massive god-complex. If you think your job is to second guess your manager's knowledge and experience, why are you working under them? You should be working as a manager somewhere else. You are not a peer, you're part of a team reporting into a person that company has entrusted to lead the team.
Yes, and there is one trick I’ve learned instead of explicitly pulling the ‘I’m the lead’ card (which is valid, but not always the best move).
Present the decision in terms of its consequences — consequences that fall on you as the leader, not on others. You want to make clear that the accountability for the outcome rest with you and that others are "safe".
What usually happens when I do this is that the team defers to me to make the decision cause they recognize my point.
That way, you preserve alignment and authority without eroding trust, because the team sees it’s not about wielding power, but about owning the consequences no one else should or can carry.
Humans sometimes yearn for the leader to put their foot down.
The quiet ones may want the yapping voices silenced so progress can be made.
And sometimes the yapping ones get out ahead of their own skis and don't know a graceful way to back down so they're happyish to be closed down, even if they're primed to come back with an "I told you so" if the leader gets it wrong.
In my most recent role I only pulled rank twice in more than 3 years. Both times, reluctantly and deliberately. I agree you want to build a LOT of trust and legitimacy before you do this and you can still build concensus once you've dictated a direction or path. Lead, don't micro-manage.
Steve Jobs was an awful human being and people like him would say anything to justify their toxic behaviour. Quoting gim was the worst possible choice. You can be a leader and a decent human being. For example Gabe Newell, to name just one.
I have my claim to a minute expertise in this domain. Was assigned to lead an initiative for something that was not achieved in 3 prior attempts. I was given the 6 strongest, most genius engineers from 6 different teams. Everyone, including me, was quite opinionated and with a great explanation for their opinion. It was not an explicit credo, but I made it my position to leverage the mirror of the saying “don’t interrupt your enemy when they make a mistake”. For us it would be, “don’t interrupt your friend when they make something great” with the corollary “do something else, and make it great”. There were other important parts to that like finding the organic separation of duties and teasing or nudging directions, accepting suboptimal valleys in places, etc. But it worked, and I am as proud as I can be for being lucky. Rooms of geniuses are challenging but also such a great opportunity to learn from each other and learn how to collectively optimise the boundaries to focus on disagreement only where it makes sense.
I believe what you describe is what I have learned to be known as Servant Leadership[0]. I could be totally wrong in my interpretation of your experience and admittingly may be projecting a leadership approach I quite fancy.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
EDIT:
Removed unnecessary qualification in the last sentence.
Kind of, but with a different motivation at inception at least. In a perverse bike shedding variation, in a room of experts, disagreement will tend to root in bringing every matter under the lense of individual expertise. No one wins there, as before addressing the problem, the disagreements tend to focus on context. There is a certain art in giving ownership on the subject matter expertise, while drawing the lines on the overlaps, where argumentation is focused and productive rather than a tug of war to pull the subject in a comfort zone.
First build the thing that works, and only if it's really necessary, split it up in separate (networked) parts. You won't have to deal with unreliable network communication, or coordinate on a breaking API change with several teams when a simple search/replace on several function definitions and calls suffices.
Funnily enough, microservices. In the macro economy you don't have to have such strict coordination with Microsoft, or OpenAI, or Google, or whomever you interface with. You just figure out how to make your solution work within the confines of the service they give you. Like it or not.
Microservices is exactly the same concept except in the micro economy of a single organization. Each team is like Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, etc. You don't coordinate with them, you deal with what they give you. Like it or not.
I expect the earlier statement confused microservices with a multi-process application.
There's both less and more to making decisions than ensuring they get made.
First: get others to actually decide. Jean-Louis Gassee at Apple (componentized mac's in the late 1980's) said that when dueling managers brought him a decision to make, he would always come up with a decision both of them hated, so they would scurry away and work together with an alternative they could live with.
Second: be sure to get everyone really on board - you first. This is really hard for managers who are following the wind. Law students are often careful and analytical, hedging every evaluation, but lawyers have to be assertive. Although they understand the precariousness of the legal position, it only works if you convince everyone (on your side and theirs) that this is how it will be. That transition is typically what weeds out new attorneys, and distinguishes partners from associates.
(Before you object to the attorney analogy: it's nice when you achieve collegial scientific consensus, but it can be a luxury. Then you have to figure out how to compel people do want they don't want to do, without straining authority. Usually it works to focus on picking a customer, or a definite time for results to appear; a more concrete objective/goal explains the decision and focuses follow-through.)
In my experience, you don't really want to say "I'm the lead" (it can come across insecure), but you do need to be able to confidently say "Ok, here's what we're going to do" or "Here's what I'd like you to do" once you've gathered all the relevant information and come to a decision.
I love the phrase "It's because that's why". For anyone interested in this kind of subject I've benefited a lot from Vanessa Van Edwards books which essentially boil down to signalling warmth and competence in the right ways for a given context. Of course, it's a giant field and no one person has all the answers, but for me it's yielded some wins.
I like to use something along the lines of "anyone in this room is capable of handling the minutia satisfactorily, there is no need to waste time on the details".
What is a lead developer in this context? An engineering manager? Is it like an architect (staff engineer/whatever)? An engineer who is in charge of a specific project?
There are different dynamics at play in each role and reading the guy's bio I'm getting the sense that he is a freelancer? or has a consulting company? which would have a whole different dynamic.
The lead developer is the person assigned to the lead developer role. I know it's cheeky but it really could be anyone. It's usually at least a senior-level individual contributor (IC). It's not uncommon for it to be a manager (that hopefully used to be an IC).
The lead's authority also tends to be varied in scope. They could be the lead of the feature, project, repo, team, initiative, or org. Depending on the context, their hierarchy might not always be the same.
So really, a lead is someone that is in or uses leadership within their scope and with others in the same position. Alternatively referred to as "politics".
In this context, they're handing the politics of development issues with the goal of getting features done.
In the aerospace world, it's called a "systems engineer."
The lead:
1: Understands the whole system, but not necessarily every detail.
2: Plans the whole project.
Edit:
Sometimes in the software world, the title is "architect."
This is rarely the "manager," except in organizations that have a hard-on for hierarchy and artificial promotion for "career advancement." Managers are usually concerned with people, schedules, and resources; but don't go very deep into technical issues.
That being said, the lead/manager may fill in for each other when one is on vacation, sick, quits, ect.
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Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice. But sometimes teams can get caught in an endless futile discussion over details that don't matter for the stated goals.
In that case, it's *your duty* as the leader to play the dictator and impose order. "If you want to make everyone happy, don't be a leader. Sell ice-cream", Steve Jobs reportedly once said.
If it happens though, don't forget to re-establish trust with your team members and make sure they understand the circumstances that led you to act in that way.
It worked at first with a good team. Then later I inherited a fragment of another team with some older know-it-all engineers who thought everything modern was garbage and we should be doing everything like they did 25 years ago. I wasted too much time letting them stonewall everything while thinking we’d eventually reach a consensus.
Then at some point you realize you have to put your foot down and pick a direction after they’ve had a chance to state their position.
That's not to say that consensus always works. But it does mean the group needs to understand the objections and make decisions the team can live with. The most toxic of engineering situations is the manager making decisions without understanding consequences and without taking responsibility for the outcomes.
Sometimes there is time pressure or difficult people but the base assumption should be that people actually want to make the right decision, being difficult generally makes your life harder. Who would be responsible for executing on the decision and who would be responsible for the outcome? What are the consequences of strong arming the team into solutions they don't agree with?
Hierarchy and coercion isn't necessary for avoiding decision paralysis in organizations. It appears to be the practical route but has all sorts of harmful and counterproductive consequences.
https://www.sociocracyforall.org/consent-decision-making/
The popular vote was going to load us up with little emergencies that were going to slow several divisions down and we ended up talking to the bosses and ignoring the vote.
In trying to smooth this over, I realized that the problem is that the people who would be dealing with the consequences of a decision wanted solution C and everyone else wanted solution A. And I think it’s something worth remembering for future indecisions, that the people with skin in the game need to be able to veto a popular vote. If you don’t want the project to lose momentum.
Generally on a large project you will have a bunch of leads all dealing with different domains, and they will reach quorum on major architectural decisions, particularly cross cutting concerns and interfaces between Conway’s Law modularizations. The boss only needs to break ties when a consensus does not emerge. And I mean NEEDS. Second worst boss I ever had refused to break ties and we had an even number of leads, so it happened half a dozen times. We wasted hours every month venting to each other about what we hated about him and one of the regular attendees just about wanted to murder him for that, and have us help him hide the body.
Breaking ties is part of the leader’s job.
Of course if every issue requires the leader to break the tie, then perhaps there’s either a management issue, and incentive issue, or people don’t understand the strategy.
Your job as a leader isn't necessarily to make the decision, just to be sure that the decision was made.
This is the most important line. You shouldnt be afraid to hurt some peoples feelings (though not intentionally and as kindly as you can of course). Absolutely nothing will get done if you want everyone to be happy
Taking this approach with skilled people paid to think can easily be interpreted as being dictatorial and often stifles future contributions.
> Take the time to listen to everyone and to form an educated decision. Explain your conclusion once, twice and even thrice.
This implies a rigid hierarchical structure, one lacking collaboration. Again, this approach might work with assembly line workers but won't fly more than once or twice with people paid to solve problems.
> In that case, it's your duty as the leader to play the dictator and impose order.
And it will be soon your duty to find people to backfill those who have better opportunities to pursue.
> If it happens though, don't forget to re-establish trust with your team members and make sure they understand the circumstances that led you to act in that way.
There is no "re-establishing trust with your team" when this form of "leadership" is employed. Once trust is broken, the only employees who remain are those with no better options.
"Okay. Let me know when you are done with that."
Present the decision in terms of its consequences — consequences that fall on you as the leader, not on others. You want to make clear that the accountability for the outcome rest with you and that others are "safe".
What usually happens when I do this is that the team defers to me to make the decision cause they recognize my point.
That way, you preserve alignment and authority without eroding trust, because the team sees it’s not about wielding power, but about owning the consequences no one else should or can carry.
The quiet ones may want the yapping voices silenced so progress can be made.
And sometimes the yapping ones get out ahead of their own skis and don't know a graceful way to back down so they're happyish to be closed down, even if they're primed to come back with an "I told you so" if the leader gets it wrong.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
EDIT:
Removed unnecessary qualification in the last sentence.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
The software examples are dated, but the wetware observations and advice stands.
https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Technical-Leader-Gerald-Wein...
God I hate modern web sometimes
Seems more a system design failure to me.
First build the thing that works, and only if it's really necessary, split it up in separate (networked) parts. You won't have to deal with unreliable network communication, or coordinate on a breaking API change with several teams when a simple search/replace on several function definitions and calls suffices.
Microservices is exactly the same concept except in the micro economy of a single organization. Each team is like Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, etc. You don't coordinate with them, you deal with what they give you. Like it or not.
I expect the earlier statement confused microservices with a multi-process application.
Deleted Comment
First: get others to actually decide. Jean-Louis Gassee at Apple (componentized mac's in the late 1980's) said that when dueling managers brought him a decision to make, he would always come up with a decision both of them hated, so they would scurry away and work together with an alternative they could live with.
Second: be sure to get everyone really on board - you first. This is really hard for managers who are following the wind. Law students are often careful and analytical, hedging every evaluation, but lawyers have to be assertive. Although they understand the precariousness of the legal position, it only works if you convince everyone (on your side and theirs) that this is how it will be. That transition is typically what weeds out new attorneys, and distinguishes partners from associates.
(Before you object to the attorney analogy: it's nice when you achieve collegial scientific consensus, but it can be a luxury. Then you have to figure out how to compel people do want they don't want to do, without straining authority. Usually it works to focus on picking a customer, or a definite time for results to appear; a more concrete objective/goal explains the decision and focuses follow-through.)
There are different dynamics at play in each role and reading the guy's bio I'm getting the sense that he is a freelancer? or has a consulting company? which would have a whole different dynamic.
The lead's authority also tends to be varied in scope. They could be the lead of the feature, project, repo, team, initiative, or org. Depending on the context, their hierarchy might not always be the same.
So really, a lead is someone that is in or uses leadership within their scope and with others in the same position. Alternatively referred to as "politics".
In this context, they're handing the politics of development issues with the goal of getting features done.
The lead:
1: Understands the whole system, but not necessarily every detail.
2: Plans the whole project.
Edit:
Sometimes in the software world, the title is "architect."
This is rarely the "manager," except in organizations that have a hard-on for hierarchy and artificial promotion for "career advancement." Managers are usually concerned with people, schedules, and resources; but don't go very deep into technical issues.
That being said, the lead/manager may fill in for each other when one is on vacation, sick, quits, ect.