| I disagree. There are many leadership principles which are contradictory either in part or in whole (e.g. Dive Deep vs. Bias for Action; Insist on the Highest Standards vs. Invent and Simplify). You can squint and see how these would be the same, but often they're just used as arrows in a quiver to knock someone down and/or put someone on a PIP (performance improvement plan). Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized): A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action) B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards) Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it. I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter. |
I don't see them as arrows to knock people down. I see them rather as, well, principles to use when reasoning about a situation. Giving a name to a concept is a good way to reason about it and discuss it. They are used when reasoning about performance, it's true, but it's used across the board: when justifying a promotion, when praising a high-performer who excels within their level, when identifying areas of growth, as well as while discussing job performance with people who are doing less well.
Performance and leadership in a creative job like software engineering cannot be perfectly objective (it's not like an assembly line where you process N units per hour), but the LPs provide some objective concepts and terminology to apply while discussing performance; they break down performance into dimensions that can be discussed individually in the context of examples, which is an advantage over just vaguely discussing things at a high level. For example, "Bob found a creative way to pack more software onto existing servers without harming performance (Frugality)" or "Sally spent two hours on the phone helping our biggest customer (Customer Obsession)" or "After causing an outage, Joe wasn't able to identify anything he'd do differently next time. I'm concerned that he's not vocally self-critical." I'd much rather have a discussion of my performance or leadership in concrete terms like these, rather than vague ones.