| > I burnt out, now I delegate lots of crap work and it works better for me and I think the team as well as they get a wider perspective. I think this is an underrated (but very accurate) opinion. While I'm not the founder of a company, I do have the tendency to shield my team from much of the insanity I deal with on a daily basis. I've made active, conscious efforts to stop doing this. When you shield your team from the harder, more hectic parts of the job, several things happen: (1) You burn out. A burned out leader is not an effective one. You're not doing your team any favors by forcing yourself into an impossible position. (2) Your team won't understand the pressures that are driving the business. Having a nice, relaxed work-week is great, but employees should at least be aware of high-pressure situations in the business. (3) Your team will get bored. Great teams like to work on challenging issues, and high-impact engineers like to work on high-impact problems. They want to grow. Exposing people to issues outside of their direct control and comfort zones will actually help make them more satisfied at work, even if it does come with a little added stress. These are issues that I've been working on, personally, for years. The gut reaction of "protecting" teams is often times not the best one for anyone involved. |
I've never experienced a manager who seemed really in tune with how I think one should treat people. They usually intend well, but effusive over the top praise makes me uncomfortable for several reasons;* the only thing worse than that is demanding contradictory or impossible things.
It seems to me that a leader needs to be a like a coach. I haven't even ever played team sports, but it seems intuitively obvious to me that you reward people by gradually trusting them more as they prove themselves, and continually stretching what is asked of them to find limits and what fits them best. And you shape everything around the good people you can find, rather than trying to get people who are plug and play for a pre-existing approach.
The hard part I think is that it is so easy to ask far less of someone than they are capable in one area, and more than they are capable of in another. Both can lead to demoralization or even disaster.
*If you're continually praising me, it starts to seem as though you had low expectations and you're not raising them fast enough. Or you think I'm easily manipulated.