[jrgoff]

I would add to this the importance of listening to be part of this approach. I used to work at a company with a couple thousand engineers. My team was 20 or so people at the time and our dev environment was constantly breaking. It was not unusual for me to spend more than a full day each week trying to get my dev environment working and unable to do any development on what I was supposed to be doing. And that was common across the whole team. We had 1 to 2 senior engineers working close to full time on improving the situation, communicating with the team who maintained the dev environment and finding workarounds for our requirements, but often in a week or two those workarounds would stop working as the devops team made more changes. To be fair, the devops team was actively working towards creating a new dev ecosystem and our team had some dev needs that were not needed for most (maybe any?) of the rest of engineering. So they kept breaking our workarounds, we would be told we shouldn't be doing things that way anyway so it wasn't their fault, but also there wasn't an officially supported way to do what we absolutely needed to do to do our work.

Eventually the situation got escalated up the chain and the director came to our site to look into the situation. I was hopeful that that would lead to some improvements but when he was introduced to the team and gave a little speech it basically boiled down to "back in my day engineers would get their hands dirty and figure things out, maybe as a company we've become too lazy and expect other teams to fix things for us" - i.e. "you guys need to stop being lazy and figure it out yourselves". We were pissed. Fortunately the management chain was able to get him to understand the situation and he assigned one of the main devops guys to work with us to make sure our needs were met going forward. He never even apologized to us, I think he just decided it would be better to disappear and let things settle (we worked in a satellite city and he was at the main office so this was the only time many of us had ever interacted with him).

[supertofu]

I can't understand why people don't apologize when they are wrong. It's not like people forget what you have said if you never admit your fault. Especially when you are a leader, admitting fault only makes people like you more.