[travelinmyblood]

Oh my, I’m conflicted about this post.

(Disclaimer - I’m CEO of a small company and also adore the Turn Your Ship Around book and partly base my leadership style on that book. )

I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.

Human beings are wired in a particular way; being physically present together in a room at least occasionally should have strong benefits, if enough other caveats are met.

So - I wonder if the baby is going out with the bath water?

Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly.

Maybe we could say that resources need to be managed and people need to be led, but the average manager/leader doesn’t understand the distinction, or perhaps doesn’t have any desire to.

One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.

And that manager is a superstar if their team members are able to regularly grow into new roles (or switch into a new role that is a better fit, as happened today.)

~ Edit ~

I just read the blog post that the author linked to, about Pivotal Software. We have a very similar philosophy. In the blog post he describes the hiring process has being designed to filter out assholes and that, for me, has to be one of the most successful parts of our approach, too.

https://www.simplermachines.com/mr-reciprocity/

[djur]

> I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if...

I can assure you that there is no leadership team competent enough that I would be "fine" with a mandatory four-hour all hands on Monday morning. Not even the bosses I have liked personally could make that worthwhile.

[hackerlight]

Unless there was exceptional reasons for it, it's a surefire way to make your best talent resentful. All these "company retreat" type things are concocted by HR-types justifying their own paycheck. It's anti-leadership.

[travelinmyblood]

I wouldn’t do it on a Monday morning, that’s for sure.

Having worked for a few companies that don’t have the ‘HR types justifying their own paycheck’.. it IS possible to find a positive environment. The one thing they’ve all had in common was a sub-100 head count.

[djur]

It's not about the environment, it's about spending 4 hours listening to executives talk. If there's that much important material to cover, it should be written down.

[travelinmyblood]

I have a roughly 50% win rate on this personally. (When talking about the companies I’ve worked for.)

Some of them horrible, some of them wonderful, some in the middle.

[sanitycheck]

A 4 hour lecture/seminar (it's not going to be a real meeting, is it) is just not ever a useful thing. Even if the information conveyed is somehow important and somehow can't be supplied as a document, everybody will be snoozing by hour 2 - not to mention resentful from minute 1.

A barely related anecdote to illustrate why some people mistrust management. Not entirely necessary but having typed it I might as well press the button:

The only time I've ever been pulled into a 4-hour all-hands meeting it turned out to be a covert way to fire a bunch of employees without giving them the chance to say goodbye to their colleagues.

One by one, people got summoned out of the room ("hey, there's a phone call for you", etc) and never returned. The rest sat listening to the "leaders" (including one fairly well known public figure) droning on about nothing. By the end many of us had figured out what was happening, and when we all returned to the office to find ~30% of the desks empty there was universal outrage.

Lots of other people left in the aftermath, and the exodus apparently continued after I went.

[andrewflnr]

> I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.

Disagree. Speaking for myself, even if I already liked my leadership, if they gave me a mandatory 4 hour meeting with that kind of language, I would wonder if they had been eaten and replaced by aliens. Clearly something changed, because that's a bad meeting, and if I was ok with them before it's because they don't do stuff like that.

[travelinmyblood]

Ok; my comment was missing a bit of nuance. I agree with you pretty much entirely.

The point I was making is that I can conceive of a world where ‘come to a meeting for 4 hours’ would be something that in some companies, people wouldn’t mind because they already have so much confidence in the leadership that they know it would be a good use of their time.

I know this wouldn’t be the case in most companies. I am trying to say that I can conceive of exceptions.

[CreepGin]

> Do I describe myself as a leader? Yes, I do; because the evidence of my life shows that to describe myself as anything else would be silly.

Are you quoting Dwight Schute?

[travelinmyblood]

I see you agree with the author’s premise

However, one of the few people who he admires in the post most definitely describes themselves as a leader.

The post would be less funny with the appropriate disclaimers (‘of course not all people who see themselves as a leader are like this’) so I think we can safely assume that he trusting in the intelligence of his readership to figure this out.

[ludicity]

For what it's worth, as I can see there have been some flak from the commenters here, I think we're probably on the same page. There are people who I do identify as leaders, and I probably wouldn't object to them calling themselves leaders... but I think the word has been so thoroughly captured that it's wise to use something else.

It's a bit like how there are some legitimate blockchain use cases (or so I've been told by a friend who works in the space) but you'd have to be nuts to identify yourself as a crypto-advocate with no further context.

>One last thought; I’ve seen it written that people join companies and leave managers and I agree with this wholeheartedly. For me, the simplest measure of whether a manager is a leader is the staff turnover on their team. That is one metric you simply cannot fake.

In the tech space, what do you make of high turnover? Do people get a pass if their staff average a 1.5 year tenure, or is this indicative of systemic issues?

Also, this would only be done by a true sociopath, but you can fake that number with sufficiently intense levels of psychological manipulation, enforced skill atrophy, and fear. Someone recently told me that they can't leave their organization before a contract expires because their CEO litigated very aggressively against the last person to do so, even though it was perfectly legal.

>I suspect that the author would be fine with the company meeting if he didn’t already have well formed (and it appears, justifiably formed) opinions about the competence of the company’s leadership.

Absolutely correct. I can imagine a useful four hour meeting, but it would be very rare. A lengthy face-to-face meeting would always be an annoyance, but they've made plenty of other mistakes and this is the cherry on top. I had hoped more people that didn't 100% agree would have been able to make that charitable inference, but I'm glad someone did.

EDIT: I apparently don't know how quotes work on HN, and don't have time to find out. Sorry!

[travelinmyblood]

Thanks for this. You remind me a lot of me when I was your age. Frustrated and without much power to do something about it. And with gradually forming ideas of what good leadership looks like .. we’re fans of the same people it appears.

In terms of high turnover, I’m not an engineer and have not managed an Eng team.

However, the companies I most admire tend to have a single digit % turnover annually.

Toyota is my favourite example but there are others - I don’t like Costco for other reasons, but they do seem to be another with a great culture.