I spent years in a toxic culture trying to "influence it". I managed to inspire my team but it was just an outlier island in a corporate ocean I couldn't change. Ultimately the stress and exhaustion resulted in medical depression and I needed to leave for health reasons.
Good question. For context, I am a high performer in a low performing team with a lower performing manager. The company has rated me as “highest talent” which only one other person on our 50+ department received. To answer your question, I tried what you suggest: influence.
Turns out, people are often intimidated in talent when they have no desire to replicate it - this is especially true for management. Even if I was able to influence others, there’s nobody left to influence me.
Not to mention, it’s makes your workload significantly more when you’re the only one researching things, asking question, improving things, etc.
So, in short, yes you can be talented and elect to quit rather than influence.
We spend so much time screening engineers, going through code tests, assessments, live code interviews, whiteboard interviews, system design interviews etc.
Yet, we don't have the same vetting standards for managers, at least from what I've seen. There is no "Cracking The Engineering Manager Interview" book, for example. The gauntlet isn't there the same way. There also seems to be far more hesitation to look at management as an issue for negative outcomes vs how its ascribed to engineers[0] much more quickly, yet a manager can make or break an entire team - even turning good engineers into bad ones.
While I suspect that management looks out for management on this, you'd think a broader trend among the community would raise awareness around this, but many well meaning engineers continue to look only at their peers, unless management is particularly ineffective or egregious, rather than evaluating possible management and team practices
[0]: which is the reason given for why engineers have these arduous interviewing requirements, to weed out any possible "under-performers"
Pretty rare to get an honest feel for upper management when interviewing or assessing a potential employer. It's only once you're inside, and usually after a few months (sometimes longer) that you get a true feel.
Yes - if someone wants you to fix their broken process or company they can explicitly ask you to and pay you suitably for it, otherwise there are plenty of other places for high performers to choose to spend their valuable time.
Knowing whether a culture / management team can be influenced is a skill of it's own.
I'd think that high performers would develop that skill fairly quickly. If they're job hoping they'll learn to sniff out the signals.
For example: if they say they encourage change for the better, but continually overload those who may be able to influence the changes with day to day work, then those managers / that culture will be resistant / allergic to influence.
If Sprint X is dedicated to learning and improvement but always seems to be full of last minute bug fixes, testing, overflow work, then even if influence is on their menu, they ain't got the ingredients to cook it up.
> Are you really high performance if you can assess the situation but elect to quit instead of influence it?
So - high performance aside, this is the route I took in my last company. I felt the engineering team was good - great, even - but the engineering manager left and I moved into that post because I felt that an external hire might risk the team's currently effectiveness. It was a big change though; IC to 25-person engineering team across multiple products, and in a regulated environment. It's not done lightly, and given people can (or could) get paid loads for doing IC work, moving is also a good choice.
You really think The New Guy can change an entire corporate culture through sheer force of will? You are literally the lowest person on the totem pole. You have ZERO social status, ZERO influence. If the rest of the org/company is culturally aligned around seriously bad practices, you are going to sound like an crazy person, even if you are the only sane one in the room. You are simultaneously Sisyphus and Cassandra.
well....yea you can be high performance and _just_ focus on what you're interested in, but agree - pushing yourself to be leadership without being a supervisor to _build_ 'the high performing culture that can deliver something great' is really special