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> Instead, I believe that great leaders have to be able to dig into the details, have an incredibly high bar for quality, and ultimately do great IC work themselves. Great managers have to manage the work - they should primarily be responsible for quality and speed of output. Managing people must be secondary to managing the product. If you are ever confused about founder-mode vs manager-mode, this is the one single insight that you need to internalize. Put in other words, the org needs leaders who drive from the front. Not managers who build empires and run performance reviews from the back. Driving from the front involves looking at external-facing data - customer happiness, features that land better, maintenance of services - things that make the customers life better - whether internal customer of external customer. They need to spend a lot of time collaborating with peer leaders, distant leaders, diagonal leaders, different departments regardless of anyone's position in the org chart. However, most large tech companies are filled with dogshit management that tries to micromanage number of commits, meetings, standups, Jira points, velocity, performance calibrations, stack ranking, PIPs - aka inward looking things that are mostly set up to catch their own people doing something. Also called politics - personal gain triumphs all. Even a 5th grader can tell you - practice makes perfect. And if your leaders are practicing inward politics as opposed to outward exploration and collaboration, you are getting exactly what they are practicing - inward politics. |