[jamesgill]

It's not a framework, and it requires no diagram. It's just trusting and empowering people to do the job, then getting out of their way. People tend to rise to your level of trust.

I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works: https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/

[nilkn]

This approach is great for peacetime and for when the team is already reasonably functional and performing. The really hard leadership problems occur during wartime (the business is in crisis, or shrinking, or responding to a serious competitive threat, or must aggressively cut costs, or must integrate an acquisition, or...) or when the team you have is routinely underperforming at scale.

These two situations require different techniques. Applying peacetime techniques during wartime does not work: you'll rapidly accumulate debt from unsolved organizational problems, politics you've lost control of, competitive pressure you failed to respond to decisively enough, or an underperforming team you've failed to correct enough. Or all of the above.

But, similarly, applying wartime techniques during peacetime also does not work. You'll alienate your high-performing team and suffocate critical innovation that will grow the business.

Confusing the two situations is a major category error that managers often make. It often happens because they've only experienced one of the two categories before, they were successful previously, they don't fully appreciate the extent of the existence of the other category, and when they encounter it for the first time they rely too much on their prior experience and have slowed down their own learning too much (because of said prior success).

[tikhonj]

Wartime is exactly when centralized control breaks down the hardest, because conditions start changing incredibly fast and communication breaks down. There's a reason the phrase is "fog of war" and not "fog of peace"!

[nilkn]

In management, what it means is having to repeatedly make decisions that are in the best interest of the company, but not necessarily in the best interest of the people on your team. This could mean needing to fire people, conduct layoffs, merge teams together and remove redundancies, strip a manager of their direct reports or reduce their scope, replace a leader, drive a major re-org that changes people's jobs in ways they may not like, shut down an entire project or team that isn't succeeding even though it's very popular or well-liked in the organization, own a technical decision that hurts one or two teams but helps the overall organization enough to offset it, etc.

[IAmBroom]

Counterpoint: Name a great victory where top leadership mattered very little.

Or, for that matter, a massive upset where top leadership did not truly contribute significantly.

The "fog of war", AFAIK, tends to refer to general breakdown of communication (as you noted), but even fully localized control (terrorist cells, I suppose) are not highly effectual without coordination and informed assessment of the overall picture. The horrific triple (almost quadruple) attacks of 9/11/2001 would have been greatly diminished, probably by 2/3, if the attacks weren't centrally coordinated.

Wartime is exactly when centralized control is most needed.

[tikhonj]

Leaders can matter—a lot—even if they do not exercise granular, top-down control. They can provide the right context and motivation, articulate high-level aims, resolve issues and create the kinds of systems and cultures that do not need explicit direction.

A great illustration of this idea in context is Andrew Gordon's book on the Battle of Jutland, The Rules of the Game[1]. He mostly contrasts the leadership philosophies in the British Navy shortly before and during the Battle of Jutland. The British Navy became very top-down and procedure-oriented during peacetime, which did not generalize well to operating in battle.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/354137.Rules_of_the_Game

[protocolture]

Yeah I get this. And it goes both ways too, I find that I am a much better wartime employee than peacetime.

[tamimio]

Great article, people mix commanders with leaders, leaders main job is influencing while others do it their approach, their style, but still align with the goals you influenced.

> People tend to rise to your level of trust.

One of the companies that I almost worked for, had all the “we trust we empower our employees etc”, good promises, and later they were requiring full uninterrupted camera access while you do the work :)

[noitpmeder]

We're the employees taking advantage of that trust? Seems a strange thing to mandate unless that trust has been severely broken.

[alemanek]

Still the wrong response. Discipline the people abusing your trust.

Part of being a good manager is knowing when to step in and have a private conversation with people before things get too bad. If the bad behavior continues then you follow the process of formal write up’s and eventually termination.

Collective punishment is the sign of a manager who doesn’t know what they are doing and will kill a team.

[noitpmeder]

No argument there, id eject from any company that even started to consider such measures (unless they're adding a few zeroes to my paycheck)

[magicalhippo]

A year after starting my current job, I had a conversation with the CEO. We were just 15 people back then, 5 devs.

I can't recall what prompted it, but he said he'd learned early on that the best thing he could do was to ensure us devs were happy and otherwise stay out of our way as much as possible.

I think that's at least part of the reason for the success of the company, which has gone from a small player to dominating our niche in the time I've been here.

[danaris]

> People tend to rise to your level of trust.

Yes, this, precisely.

Most people want to be trusted and given autonomy, and they want to live up to your expectations.

There will always be a few who are looking for ways to cheat the system, but they are the exception, not the rule—and the earlier in life you can get to them with a policy of trust and lifting them up, rather than suspicion and tearing them down, the more likely they will be to turn out well.

[rramadass]

See Self-Determination Theory (SDT) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-determination_theory

[rich_sasha]

Sort of true. But then I've worked with people who seem totally unfazed when they mess up through utter carelessness, and for reasons, won't be replaced. Or people who asked to move a button set off redesigning the template engine to be more functional, time after time.

You could say, and I wouldn't disagree, those people shouldn't be on the team. But equally it's often not that easy. Also good people are hard to find and the mediocre one might be the best you have.

It strikes me that the Google statistical results might be getting the wrong end of the stick. The teams where the leader is hands off and empowering are full of people who can be trusted which is basically the same as them doing the job themselves. The teams where the leader feels the urge to descend to micromanagement are the ones where people don't get things done.

[rramadass]

You might find Jeffrey Pfeffer's Leadership BS: Fixing Workplaces and Careers One Truth at a Time interesting - https://jeffreypfeffer.com/books/leadership-bs-fixing-workpl...

Also checkout his other books.