Good Leader, Bad Leader

As I reflect on my own leadership path, and the lessons I’ve learned via both managing teams as well as observing leaders across companies, I wanted to capture some of these lessons as a primer for new leaders.

I’m a big fan of Ben Horowitz, especially his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, so I modeled this post after Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager — thanks for the inspiration Ben!

Overall, to be a successful leader you have to care. There’s no substitute for spending time with your reports. Get to know their motivations. Really showing up is probably 90% of the battle.

Recently, one of my favorite HR leaders at Dropbox interviewed the company’s top performing employees. She asked them what they valued in a manager. The answer was a surprise. She expected the employees to highlight traits along the “mastery of craft” dimension — meaning great engineers would want to work for even better engineers. Instead, she found that the top performers at Dropbox consistently highlighted that the best managers cared about them, supported their career aspirations, and put them in a position to succeed and to grow. Mastery of craft rarely came up. Great people want managers who are demonstrably invested in their success.

I’ve broken this post up into three categories of focus — mindset, motivation, and hygiene.