The Law of the Lid
The job description of the engineering manager, when reduced to its simplest form are these: To win AND To increase the capacity to win. Everything else is how you do those two things.
- Wade Chambers, former Twitter VP of Engineering
John Maxwell in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership introduced the notion of Leadership Lid. He says that “leadership ability determines a person’s level of effectiveness.”¹ In truth, the complexity is beyond just leadership ability alone. His work however, highlighted a very important notion that remains absent in many leadership books, research and blogs today. The concept of leadership lid is so important that if the leader is not cognizant of this, he will sooner or later be the lid that keeps the organization from moving to the next level, if he isn’t now.
Maxwell observes that hard work is only one factor of the productivity complex. It must be further noted that sheer skill or talent alone is insufficient to achieve excellence. Consider the figure below:
Maxwell claims that an organization’s success is limited by either the leader’s relevant technical skills or his social skills. The leader ideally should grow both. Without the former, the leader’s ability to cast a vision and to navigate the organization is compromised. Without the latter however, the severity of the compromise is multiplied (to be addressed in later posts). Hence, should one be lacking of either, let it be the hard skills. It goes without saying that the lack of technical skills is much easily addressed: he simply needs to delegate. Still, a leader who spends time improving his technical skills opens up opportunities to see things even the subject matter expert don’t.
For instance, a few years ago we had an issue on how to properly design a solution to help address customer tickets in a more efficient way. All of us involved in the project were tied into how we can use existing tools and processes and create a tech solution around it. However, the complexity of doing things the way it is involves many weeks of development and testing. A luxury we don’t have.
When we brought in one of our senior leaders, he proposed an entirely new way of doing it which made sense to all of us. It saves so much time and the customer experience team was very happy with it. To this day we still employ this solution. What happened? The senior leader used to be a software engineer himself and while he is not cognizant of the details of implementation, he had context none of us had. He understands that an engineering solution is possible and should be straightforward if certain processes were tweaked. Because he also works with the customer experience team, this simple tweak opens up an entirely new way of doing things which proved to be more effective and reliable.
Now if he hadn’t had the technical skills, could he have proposed the same solution? Perhaps. But more likely not. Perhaps it could have taken us more time to arrive at that solution, or we could have spent so much more time working on something which could have been optimized on both ends.
Everyone in positions of leadership have leadership lids all over them. Some of the most common ones which should be no mystery to many are the following: ignorance, trustworthiness, insecurity management, integrity, greed, and pride.² I would like to highlight further that I intentionally left out incompetence. Incompetence is a result of one failing to be effective in one or more of the qualities mentioned above. In future posts, I shall tackle each one of them in greater detail. For this post, I will quickly tackle ignorance. Specifically, ignorance of the leadership lid.
Ignorance is when one’s lack of awareness prevents him from understanding the big picture. When one is not aware of his weaknesses, dealing with them is a near impossibility. One example which is very common in popular culture today is the notion that leadership is for a select and privileged few while the vast majority are simply composed of followers. Henry Mintzberg argues that such a view must be abandoned, especially in an organization of knowledge workers.³ He noted seven beliefs that go along with this worldview:
- Leaders are important people set apart from those engaged in core business.
- The more senior a leader is, the greater his or her importance.
- Leaders pass strategy down to those with responsibility for implementing it.
- Followers are inclined to resist leaders’ ideas and authority.
- Leaders have responsibility for establishing facts and allocating resources on that basis.
- Leaders alone deserve reward for success (which they alone are qualified to assess).
- Leadership is about the subjugation of others to one’s will.⁴ (emphasis mine).
Bennis, Burns, Haslam and others consider this an almost complete oversight of the role followers play in success.⁵ Their research shows that leadership needs to be non-individualistic and must be both context and perspective sensitive.⁶ In other words, an understanding of multiple factors influencing the success of the organization is required.
What I noted above is simply an example of ignorance. If leaders are not aware that their worldview involves such beliefs, that is a lid to them. Of course, a straightforward solution it may seem is for the leaders to study. An even quicker course of action is to gather feedback. Yet that in itself can prove to be one too unreliable in certain contexts. One which I will also discuss in later blogs. Feedbacks are often hampered by many factors such as the safety of the respondent, the range and reliability of the data used to construct the feedback, the question(s) asked, and the willingness and capacity of the leader to receive them. Must one seek for other solutions? Negative. Feedback done right is the best way. Resources elsewhere are abundant though I should write one myself at a future time.
As observed, humans are epistemically non-deterministic, and since leadership is all about human management, it turns out to be a complex blob. It is not an algorithm which you can write on a blog to explain how to optimize and/or what not to do. The sheer scale of human management, if leadership may be rightfully referred to as such, is an art.
This blog is part of a series on Software Engineering Management and Leadership.
¹ Maxwell, John C. The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson. Kindle location 131.
² I should note that this list is not exhaustive. It is based loosely on Haslam’s work and hence as I learn more in the future, the list might change.
³ Mintzberg, Henry. Managers Not MBAs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Managing and Management Development. Erscheinungsort Nicht Ermittelbar: RHYW, 2008. 144.
⁴ Ibid., 275.
⁵ Haslam, S. Alexander., et al. The New Psychology of Leadership: Identity, Influence, and Power. Psychology Press, 2011. 16.
⁶ Ibid., 17–18.
