On Leadership
Published on DecĀ 2, 2019 (updated FebĀ 5, 2024), filed under management (feed). (Share this on Mastodon orĀ Bluesky?)
Leadership is a topic Iāve been studying again over the past few months because Iāve been refocusing my corporate role on the management of tech teams. Thereās much awareness for why and when leadership is needed, but when speaking with peers and companies Iāve also noticed a certain attitude, one of frowning upon the matter. āWe donāt have leaders,ā conversation partners would say, āwe have a flat hierarchy,ā or āwe want leaders to emerge from our teams.ā
While this is completely fineāIām not here to judge, and the discussions I had were exclusively positive and constructiveā, Iāve picked up on an argument that, if it matches the sentiment, is decidedly fallacious:
- P
- Some leaders are poor leaders.
- C
- Therefore, leadership is bad.
You donāt need a logic course to tell how that argument is neither valid nor sound, and yet itās what Iāve observed in many discussions. I certainly agreed on the premise!āalas, the conclusion doesnāt follow from it, and, assuming you, too, agree on often poor leadership, looking at what could actually be seen in it is more interesting.
Even if we modified the premise to say āmost leaders are poor leadersāāone may be tempted to say thatāit still doesnāt warrant a conclusion such as āleadership is bad.ā Thatās for a good part because leadership skills donāt fall from the sky but need to be learned. That leadership skills donāt fall from the sky, that they need to be learned is a problem with both the āour leaders emerge from our teamsā idea as well as aforementioned fallacious conclusion, which, as it stands, does nowhere consider training.
A more constructive āargumentā may then be the following (it still doesnāt follow logically speaking, but Iāll keep with the pseudo-logical structure):
- P
- Some leaders are poor leaders.
- C
- Therefore, letās help poor leaders become better leaders.
Here we seem near the core, then, because not all people in leadership positions seem to go through formal leadership training. Likewise do few go through any sort of casual training, and only a minority, then, may study the topic.
My own best leadersāmanagersāIāve pretty much all had at Google, whereas in other years, some of the best leaders Iāve seen were only not bad, and that simply because they didnāt lead in the first placeāmeaning they just happened not to get too much in the way of their teams, teams that happened to display initiative. That is, some of the āgood leadershipā we sometimes encounter is chance leadership.
Given these observations and how many mistakes leaders can make, no wonder that people suspect leadership to be bad if all they see is bad leaders!
However, now, leadership is not bad. Leadership is important. As we know from other skills, too, surely most leaders are poor leaders without training, which is why training is so important to stress. What we need to do then is train leaders so that they become better leaders. Although I wonāt cover leadership training and resources here (frankly, thereās so much that Iām still learning), an entirely different though likewise invalid and unsound argument would be nice to arrive at, then:
- P.1
- Most leaders study leadership and go through leadership training.
- P.2
- Most leaders are great leaders.
- C
- Therefore, leadership is good.
Leadership is important, and it can be learned.
About Me
Iām Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and Iām a web developer, manager, and author. Iāve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies youāve never heard of and companies you use every day, Iām an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for OāReilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)