Do What You Love: It Might be Leadership

Happy Friday,

Last week, we talked about how leadership shouldn’t be the automatic career path for every strong technical contributor. Incentivizing superstar engineers to become okay managers is a lose-lose-lose for the individual, the team, and the organization. To put a finer point on it, an engineering organization will perform worse, not better (likewise profit less) when people believe a manager title matters more than engineering excellence.

Besides, a lot of people care more about the title than the actual job, so the obvious solution is to just make everyone in the organization a VP. Problem solved. Multiple advantages.

Engineering organizations do need good leaders, and for the right people, statistically around 3 in 10 (Gallup), leadership can be a rewarding and valuable career choice. But having no leader is better than having a bad one, and force-fitting a low-probability choice only compounds the problem.

To be clear, we’re talking about leadership, not management. Huge difference.

Management is largely zero-sum. It’s about controlling and administering resources (think second-guessing last week’s utilization) and squeezing expected performance out of an existing team. Managers keep the pie the same size.

Leadership, done right, is non-zero-sum. In fact, it's fundamentally entrepreneurial. Leadership is about building value by understanding and orchestrating human and business factors to increase the collective value and capability of the team, and each individual in it. Entrepreneur, not administrator.

Building value is precisely why leaders exist at all in an engineering organization, and it's the truest measure of every leader's success. Why would an organization pay people to oversee and second-guess the talent? Leaders ultimately exist to multiply it.

But leadership is definitely not engineering; it’s a career change that requires an entirely different set of skills. Make sure you have them! No, really...do. Also, ask yourself honestly: Am I doing this because it's the expected next step, or because I have the skills and desire to be good at something new?

Punchline: Being really good at something you love doing is where the action is. So whether it's leadership or something else, be clear-eyed and trust your head and your heart.

And have a great weekend!

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

All previous topics are available at @goodnewsfriday.com

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