Follow the Leader
August 15, 2008 9:26 am insight, politics, religion, workMarco and I have been talking a lot about the role of leadership in organizations. We’ve gotten on to a lot of different tangents, but there’s one important point I’d like to make out in the clear.
When I put someone in charge it’s because I want them to use their discretion — I believe they can be successful. I trust their judgment.
I expect that their team members will support them. I don’t expect unquestioning obedience or anything, but I expect everyone to realize that Leader Guy is, in fact, Leader Guy because I thought he was the best person for the job.
I know Marco’s Bro and, in real life, would probably accept most of his decisions. However, I disagree with this way of thinking in a general sense. My response to his statement goes like this:
What if you made a mistake? What if Leader Guy deceived you into thinking he’s more capable than he really is? What if he’s no longer as capable as he once was (personal problems, brain injury, etc)? What if he’s now out of his area of competence (see: the Peter Principle). What if you only rationalized to yourself that he’s trustworthy, when in actual fact you installed him because he’s dating your sister? What if your trust in him stems from his Harvard degree that his father bought for him? What if your boss chose you because he knew you’d choose That Guy, who happens to be his nephew?
Authority is a dangerous thing. When you trust in vested authority over other qualities then you put all of your eggs in the basket of the authority figure; your risk has gone up dramatically. That may turn out OK if the leader happens to be a good decision maker. However, thousands of years of history have shown us that following the leader doesn’t always work out well, and can often be disastrous. I’m sure everyone has been in a situation where they’ve had to accept the authority of someone who, on the face of it, shouldn’t have been given that power (I know that everyone in the U.S. has).
Marco and His Bro have stated that they don’t expect unquestioning obedience in the leader, but that when the leader has made a decision, they expect the rest of the team to go along with it, even if they think it’s wrong. This strengthens my argument against authority while at the same time cuts its legs out from under it. Yes, you want your leader to be taking the arguments of his subordinates into consideration. If, at the end of the day, he rejects them regardless of their validity, then they may as well not have been voiced in the first place. Both Marco and His Bro have said that if they’d heard of dissent escaping from the confines of the team and propagating up to their level, they’d tend to trust the leader and think of the dissenter as a troublemaker. Of course, that may true in a some cases, but this policy definitely puts a chilling effect on dissent that could be beneficial (or even critical).
In one of my instant messaging chats with Marco, the topic of religion (very briefly) came up. Religion is, of course, the ultimate in authority, both in a supernatural and in a real-world sense. Especially in monotheism, a deity has overwhelming power over its followers, who in turn have none over it. That deity, in turn “installs” its own hierarchy of people to act as a local authority on its behalf — at least according to the people in the hierarchy. Since these people supposedly have privileged access to the deity, they are effectively granted authority by the followers. Religion is particularly good at suppressing dissent, through everything from genocide down to making virtues out of trust and belief without evidence.
Evidence and reasoning are the keys to overcoming the risks associated with authority. They are the great equalizers, because Nature doesn’t care one bit about who has granted authority to whom — but with enough evidence and reasoning you can navigate the rules that Nature has put in place and use them to achieve your goals.
It may very well be that the chosen leader makes successful decisions because she applies the best evidence and reasoning to a problem. Ideally, this should be true in every case; you can make the best decision possible in the shortest amount of time when you don’t have to explain and justify it to others. But we all know that this doesn’t happen every time. Even if the leader has the best reasoning skills, she may not have the best evidence, and so her conclusions might be suboptimal.
This is why I reject authority that exists for its own sake. If an authority figure makes a decision, let the decision stand on its own merits, not on the position of the person who makes it. If it’s a good decision (based on the reasoning and on the evidence), then it’s worth supporting. If there’s an better one, let it be the course of action, regardless of who proposed it. If gathering evidence is too costly (and it often is), then it’s OK to go with the assumptions of the most “experienced” person on the team, but be prepared to reject those assumptions when the evidence contradicts it. Personal experience is a valid argument (we rely on it for a great many decisions), but it’s a weak one, and it should be overridden and/or augmented by objective evidence whenever possible.
Authority, at best, illegitimately takes credit for success. At worst, it leads to failure. Be skeptical of it at all times.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:00 am
I think the missing part here is that of responsibility. The guy who’s challenging authority almost by definition doesn’t have responsibility for the outcome–they can just challenge and challenge and challenge.
The guy who’s being challenged? They’re the one who’s ass is on the line.
Now: if you make Mr. Challenger *equally* responsible for hitting the dates–*equally* responsible for the outcome … all that, s/he may find that arguing past a certain point suddenly becomes less attractive.
But then, of course, they’re effectively in charge too …
-Marco
August 15th, 2008 at 10:10 am
You’re exactly right, but IMO the solution is not to strengthen authority but to share responsibility.
You definitely need to ensure that authority is balanced by responsibility. Any time that equation is out of whack (one way or the other) then you’ve got a recipe for disaster.
In the same vein, it’s irresponsible to let subordinates be affected by the consequences of a decision if they have no hand in making it. That’s effectively slavery.
And you’re correct: when the challengers bear responsibility for their decisions, they won’t be so quick to make rash challenges. That’s a *good* thing. Challenging for the sake of challenging isn’t much better than authority for the sake of authority (although a devil’s advocate can sometimes help uncover the truth).
The goal is to get the decision that gives optimal results. Without dissent, you limit your options to those proposed by the authority figure. Since people are universally fallible, some of the time you’ll get a worse decision than you could have otherwise.
August 15th, 2008 at 10:13 am
And, FWIW, the authority figure doesn’t always have his ass on the line. Every golden parachute and statue in tribute to a tyrant is evidence of this.
August 15th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Teams with leaders (i.e. a person in a position of accountability with authority) are efficient ways to get things done. In many cases efficiency is not a nice-to-have; it’s a requirement.
If I’m staffing a project with any kind of timeframe constraint shared authority is probably a no-go. Within that constraint I’d expect people to work together.
The point you were responding to (me talking about how I staff projects) isn’t contradictory to your statement about an idea standing on its own merits — but part of the “merits” comes from the source: if a talking parrot tells me I should a particular open source product I’m less likely to listen to it than if a developer with deep experience in the domain does.
Likewise, the guy leading the project is usually the most qualified (probably because he or she understands the problem domain and has a history of delivery… first-time leaders are a slightly different story).
If someone with a long history of knowing what they’re talking about, getting things done, and doing them right has to explain every decision they make and get buy-in from a team that is (almost always) less expert in the holistic domain, then we’re operating very inefficently and we’re likely to fail simply because of the communication overhead required.
Either extreme (blind obedience v. a never-ending discussion about every little detail) is bad. In my experience functional teams fall in the middle with the leader coordinating and listening to the vertical experts and developing a plan that works for everyone. If the leader’s doing what I expect (listening, coordinating, etc.) and there’s still a problem, it’s usually not a matter of the facts; more an issue of personalities.
But: that’s my experience — you may have a different image in mind (I asked in Marco’s blog for some examples fo what we’re talking about–that would help me see where you’re coming from in a way that the discussion about QM and Tyrants doesn’t)
Eric
August 15th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I’ve said before (though not on this blog) that it doesn’t matter how quickly/efficiently you travel if you’re going in the wrong direction. In fact, moving fast is exactly what you *don’t* want if you’re heading toward a cliff.
While I don’t disagree with your statements on middle grounds, it all comes down to this:
If that’s actually true, then I *really* want to be in on your projects. Pretty pretty please. In my experience the people leading usually:
a) don’t know how to make good decisions
b) won’t listen to the advice of their subordinates
c) have agendas that are in opposition to the interests of the team, and/or
d) are so hamstrung by *their* superiors that they’re unable to be effective.
I’ll email you with non-public followup.
August 16th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
d) are so hamstrung by *their* superiors that they’re unable to be effective.
That’s something that I wanted to bring up, too. I know that many times a boss has come to me with a decision, I’ve expressed doubt about the wisdom of the decision, and my boss has agreed with my misgivings but said that we need to do it her way because she’s trying to balance “effective decision-making” with “not alienating her superiors, who are being weird about X, Y, or Z.” (And oftentimes that X, Y, or Z is not something that’s even directly involved with this current project, but is backlash about some *other* project she’s working on.)
Decisions aren’t made in a vacuum, and subordinates may not always be in the best position to gauge some of factors that need to be considered in order to keep the company running smoothly. I don’t think you can look at some of this stuff in concrete project-chunks, and I think it’s a leader’s job to be balancing some of those big-picture concerns.