Leaders Should Not Work in Hero Mode
The Elon Musk vs Twitter saga pushed me into writing an article about a topic that I’ve been postponing for too long. I won’t be diving into the Twitter vs Musk fiasco per se (that’s definitely not my cup of tea!), but I do want to touch on Elon’s leadership traits and how it relates to engineering leadership.
Don’t be the hero
One negative trait that I’ve seen from leaders is the idea that they need to work in hero mode where everything depends on them. This is detrimental to a team’s culture and creates an environment where engineers are less happy and less creative. Leaders who work in hero mode tend to suck up all the air (and fun) in the room. This, of course, has a direct impact on attracting top talent, retaining talent, and team culture.
As Simon Sinek calls out in Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action:
The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.
Your goal as a leader should be to focus on what you do best and how you can have the most positive impact on the company. In other words, this would be to not do the work of engineers. You should delegate the work you do in hero mode to engineers so that they feel trusted and valued.
Trust and empower others
Engineering leaders are responsible for their team’s outcome. Their success is linked to their team’ success. The more they multiply the impact of others, the more successful the engineers will be. This, in turn, will lead to the leaders being more successful.
Leadership is about making sure that the people who work with you feel valued and feel like they are also getting opportunities to grow.
Empowering and trusting your team more will result in happier, more energized, and more creative engineers. They will be more successful and more impactful. And, you will be more successful because of that.
What about Elon?
What does this have to do with Elon, you ask?
Elon is very hands-on, according to everything I’ve read and learned about him. He is supposedly very hands-on at SpaceX and at Tesla. When his text messages were recently revealed as part of the Twitter dispute, a particular exchange with Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, was fascinating to read. Elon had lots of concerns about Twitter’s bot ratio and did not trust the information given to him and other stakeholders. To dive deeper into this problem and find a solution himself, Elon said to Agarwal:
I would like to understand the technical details of the Twitter codebase.
As I mentioned earlier, this is apparently something that Elon often does. It’s a bad trait that many engineering leaders do. They like to play the hero. Instead of empowering engineers to make decisions and to support them along the way, they want to be involved in every detail of the solution. This slows down progress and is less fun for the engineers. It promotes a culture that relies on the boss and where all decisions need to be thoroughly vetted by the boss.
Instead, as mentioned earlier, leaders should look at pushing these responsibilities to engineers. Leaders should focus on building a culture of ownership and accountability.
One approach that I enjoy using to enable a culture of ownership and accountability is the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) model. This model was first coined by Apple but I’ve personally used it at Stripe, GitHub, and InVision with lots of success.
By having engineers act as DRIs, leaders create the type of environment described earlier in this article: a place where engineers feel valued, trusted, empowered, creative, and accountable.
And, as Camille Fournier points out, leaders who want to remain involved have other ways of making an impact. They should ask engineers to bring proposed solutions as well as a recommended path forward based on the tradeoffs that they’ve considered. Leaders should then use this opportunity to ask hard questions, try to poke holes in the solution, better understand the scope and timelines proposed, help align on priorities, and much more!
While doing all of this, leaders should remember to speak last.