Shut up, salute & soldier on?

Leadership and management are currently hot topics, with the #NoManager movement among the hottest of the hot. My detailed opinion on flat organizations/holacracy is a post for another day, but one aspect that I fully agree with is the differentiation between leadership and management. They can and should coincide, but they don’t always. Most importantly, the number of leaders should exceed the number of managers. To re-state a point I made in “Lord of the Repository”, the best managers develop their team members so that the team is never without leadership, even when the manager is away.

Tony DaSilva’s recent post on the subject, “In Defense of Hierarchy”, spoke to some benefits that derive from hierarchies. One of those benefits identified was “orderly execution of operations”, supported by the following quote:

Imagine if students argued with their teachers, workers challenged their bosses, and drivers ignored traffic cops anytime they asked them to do something they didn’t like. The world would descend into chaos in about five minutes. – Duncan J. Watts

For each of Watts’ examples, his point is, in order, wrong, possibly wrong, and correct. I have experience that speaks to all three.

My career in software development is my second career; my first was in law enforcement, serving as a Deputy in a county Sheriff’s Office. One of the positions I held during my tenure there was Assistant Director of the Training Academy. My role was split between administration, instruction, and supervision of students (limited strictly to their time in training, I didn’t hold a supervisory rank that would apply beyond that). My position was then and has always been, that any trainer or teacher that cannot tolerate respectful, appropriate challenge is unworthy of their position. A student probing and testing the information being presented was something to be celebrated in my opinion, not discouraged.

An alert went out on the radio one afternoon that there was a fire in one of the housing units of the jail. After a quick run to the location, I found that the supervisors had succeeded in getting the fire knocked down, removing the person who had started it and detailed staff to evacuate the other inmates to a smoke-free secure area. However, the remaining staff were milling about without protective gear or spare fire extinguishers should the embers flare back up. While waiting for someone with authority, I took it upon myself to direct individuals to get the equipment that was needed. Once someone arrived and assumed control, I then headed back to normal duties.

While talking about the incident later on with a co-worker, they happened to mention that they were really shocked when I ordered the Major to go retrieve an air pack and he did so (n.b. the Major in question was the third ranking person in the department and five levels higher than me in the hierarchy). Needless to say, I was just as shocked. I hadn’t been paying attention to much beyond getting the situation safely under control and the Major hadn’t objected, so I didn’t notice the real-life inversion of control, though my colleague certainly did.

That incident illustrates several things about leadership. First, is the point I mentioned above that leadership and management/authority are separate things. I had no official authority, but exercised leadership until someone with authority was in a position to take over. Second, is that my unofficial authority rested on the trust and acquiescence of those executing my orders. I would argue that, far from undermining their trust, my openness to challenge in non-emergency situations made them more likely to follow me in the emergency.

So, to return to Watts’ examples – teachers should be challenged (appropriately), cops should be obeyed (until the emergency is in hand), and both you and the boss should be able to flex based on the whether the current situation requires a teacher or a cop.

Participative leadership is more likely to engender trust and buy-in. Smart leaders (be they managers, architects, team leads, etc.) aren’t looking for passive followers, they know it could cost them. As Tom Cagley observed in a his post “It Takes A Team”:

While a product owner prioritizes and a scrum master facilitates, it takes a whole team to deliver. The whole team is responsible for getting the job done which means that at different times in different situations different members will need to provide leadership. Every team member brings their senses to the project-party, which makes all of them responsible looking for trouble and then helping to resolve it even if there isn’t a scrum master around.