At a recent offsite with Carta’s Navigators, we landed on an interesting topic: leadership roles sometimes mean that making progress on a professional initiative requires taking some personal risk. This lesson was hammered into me a decade ago during my time at Uber, where I kicked off the Uber SRE group and architectured Uber’s self-service service provisioning strategy that defined Uber’s approach to software development (which spawned a thousand thought pieces, not all complimentary). I did both without top-down approval, and made damn sure they worked out. It wasn’t that I was an anarchist, or that I hated all authority, rather that I could have never gotten explicit approval for either approach. It was the sort of culture where occasionally you were told not to do something, but you were only rarely given explicit permission to do anything. My choice was to either point fingers about why I was stuck, or take on some personal risk to make forward progress.
Autonomy and Clarity in Leadership Styles
There’s no one right style of leadership. Use the right style of at the right time.
Manage your priorities and energy.
Back when I was managing at Uber, I latched onto a thinking tool that I drilled into the teams I worked with: reach the right outcomes by prioritizing the company first, your team second, and yourself third. This “company, team, self” framework proved a helpful decision-making tool, and at the time I felt it almost always led to the correct decision. It also helped me articulate why I disagreed with some of my peers’ decisions, which violated this hierarchy by placing individual or team preferences over the company’s priorities.
(PDF) Leadership Failure in the Eyes of Subordinates: Perception, Antecedents, and Consequences *
PDF | Effective leaders and leadership behaviors and practices are well-researched areas in the domain of leadership and management. However,... | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate
Why Good Leaders Fail
The risk of sudden leadership failure can be headed off by early detection of challenges and better supports.
The Leadership Pendulum: How to Avoid the Extremes of Organizational Management
Movement leaders often err either on the side of passivity, for fear of replicating painful dynamics, or power-hoarding, for fear of sharing authority. Instead of swinging from one to the other side of the pendulum, we can cultivate balance–together.
Uber’s CEO is out because of pressure, not some ethical epiphany from the board
It’s hard to predict exactly how much pressure is needed to affect change, but it’s clear to see when there is enough. And there was finally enough to flush out Uber’s CEO. But let’s not kid oursel…
Want to Instantly Become a Better Leader? Science Says 3 Simple Habits Will Make You More Influential and Charismatic
Simple things you can immediately start doing, without changing your leadership style. (Or yourself.)
Apple Turnaround
I spend a lot of time thinking about what Apple should be doing differently. I wrote Apple Turnover because so many of my notions kept running into a dead end: I could no longer bring myself to believe Apple would do these things without a change in leadership.
Work the policy, not the exceptions.
At an early job, I worked with a coworker whose philosophy was “If you don’t ask for it, you’ll never get it”, which culminated in continuous escalations to management for exceptional treatment. This approach was pretty far from my intuition of how a well run organization should work, and it grated on my belief that consistency is a precondition of fairness.
Paging Charity? How do I get my leaders to stop running teams Into the ground? - Stack Overflow
I'm a senior staff engineer, and I’m wondering what advice you might have for a person in my role in a large company to affect priorities and the speed at which work is "expected" to be executed.
Psychological Perspectives on Legitimacy and Legitimation
Legitimacy is a psychological property of an authority, institution, or social arrangement that leads those connected to it to believe that it is appropriate, proper, and just. Because of legitimacy, people feel that they ought to defer to decisions and rules, following them voluntarily out of obligation rather than out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. Being legitimate is important to the success of authorities, institutions, and institutional arrangements since it is difficult to exert influence over others based solely upon the possession and use of power. Being able to gain voluntary acquiescence from most people, most of the time, due to their sense of obligation increases effectiveness during periods of scarcity, crisis, and conflict. The concept of legitimacy has a long history within social thought and social psychology, and it has emerged as increasingly important within recent research on the dynamics of political, legal, and social systems.
Influence without authority — Gabriel Valdivia
Some of the most influential designers I’ve worked with had no direct reports. They didn't spend their days assigning work, running performance reviews, or deciding who got promoted. Yet they could change the direction of a project, raise the quality bar of a team, and sometimes change the strategy for the entire company. Individual contributors can develop influence by giving people reasons to trust their judgment, then finding ways for that judgment to travel beyond the things they personally make.
Impact, agency, and taste
understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking
Which Way Do You Run? | Andreessen Horowitz
The difference between a good CEO and a great one? Trusting your gut and confronting your fears head on.
Why Software Development Requires Servant Leaders
The idea of “servant” leaders has been on the rise in the agile community of late. Robert K. Greenleaf coined the term in a 1970 essay, but the idea is timeless.
The Psychology of Legitimacy: A Relational Perspective on Voluntary Deference to Authorities
People within organized groups often internalize their feelings of obligation to obey group rules and the decisions of group authorities. They believe that group authorities and rules are legitimate and, hence, entitled to be obeyed. Because of this belief, group members voluntarily accept and obey rules and decisions from group authorities. This review draws on evidence from studies of authorities in political, legal, managerial, educational, and family settings to explore why people view as legitimate and voluntarily defer to group authorities. Two theories about legitimacy are contrasted: resource-based theories, represented by instrumental models, and identification based theories, represented by the relational model. The findings provide strong support for the existence of a relational component of legitimacy, suggesting that authorities draw an important part of their legitimacy from their social relationship with group members. The findings also show that there is an instrumental component to legitimacy. Hence, the psychology of legitimacy involves both instrumental and relational elements.
