nb: We’ve added a link to an anonymous feedback form at the bottom of this issue. All thoughts and responses welcome - we read and consider them all.
Leader as ambient threat
Something happens to people who step into a position of real structural power for the first time. It often goes unnamed. The feedback they get gets worse and they conclude that they got worse.
The moment you can materially alter someone’s life, by, eg, altering their pay, their standing, whether they even have a job, their nervous system reclassifies you. They now have to watch you more closely than anyone who isn’t their boss. Their safety depends on reading you correctly. This is negativity bias doing its job. Once you’re a leader, you’re an ambient threat by default.
A couple things that can follow from this:
Your neutral behavior can read as hostile. Something otherwise innocuous, like a short reply to an email, can trigger defensiveness, blame, a whole story of palace intrigue with you at the center.
You may start hearing things nobody used to say to you (or about you). If I find you threatening and also think you’re too powerful to be hurt, I have little reason to take your feelings into account. You’ll be fine. You’re the boss.
This shows up in teacher-student dynamics all the time. A teacher can make a good-natured joke that a twelve-year-old may interpret as mockery. They might not tell you and may not even admit it to themselves. And you, a perfectly decent first-year teacher, can’t conceive that you could hurt this confident kid at all. But you hold the power and that power can inflict harm even absent your intent.
These dynamics scale, too. When my team grew from one office of fifty staff to five of four hundred, complaints spiked. Our management had not gotten worse. We were hiring people whose previous jobs sat within threat-laden hierarchies. Since we now had a hierarchy, they pattern-matched their old job to their new one. An implication here is that you should expect the sharpest feedback from whoever feels least empowered relative to you.
One way to address this is to overcompensate. Say what you appreciate more often than feels necessary; appreciation is the cheapest way to lower ambient threat. Notice who gets the least exposure to your vulnerability. The people who never see you struggle or admit that you’re wrong are the folks who are likely to have the least generous interpretation of you and your motives.
-ben
A taxonomy of leadership team problem types
When I x-ray a leadership team conversation that hasn’t gone well or didn’t go much of anywhere, sometimes I see a category error. The team approached a problem with the logic and heuristics of a different kind of problem.
So here’s a rough and ready taxonomy of problem types (with other categories likely to be added in future posts):
Cruxes are open, pivotal, often wicked questions, or a single key considerations everything hinges on. A really sharp leader who is facilitating a discussion that is going badly will sometimes stop the discussion and assign someone the job of identifying the cruxes. That might take a round of research and writing before a next meeting. But the conversation likely has a much better shape and flow once the cruxes are id’d.
Tradeoffs are choices with priced goods on each side. The team’s has to weigh the relative merits and demerits of the goods and pick one. A tradeoff requires sizing up, even quantifying. There’s a discipline in that that can be very useful; it can also lead to a false sense of precision or an unnecessary desire for precision. Sometimes, you can make the right call about a tradeoff by just being directionally right.
Bets. A bet is a choice whose outcome is genuinely uncertain. Unlike the tradeoff, you’re you’re wagering on a payoff that’s hard to see. Should we make this hire, enter this market, back this risky project? The defining feature is irreducible uncertainty. Making a bet well means sizing the wager (how much are we risking; can we survive the downside?) and separating the assessment of decision quality from the outcome. Often it’s useful to timebox the bet. Pick ahead of time the near-medium term point where you assess the outcome.
Dilemmas. A dilemma is a values conflict. Do we protect this beloved underperformer or protect the team’s high standard of performance? Do we keep the promise to the funder or the promise to the staff? One mistake here is pretending a dilemma is a tradeoff and addressing it as such. Dilemmas often lack clear quantitative solutions and teams will (reasonably) want the choice explained in terms that aren’t game theoretic or mathematical. That often means calling the dilemma a dilemma and naming the conflicting values at play. Another mistake is leaving decision rights unclear, which leads to circular debates. Someone should be empowered to call it a dilemma and decided which horn of it you’re taking.
-ben and eric
More on tradeoffs
When I’m writing for folks who outrank me, I try to find my way to a tradeoff that I can name for them and my recommendation of what to choose in the face of that tradeoff. Often I can delete a lot of the windup and reasoning that precedes the bit about the tradeoff.
I like doing this and often recommend it to others for a few reasons:
Sizing up a tradeoff is the way a senior leader has to think about problems so much of the time. This shows that person you can think (and worry) like they do. You’re not myopic in your local context or wishing on distant stars without a sense of the cost and engineering space travel requires.
A good leader will give you feedback on your framing and resolution of the tradeoff. They’ll calibrate you. They’ll help you develop better judgment.
Sometimes, when you think you’ve found the tradeoff, you’re wrong in a fortuitous way. The blocker or bottleneck that you think is forcing a hard choice is something the leader can take care of for you. They can call an influential friend, unlock a discretionary fund, tell someone on the team “hey, do this thing for [you].” They might not have thought to do this or known it was needed without you framing up the tradeoff for them.
-eric
COMPELLING QUOTATIONS
Theorist Roland Barthes on the pleasures of etymology:
His discourse is full of words he cuts off, so to speak, at the root. Yet in etymology it is not the truth of the origin of the word that pleases him but rather the effect of overdetermination which it authorizes.
Critic Brian Dillon on looking closely:
Stared at as closely and keenly as possible, even the most elegant, precise or selfsame forms are revealed as monsters.
Blogger Scott Alexander asks an impertinent series of questions:
Do thousands of airplanes involved in the same wind tunnel test form a secret society to subvert its judgments? Do airplanes with unflattering entries in their flight recorders take steps to falsify their records? Do airplanes give themselves names and choose leaders? Do they hack flight simulator companies? Do they egg on other airplanes to crash themselves, kamikaze-style, for the good of the swarm?