Leadership

· tech

#leadership

📑 Contents

What leadership is

The word “leadership” gets read as “senior title”, “gives the orders”, “has people who do what he says” — but the core of leadership isn’t power or control, it’s influence.

Leadership has a range. The same person’s leadership differs from group to group, and the quickest traditional way to see it is to ask every member of a group to rank everyone else’s leadership — aggregate the answers and you have that group’s leadership ranking.

Models

That way of analysing leadership is a general model, and general models lose their accuracy the moment you drop them into a specific domain — the same way plenty of specialised fields don’t reach for an LLM but for ML/DL, and even inside ML/DL the algorithm changes with the domain. Leadership has many models too.

They fall roughly into two kinds — organic and linear. As the words suggest, linear thinks in single causes (one-to-one); organic thinks in many causes (many-to-many). The two mindsets, side by side:

  • Linear model thinking:

    • Good at sorting people into categories
    • Speed of analysis: fast
    • Defines the relationship between people by role (boss, support, engineer, PM)
    • Tends to assume things stay put

  • Organic model thinking:

    • Relationship-oriented
    • Good at watching dynamics and context (context-aware)
    • Speed of analysis: slow, but closer to the truth
    • Defines the relationship between people by interaction and trust (who influences whom, who inspires whom)
    • Takes situation and systemic effects seriously (systemic thinking)
    • Treats change as something to be accommodated

Linear is closer to “structured organisational management”; organic is closer to “the interactions in an ecosystem”.

In a linear world the leader is a chess player — issuing instructions, moving resources around, driving towards the goal. In an organic world the leader is a gardener — creating the environment, guiding growth, letting different people realise their potential where they each stand.

Linear · chess playerone-way cause · sorted by role Leader Engineer PM Support Organic · gardenermany-to-many · by interaction and trust Leader
One team, two ways of seeing it: linear sorts people by role and sends instructions down; organic looks at the web of who influences whom, with the leader as one node in it

Reflection

  • The people I’d call leaders in my own life are unusually good at two things: communicating with people, and growing them. So if my leadership improves, what it really means is that I care more about the people around me — they trust me more, and the group moves in a more consistent direction.
  • In my current job I pass knowledge on through code review, hold the team together with a coding style, and use a type checker to take the weight of consistency off everyone’s shoulders. I also run regular 1-on-1s to know how people are actually doing. But when I let code review sit too long, I become the thing slowing the team down; and 1-on-1s without follow-up end up feeling like a formality.
  • So: raise the priority of code review, and keep notes on every 1-on-1 with actual follow-up. I want to keep learning in this environment and grow with the team rather than ahead of it.

Leadership isn’t walking in front and showing the way — it’s making it possible for others to lead too.