Leadership — Power and Congruence

Power and congruence

The last two chapters of the motivation part (Ch14–15) are about power — but the power Weinberg means isn’t the one most people picture.

Power is a relationship

Ch14 overturns the common-sense view in its first sentence: power isn’t something in you — it’s the relationship between you and other people.

The confusion engineers fall into most easily is between expertise and power. Expertise is yours: what you know lives in your head and goes wherever you go. But whether expertise turns into power depends on your relationship with others: the same technical skill is power in a room full of juniors, and buys far less influence in a room full of seniors. The skill didn’t change; the relationship did, so the power did.

That also explains a frustration many senior engineers hit when they become leaders: people used to listen when you spoke from technical authority, and now the same authority moves nobody. You haven’t got worse — your power always lived in the relationship; the old relationships just happened to let you believe it lived in you. Which is the first great obstacle to motivating others all over again: other people are invisible, right down to not seeing where your own power comes from.

Ralph’s mechanical problem

Ch15 explains congruence through one case. A manager writes to the author: Ralph works for me, and other people have told me privately that Ralph smells bad — if this goes on, they’ll quit. What do I do?

The author’s advice: go to Ralph yourself, and talk about it privately and directly. It turns out Ralph’s hobby is leatherwork; the chemicals he uses leave a strong smell on his hands, and he couldn’t smell it himself at all. He went to a doctor — and he was grateful the manager had told him.

What makes the case so sharp is that the manager actually had five options, and each one maps onto a response stance. Weinberg talks about congruence in Virginia Satir’s language: when a person responds under pressure, there are three things to attend to at once — self, other, and context. Attend to only some of them and you get one of four incongruent stances; attend to all three and that’s congruence.

Laying the five paths out:

• Placating: tell the complainers to put up with it. Attends to Ralph, and to the “let’s not make a scene” context — but not to your own sense that this needs handling. Someone quits.
• Blaming: “You stink — deal with it.” Attends only to your own position. Ralph is hurt, and because nobody looked for the cause with him, he still doesn’t know what the problem is.
• Super-reasonable: an all-hands email, “please mind your personal hygiene”. The rules show up and the people vanish — everyone feels accused, and Ralph is the one person who doesn’t recognise himself.
• Irrelevant: do nothing and wait for it to pass. Attends to nothing; the problem only gets worse.
• Congruent: talk privately, directly, and well. All three corners covered — self (admitting this is hard to say, and saying it anyway), other (protecting his dignity by doing it in private, and assuming he doesn’t know), context (people on the team are close to leaving).

A mechanical problem isn’t a character problem

There are two more layers in this case, and they’re worth more than the five stances.

First: by the time the teammates complained, most of them had already passed judgment — this person doesn’t care about hygiene, doesn’t care about other people. The truth was leather chemicals: a solvable physical problem, which Weinberg calls a “mechanical problem”. Everyone was trying a mechanical problem as if it were a character flaw. That’s the thread running through this whole series — understand it before you judge it — except this time nobody had even understood what the problem was.

Second: people can’t see their own mechanical problems. Ralph couldn’t smell himself — self-blindness, in the most literal sense. Everyone has problems they can’t perceive, and the only way to learn about them is for someone to say so. Congruent feedback is a gift; Ralph’s gratitude is the proof. Put the other way round: staying silent to avoid awkwardness looks gentler, and is the genuinely unkind option.

There’s a subtle echo of the last post’s three gates here. Gate one asks “do they want it?” — but Ralph didn’t know he had a problem, so there was no way to ask him first. What the manager did wasn’t solve it for him; it was hand him the information he couldn’t see. Whether and how to act stayed with Ralph (he went to the doctor on his own). When someone can’t see the problem, give them the information first, and leave the action to them.

The engineering team’s Ralph

This situation comes up constantly on teams — the “smell” is just something else: someone who interrupts in every meeting, whose Slack messages land harshly, whose PRs are always too big for anyone to want to review. The leader usually hears about it the way that manager did: from other people, in private.

And the most common mistake is the super-reasonable all-hands email: “Reminder: let’s keep PRs small.” The person it’s aimed at never recognises themselves, and everyone else feels wrongly accused.

Reflection

One sentence, repaid more than a decade later

The Ralph in the book said thank you on the spot — a tidy ending. My own version is less tidy.

Once, I told a friend privately that a nose hair was showing. I wasn’t sure whether he already knew, and he didn’t say much in response. That was that — until more than ten years later, when I noticed he’s meticulous about his appearance, and has been paying attention to exactly this.

Nose hair is about the lowest-risk mechanical problem there is: awkward but harmless; get it wrong and two people laugh it off. But it takes the same ability as that manager’s conversation with Ralph — see a problem the other person can’t, absorb a few seconds of awkwardness, say it privately and directly. And what it taught me is the side of the story Ralph’s version leaves out: the payoff for being congruent is usually invisible, and it arrives late. You can’t use “did they thank me” to decide whether to speak. You speak because all three corners are covered; whether it pays off, and when, is outside your control — it’s the infinite game again, one sentence still working on someone more than a decade on.

Someone who can’t bring themselves to mention a nose hair won’t suddenly be able to talk to Ralph about body odour once they’re a leader. Congruence is trained on small things.

My own two kinds of incongruence

Hold this framework up to myself and it’s just as accurate. When the order-statistics solution lost, I said nothing at the time and swallowed it, then spent years wondering whether my approach had been wrong — that’s placating: attending to the team’s decision, not to myself. But I was actually furious at the time, and I went straight into reviewing the winning solution, more strictly than I’d ever reviewed anything, and found several real bugs and wasted performance — that’s blaming: the feeling I’d pushed down came back out in a different shape.

Put the two side by side and the lesson is: placating and blaming usually come as a pair. What you swallow doesn’t disappear; it finds another exit. If I’d been able to say congruently, “I don’t agree with this decision, and I understand the team’s reasoning”, neither the years of self-doubt nor that heated review would probably have happened.

The step where expertise becomes power

Finally, back to Ch14. Earlier I quoted a line of my own — “not every member understood any of this, and I was happy and proud anyway.” Read it again in this chapter’s language: the expertise behind that optimisation was mine, but when the team couldn’t see its value, it never became power. The expertise stopped at me; the relationship end was empty.

That’s one more layer on my own vision — “understand it, then leave it in a form other people can take away”. Sharing expertise doesn’t make you weaker. The opposite: expertise only turns from “something you own” into “a relationship between you and others” — that is, into power — at the moment it’s shared. This blog is that moment, repeated.

That closes the motivation part. Looking back along the four chapters: see the people first, don’t treat them as computers, clear three gates before helping, cover all three corners when you respond — each lesson is the same move from a different angle: understand the other person as a whole human being. That’s where power grows.