Avoid These Kinds of Leaders
We often talk about what leaderships skills to harness, but what about avoiding bad examples?
Coming up as a junior, I would look at my leadership and at times assume it must be so easy to just make the decisions and pass down the strategy to make it happen. As I got closer, it began to look much harder than I thought. Now that I am in the bottom rung of it, I can confirm, dear reader, that it is much harder than it looks.
Good leaders make it look effortless, and bad leaders make it much harder than it needs to be. Employees want clear directives, laddering up to a shared mission where they feel the work they’re putting in has some kind of life beyond the handoff and is actually helping the agency, the client, or both. There are archetypes of bad leaders - here’s how to spot them.
The Chaos Agent
The first - and most obvious - leader you want to avoid is the chaos agent. Some of these leaders seemingly do this on purpose - changing strategic direction on the fly, giving feedback that is misaligned from the initial ask - and others are unwitting chaos agents, unaware of their stature within an organization and inadvertently driving chaos internally.
The unwitting chaos tends to come from the “thinking out loud” crowd. It’s a fine line between transparency and creating unnecessary work. Countless times I have seen the highest ranking person in a room toss a few ideas out for posterity, only for people in the room to scramble afterwards to figure out how to make the thoughstarters a reality. Confusion reigns when these ideas have some time spent on them and make their way back to the leader, who asks why these are being worked on as they were simply “thinking out loud” when they were brought up.
The Information Hoarder
We all know that knowledge is power, and no one knows it more than the leader who hoards as much of it as possible in order to increase their apparent importance to an organization.
This person sees internal communication as a political game, and shares tidbits of information selectively across the organization - either to seem in the loop on something or to maintain their place in a game of telephone in order to maintain a line into various teams, who have to go through this leader to actually get anything done.
Needless to say, this is wildly inefficient and it hurts the final work product of the organization at the end of the day. One of the main drivers of this leader is that they feel they can’t be sacked if they are so integral to the organization that every initiative simply has to flow through them in some way.
The problem is they’re not an omniscient force at the company, helping to guide things through to the finish line. They’re a roadblock to efficiency and progress, treating workstreams and the knowledge to move them along like a middle school gossip, only to be shared for maximum effect for the gossipee.
The Toddler Parent
Toddlers need constant attention, even when they insist they don’t. I took my kids to the grocery store over the weekend and they each wanted their own mini shopping cart. The amount of direction I was giving them in our local, crowded grocery store had me feeling like an air traffic controller, and it was exhausting. Sometimes they wanted to explore, but it was neither the time nor place. When you’re a toddler parent, the “Why?” sometimes just isn’t as important as getting the job done (i.e., not destroying the ankles of the other shoppers just trying to get some chips.)
Work isn’t like that, though. Leaders need to be transparent with their instruction - even moreso when asked. “Because I told you so,” might work with your kids (Ed.’s note: It does not) but it is not a winning strategy in the office and should be reserved for those whose decision-making processes are nearly non-existent.
Employees like to see the end results of their work and that it is being used for a larger purpose - it helps them buy into a shared mission and goal. When they feel their work just goes into some black hole (or worse, was simply done as a box-checking exercise with no real purpose), they won’t approach the task with the same rigor and effort as one they know will be appreciated and well-utilized.
Engaged employees create better work product for the final end-user, and transparency is an easy way to get the kind of buy-in that leads to better work.
So Who Are the Good Ones?
We’ve talked about the bad kinds of leaders, but what are the good kinds? Honestly, a lot of them are simply the opposite of the bad.
The chaos agent is countered by the clarity creator; someone who has a clear sense of strategic direction that only changes outside of a relatively set schedule when external factors dictate it. You can’t avoid chaos all the time, but this leader at least works to get things into the complex, if not complicated portion of the Cynefin framework to get everyone aligned. They also avoid the “thinking out loud” inadvertent chaos by doing it only when the audience and situation allows, which is rarely.
The information hoarder’s alter ego is someone who is happy to loop people in when appropriate and to keep others briefed on progress across a wide range of workstreams. Instead of creating forced relevancy within the organization by withholding and selectively sharing information, they are confident enough in their work product to let that do the talking (and these two traits - info sharing and solid work product - tend to be highly correlated.)
Finally the opaque toddler parent sees their opposite in that transparent leader who not only lets juniors in on how their work is contributing to the larger goal, but also passing down any feedback received for said work. Maintaining this feedback loop keeps employees engaged and also drives better work product through constant improvement.
Avoid the bad and try to work for the good - easier said than done, but a goal that should remain constant throughout one’s career.
Grab Bag Section
WTF Devers: If you’re the highest paid person in your organization and have two workstreams, and then one of those workstreams is removed - allowing you to focus on a single one - it would follow logical sense that you would then be a little bit better in that one workstream. That is, if your name is not Rafael Devers.
Devers is the highest paid player on the Red Sox, and his third basemen duties were taken over by the free agent signing of Alex Bregman. There was a will they/won’t they aspect to Bregman and Devers at third, but it would be clinical insanity to not put Bregman coming off of a 2024 Gold Glove season.
Which put Devers at designated hitter. Time to focus purely on the swing and the mechanics and the offense. And yet, four games into the season and Devers is 0-16. He set an MLB record for most strikeouts in the first four games of a season (12.) His greatest achievement for the Sox so far is a walk.
Is it early? Yes. Should Sox fans be freaking out? Probably not. Should Devers be doing better than .000 and 12 Ks at this point in the season? Absolutely.
Album of the Week: You know it as soon as the piano begins on “So What.” It also spawned what could very well be the most quotable Adam Sandler lines for middle school kids across the country. This week we’re diving into a reader request for AOTW: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.
We take for granted musical progress - especially for music created well before our birth years. It’s hard to understate the paradigm-shifting nature of Davis’ 1959 album. It represented a heads-first dive into modal jazz - a new derivative of the famous genre that saw artists play within multiple tonal centers, as opposed to focusing on chord progression while staying within the guardrails of a single scale. It was a move that would change the jazz world, and lead to another incredible album (potentially this newsletter’s favorite jazz album) John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme.
The album was done in two sessions - one for each side of the LP. Davis didn’t give the sextet a lot of notice on what was to be played, instead simply giving a sense of where they should be playing in from a scale and melody perspective, hoping for the improvisation to lead. And it sure did.
While the newsletter prefers side 1 (the swap at piano for Wynton Kelly in place of Bill Evans to make it more bluesy makes “Freddie Freeloader” a top track on the album), you can’t really go wrong with Davis’s magnum opus. Give it a spin this week as we enter spring and leave the winter blues in the rear view.
Quote of the Week: “More is lost in indecision than wrong decision. Indecision is the thief of opportunity. It will steal you blind.” - Cicero
See you next week!