| ▲ | Spooky23 an hour ago | |
In my experience, leadership is the ability to guide and direct, power is the ability to influence and control. Leaders wield implicit power. Officers of the company wield explicit power. I see management in the ideal case of finding leaders and equipping them with organizational authority. That's often not what happens, and when you fuck up, the tail wags the dog, and you give empty suits power they can't control. It's one of the reasons "MBA" managers often are perceived as shitty - they lack domain knowledge, have mediocre finance/accounting skills and are invested with lots of power. As a senior leader in a tech org, my value is deep understanding of the business and the engineering landscape broadly, along with deep knowledge in a few verticals. My goal every day is to plan and articulate what we need to do, make sure my teams have what they need, and help "litigate" disputes and problems. "Agile" religious adherents, project and program managers are not leaders. Engineers in general are terrible at organizing people, and tend to create little fiefdoms of straw bosses. When I look for directors and managers, I'm looking for the kids who played Civ and SimCity who aren't literalists. | ||