I can see where you’re coming from and I have some more context to add, which can be helpful.
This phrase:
> a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance
Feels like something uttered by a cocaine snorting MBA who gets high off creating hostile work environments and enjoys firing people.
I’ve been in environments where everyone is agreeable because they have to be agreeable. They are agreeable to a fault. These environments have a banal toxicity that is hard to pin down, but it shows when there is disagreement. These orgs value agreement above all else, above performance, above achieving goals. They suppress valuable insight because it is uncomfortable to them. FUD is a great rhetorical strategy that I’ve see used to squelch conversation, thinly veiled appeals to authority is another. This breeds complacency and destroys value.
We have a management class in the west that believes that management can be a mechanistic exercise of gathering metrics, assessing performance, and assigning corrective actions. That it can both be systematized and abstracted away from the work is a core assumption of western management. This is a paint by numbers approach, similar to Searle's Chinese room, and works to take the leadership out of management.
You’re right that most of the time the best choice for your business and customers is to choose the boring, stable technology that works. Avoid the rewrite, don’t use the hottest new frameworks, or languages that are in vogue.
Experience shows generally to dismiss developer desires for novelty. But sometimes you do need a novel solution and your developers are the ones who are going to tell you. You will not figure this out by following the rules taught in management school. Metrics like CPI and SPI are only going to tell you that you’ve made the wrong choice on your project when it’s too late. You need to make a decision, which means seeking out information and making the best decision based on the information you can get. This takes leadership.
The best programmers I know have strong opinions. They will tell you that you are wrong. They do this to learn both to test themselves and the people around them. If they are wrong, the withdraw, then more on. It’s the most healthy thing I’ve seen and is actually what builds success.
Disagreement is healthy and good and should be encouraged, when the goal is knowledge gathering. A leader who is turning agreement to zero is a leader who wants to be decisive.
Stop the madness. It does not matter how things feel. It matters how things are measured, which includes employee retention and delivery and product quality. Most of the comments here loudly scream none of these people have been in management.
The one big difference between a leader and a contributor is ownership. Everyone here has danced around the idea of ownership without addressing it. Unless you have owned liability in a managerial capacity it doesn’t matter how things feel, because your perspective is too narrowly construed.
Disagreement, when voiced, is a form of confrontation. It is healthy. Healthy teams are brutally honest. Most of software absolutely abhors confrontation.
This phrase:
> a strong leader knows how to turn that down to 0 for maximum confrontation and/or defiance
Feels like something uttered by a cocaine snorting MBA who gets high off creating hostile work environments and enjoys firing people.
I’ve been in environments where everyone is agreeable because they have to be agreeable. They are agreeable to a fault. These environments have a banal toxicity that is hard to pin down, but it shows when there is disagreement. These orgs value agreement above all else, above performance, above achieving goals. They suppress valuable insight because it is uncomfortable to them. FUD is a great rhetorical strategy that I’ve see used to squelch conversation, thinly veiled appeals to authority is another. This breeds complacency and destroys value.
We have a management class in the west that believes that management can be a mechanistic exercise of gathering metrics, assessing performance, and assigning corrective actions. That it can both be systematized and abstracted away from the work is a core assumption of western management. This is a paint by numbers approach, similar to Searle's Chinese room, and works to take the leadership out of management.
You’re right that most of the time the best choice for your business and customers is to choose the boring, stable technology that works. Avoid the rewrite, don’t use the hottest new frameworks, or languages that are in vogue.
Experience shows generally to dismiss developer desires for novelty. But sometimes you do need a novel solution and your developers are the ones who are going to tell you. You will not figure this out by following the rules taught in management school. Metrics like CPI and SPI are only going to tell you that you’ve made the wrong choice on your project when it’s too late. You need to make a decision, which means seeking out information and making the best decision based on the information you can get. This takes leadership.
The best programmers I know have strong opinions. They will tell you that you are wrong. They do this to learn both to test themselves and the people around them. If they are wrong, the withdraw, then more on. It’s the most healthy thing I’ve seen and is actually what builds success.
Disagreement is healthy and good and should be encouraged, when the goal is knowledge gathering. A leader who is turning agreement to zero is a leader who wants to be decisive.