The 3 Directions of Leadership
Leading is more than just telling people what to do
This next section of the course will cover how to start making the move to management. It will give you the tools and thinking to navigate your way to the job. If you are already a manager I wouldn’t skip this section. It has lots of concepts that we will build on in the management section. If you are reading along live as these are coming out you cant skip this section because there is nothing to skip to 😂.
When most people think of leadership they are thinking about telling people what to do. This is only one piece of leadership and in my opinion it’s the easiest form. There are two more forms of leadership that are often overlooked: Leading up and leading laterally. These are much more difficult but they, unlike leading down, are available to everyone. If you are not in management yet you should be working on these forms of leadership.
A theme you will see over and over again in Forged Managers is that leadership takes time, and you need to “get the reps in”. It takes a lot of practice to become a good leader and it is important to understand that you already have leadership opportunities available to you. You may not have developers reporting to you but you can lead your peers and your boss.
Leading Up
The best form of leadership is getting someone to do something and to think that it was their own idea. Most people complain about people taking credit for their ideas, “My boss just takes my ideas and pretends like they are his.” In reality they should feel a little smug. They just pulled of a heist of the person’s brain. Good leadership and manipulation are only different in intention. People who are manipulative are trying to get you do what is good for them, leadership is about getting you to do what is good for yourself and the team. When you can lead people and they don’t know they are being lead, that is the highest form of leadership.
In order to lead up you and influence your boss you need to employ tactical empathy. If this term is foreign to you, good. Most people confuse empathy with sympathy. Empathy is simply understanding the other person’s point of view. You don’t have to agree with it, that is sympathy, you just have to understand it. Its called tactical because their is a reason you want to understand your boss’s point of view, its so you can influence it.
I think this is the hidden gem for career advancement. Rather than spending all of your time thinking about what you need to do or what you need to know, spend some time thinking about what your boss needs to do and what they need to know. Put yourself in their shoes. What information are they looking for, what keeps them up at night. Once you know how they operate you will know what you need to do to support them.
Does your boss constantly need status updates? Don’t get frustrated by the micro managing. Create a system to constantly feed the status of projects up to them.
Does your boss harp on you about software design? Make sure to constantly brief them on the design of new projects.
Whatever your boss’s biggest fears and concerns are, make them yours. Once you have solved their concerns you can begin to lead them to areas that you have concerns. At this point its important to remember, if you bring a concern to your boss also bring a solution. Use your empathy, if you were in their shoes you wouldn’t want more problems dumped on you by your reports. It is much better to hear about the problems and to already have the person reporting them sign up with a clear solution.
If you follow this pattern you will become invaluable to your boss. People who are invaluable get promoted.
Leading Laterally
Leading laterally is probably the most difficult direction for of leadership. If you can master leading laterally, leading down is easy. When you lead laterally you cant use force because you have no leverage in these situations. You have to use persuasion. Once you get into management you will find that force is almost never a good option for leadership. It should be used as a last resort. That is why I say if you can master leading laterally and persuading your peers, you can master leading people who report to you.
Like leading up the best results in leading laterally is when you can get other people to do what you want but think it is their own idea. To do this you need to use a tool out of the sci-fi writers toolkit, “show not tell”. The best sci-fi writers create their worlds through story. They dont spend a lot of time explaining the mechanics of their universe, they just tell the story. As you read you begin to understand the how the universe functions, but it is never said explicitly.
Your peers will not appreciate your running around telling them that their ideas stink and that you have better ones. Everyone thinks their ideas are good. If they thought they were bad they would ditch them for new ones. People rarely change because others tell them to, they have to want to change themselves. You can get them to want to change by showing your own transformation based on new ideas. Show, don’t tell.
To be able to show transformation you have to get really good at measuring things. Developers love their data and so you need standard and creative ways to measure things. Standard ways of measurement show you understand the general benchmarks in software development. Creative ways tell an interesting story.
Leading Down
Leading down is the simplest form of leadership, but it is not easy. There is much more we are going to get into about how to lead down. The important thing to note is that the lessons you learn from leading up and laterally will apply to leading down as well.
For example, even though you can just tell people what to do if you are their boss it is not that effective. In some cases it can even be counter effective. Like when you are leading laterally, you need to persuade the people who report to you. They need to understand why they are doing what they are doing and not just do it “because I said so”.
Similar to leading up, you need to have tactical empathy. You need to understand what its like to be in your team’s shoes. If you are putting into place a process you need to think about what it will be like to be the person who has to run the process every day. You have to understand what really matters to them and see how you can work to make sure they dont have any blockers keeping them from making those things happen.
Just Lead
There are leadership opportunities everywhere. As you prepare to make your move into management you need to see everything through the lens of leadership. By seeing problems as leadership problems you will start to think of yourself as a leader. Viewing yourself as a leader is and important step. It will give you confidence when you are given formal opportunities as a leader.
If you want to get crazy with it you can create your own leadership opportunities outside of work. Between $10-$20 you can hire a personal assistant through upwork to help you keep your life organized. Since leading requires practice, this can be a great way to learn how to delegate tasks to someone on a regular basis.
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