8 ms·

Over the years a test I've often used is asking "how does this person respond to being challenged/questioned?" A great leader tends to embrace the fact that som

by freddyc 10y ago

Over the years a test I've often used is asking "how does this person respond to being challenged/questioned?" A great leader tends to embrace the fact that someone is asking "why" and uses it as an opportunity to learn and potentially convert the questioning party (if they're questioning something in the first place, then you haven't nailed it 100%). A weak leader who doesn't have confidence in their abilities sees the challenge as a personal attack and reacts in a knee-jerk fashion (often, though not always, resulting in a termination). If you can't reconcile differing opinions and convert those with opposing views to you then you're doomed as a leader and odds are your company/team will experience high turnover. Obviously there's a whole range of other traits that make great leaders, but I've found people that fail this test are almost always terrible leaders who others don't want to work for.

jotux 10y ago
Remind me of this quote from Meditations: >If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.
- jhanschoo 10y ago
  Since you're quoting from Meditations, I hope you will entertain me if I go on a tangent. I find Meditations too disorganized to learn from it, and contextualize what it says. Do you have any advice?
  - jotux 10y ago
    I think of Meditations like a daily journal or notebook. It's one of the few books I keep around my desk and occasionally just flip to a random page and read. Individual passages have a lot of meaning so often I'll isolate one and really think about it or talk to my wife about it for a while. In general, though, I agree it's not very organized or easy to read. If you're looking for a better entry into stoicism I'd suggest A Guide to a Good Life[1]. It's a structured overview of stoicism with straight forward advice on actually using stoic ideas in your own life. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195374614/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195...
coffeemug 10y ago
I often see the opposite effect -- immature people who challenge leaders for the sake of challenging them (perhaps to perform this test, perhaps because they want to appear smarter than their managers, perhaps for other reasons). They ask irrelevant questions, slow everything down, and have little intuition about what's important to the business. Most of these terminations I've seen haven't been about treating being challenged as a personal attack. They've been about getting smug weenies out of the organization so people can actually do their work.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  There's a balance here. I had a manager at Google who once said the people who were terminated at Google were those who "question too much and code too little", i.e. you can always question your leaders, but you have to be willing to buckle down and do the work if their answers are reasonable. I don't think there's anything wrong with questioning a leaders' decisions, but if you're doing it all the time, you really ought to consider whether you should be at that organization at all. It's like a therapist friend said about one of my (poor) dating choices once: "Look, either you trust her or you don't, but if you're constantly second-guessing her, you ought to evaluate whether this is a relationship you want to be in or not. It's not fair to her, and it's not fair to you." Same applies to corporations: ultimately you either trust your leaders or you don't, and if you don't you should do both yourself and the organization the favor of finding one you do trust.
  - vtange 10y ago
    Wow this is a really good comment. Great analogy with relationships and all. Sometimes I think people naturally reflect who they are; i.e. a thief will naturally be aware/paranoid of other thieves snooping around his stuff. So I guess someone with trust issues probably sees himself as unfaithful?
    - SolaceQuantum 10y ago
      I would be wary about blatant comments like this. One can be paranoid because they have had a history of being abused intimately within one's own personal life, or stolen from, or have grown up in a neighbourhood with a lot of crime, or have a mental illness such as PTSD, Schizophrenia, anxiety, etc. There are a variety of reasons someone has trust issues, and only one of them is "because they can't be trusted".
treenyc 10y ago
The knee-jerk reaction you are talking about is what is consider by some scholars as an Ontological Functional Constraints [1]. The constraint is considered deadly for the effective exercise of leadership. The constrains can however be removed or at least relaxed in a reliable way. :) 1). https://ssrn.com/abstract=1392406 https://ssrn.com/abstract=1392406
concinds 10y ago
Put differently: leaders are comfortable with conflict, and know how to resolve it when it arises. Silencing it doesn't resolve it. This requires good management skills, good listening skills, and problem-solving skills. Great leaders will make sure not only to be comfortable with conflict, but to make the their whole team knows this fact, so they come forward. Funnily, in my experience the people that say "diversity results in better products and decision-making" (dominant view today) focus on the wrong thing, and don't realize how important conflict is, or that conflict is what leads to better decision-making. Maybe communication and leadership should be taught in schools? Certainly in universities. More great leaders probably means less need for bloated middle management too.
- alphadevx 10y ago
  Great comment, only tweak I would suggest is replacing "conflict" with "peer review" in terms of language, as I think people are more comfortable with that. I'm learning as a leader that I am reluctant to accept a proposal unless it has been thoroughly peer reviewed for gaps or weakness, and if there is some disagreement about the approach, then great let me hear that to. Rigorous peer review is very healthy, the trick is to get people to attack the proposal and not the proposer ;-)
jghn 10y ago
I struggle with this. My reaction to being challenged, even before finding myself in a leadership role, is always the knee jerk that you describe. After some reflection, often quite quickly once I can stop and think about the matter, I revert to your other scenario. I've been trying to get myself to a place where even if I'm reacting in a knee jerk fashion that at least I'm keeping it to myself but man, it's hard to overcome something that's effectively instinctual.
- acrynx 10y ago
  It might be a sign for you being too ego-centric in general. It could also be completely unrelated, though. But there definitely seems to be some kind of fear at the root of that.
  - jghn 10y ago
    In my case I believe it's a little bit of both, or one of the two managing to manifest as the other.
- grogs 10y ago
  Sidenote: Mindfulness (AKA vipassana or insight) meditation can give you that gap between feeling something, an emotion in this case, and responding to it. It's potentially useful for a lot of usecases - the NHS have been offering mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for a while now - but what you're talking about sounds very relevant!
  - jghn 10y ago
    Thanks I will look into this

by freddyc 10y ago

jotux 10y ago

Remind me of this quote from Meditations: >If any man is able to convince me and show me that I do not think or act right, I will gladly change; for I seek the truth by which no man was ever injured. But he is injured who abides in his error and ignorance.

jhanschoo 10y ago
Since you're quoting from Meditations, I hope you will entertain me if I go on a tangent. I find Meditations too disorganized to learn from it, and contextualize what it says. Do you have any advice?
- jotux 10y ago
  I think of Meditations like a daily journal or notebook. It's one of the few books I keep around my desk and occasionally just flip to a random page and read. Individual passages have a lot of meaning so often I'll isolate one and really think about it or talk to my wife about it for a while. In general, though, I agree it's not very organized or easy to read. If you're looking for a better entry into stoicism I'd suggest A Guide to a Good Life[1]. It's a structured overview of stoicism with straight forward advice on actually using stoic ideas in your own life. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195374614/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/Guide-Good-Life-Ancient-Stoic/dp/0195...

coffeemug 10y ago

I often see the opposite effect -- immature people who challenge leaders for the sake of challenging them (perhaps to perform this test, perhaps because they want to appear smarter than their managers, perhaps for other reasons). They ask irrelevant questions, slow everything down, and have little intuition about what's important to the business. Most of these terminations I've seen haven't been about treating being challenged as a personal attack. They've been about getting smug weenies out of the organization so people can actually do their work.

nostrademons 10y ago
There's a balance here. I had a manager at Google who once said the people who were terminated at Google were those who "question too much and code too little", i.e. you can always question your leaders, but you have to be willing to buckle down and do the work if their answers are reasonable. I don't think there's anything wrong with questioning a leaders' decisions, but if you're doing it all the time, you really ought to consider whether you should be at that organization at all. It's like a therapist friend said about one of my (poor) dating choices once: "Look, either you trust her or you don't, but if you're constantly second-guessing her, you ought to evaluate whether this is a relationship you want to be in or not. It's not fair to her, and it's not fair to you." Same applies to corporations: ultimately you either trust your leaders or you don't, and if you don't you should do both yourself and the organization the favor of finding one you do trust.
- vtange 10y ago
  Wow this is a really good comment. Great analogy with relationships and all. Sometimes I think people naturally reflect who they are; i.e. a thief will naturally be aware/paranoid of other thieves snooping around his stuff. So I guess someone with trust issues probably sees himself as unfaithful?
  - SolaceQuantum 10y ago
    I would be wary about blatant comments like this. One can be paranoid because they have had a history of being abused intimately within one's own personal life, or stolen from, or have grown up in a neighbourhood with a lot of crime, or have a mental illness such as PTSD, Schizophrenia, anxiety, etc. There are a variety of reasons someone has trust issues, and only one of them is "because they can't be trusted".

treenyc 10y ago

The knee-jerk reaction you are talking about is what is consider by some scholars as an Ontological Functional Constraints [1]. The constraint is considered deadly for the effective exercise of leadership. The constrains can however be removed or at least relaxed in a reliable way. :) 1). https://ssrn.com/abstract=1392406 https://ssrn.com/abstract=1392406

concinds 10y ago

Put differently: leaders are comfortable with conflict, and know how to resolve it when it arises. Silencing it doesn't resolve it. This requires good management skills, good listening skills, and problem-solving skills. Great leaders will make sure not only to be comfortable with conflict, but to make the their whole team knows this fact, so they come forward. Funnily, in my experience the people that say "diversity results in better products and decision-making" (dominant view today) focus on the wrong thing, and don't realize how important conflict is, or that conflict is what leads to better decision-making. Maybe communication and leadership should be taught in schools? Certainly in universities. More great leaders probably means less need for bloated middle management too.

alphadevx 10y ago
Great comment, only tweak I would suggest is replacing "conflict" with "peer review" in terms of language, as I think people are more comfortable with that. I'm learning as a leader that I am reluctant to accept a proposal unless it has been thoroughly peer reviewed for gaps or weakness, and if there is some disagreement about the approach, then great let me hear that to. Rigorous peer review is very healthy, the trick is to get people to attack the proposal and not the proposer ;-)

jghn 10y ago

I struggle with this. My reaction to being challenged, even before finding myself in a leadership role, is always the knee jerk that you describe. After some reflection, often quite quickly once I can stop and think about the matter, I revert to your other scenario. I've been trying to get myself to a place where even if I'm reacting in a knee jerk fashion that at least I'm keeping it to myself but man, it's hard to overcome something that's effectively instinctual.

acrynx 10y ago
It might be a sign for you being too ego-centric in general. It could also be completely unrelated, though. But there definitely seems to be some kind of fear at the root of that.
- jghn 10y ago
  In my case I believe it's a little bit of both, or one of the two managing to manifest as the other.
grogs 10y ago
Sidenote: Mindfulness (AKA vipassana or insight) meditation can give you that gap between feeling something, an emotion in this case, and responding to it. It's potentially useful for a lot of usecases - the NHS have been offering mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for a while now - but what you're talking about sounds very relevant!
- jghn 10y ago
  Thanks I will look into this