But overall I agree with at least enough of the points to find it is a decent post worth a read.

> Leader: "Exactly. Convince me it's the right move."

> Leader: "Is it the right thing to do?"

I think the general approach is the right one - but I can say, I personally find it extremely annoying if superiors talk like this. For me it comes across as wanting to play mind games or leaving me with an unclear state of responsibility.

By all means, give me more autonomy to choose tasks to work on and also expect a good justification from me. But at the end, I'd like at least clear feedback if my proposal was accepted and we should be moving in that direction (and I should be getting to work) or not.

The article already starts with a strong assumption that I would challenge.

I wrote about this, because after a long career I've come to see that most people have no idea what leadership is, or how it works: https://thinkhuman.com/the-leader-ship/

When I get to the recommendations to “ban” words and force engineers to speak in certain phrases I start having flashbacks to all of the bad managers from the past who read a few management books and thought those tricks were going to make them a good manager. Like when the management book trend was to write user stories in the form of "As I user, I want to" and my manager would force us to write "As I user, I don't want to the app to crash when I" when filing bug reports because that's what their book said we should do. This type of management guidance is not good, and it doesn’t produce good results.

Yes, it’s good to direct teams to express intent. No, it’s not good to ban phrases and force your team to speak in prescribed sentence structures. This is how good advice turns into cargo cult rituals that everyone hates.

come on. this is such a dilution. it screams refusal to take responsibility for anything. diversifying responsibility so that no one is held accountable. Or a massive lack of understanding why and how naturally humans organize using a hierarchical structure.

This is a cowardly way of managing people, a leader blaming those under him/her for not also being "leaders" when they fail, that's what it seems like to me, and how I've seen this mindset abused.

I don't care if you're a two person team, one follows and the other leads. the problem is actually the opposite of what this guy describes usually. A refusal to accept hierarchy, and an immaturity resulting from not being able to understand, that leadership comes with responsibility, not just rights, as does following.

There is this massive ideological disease in corporate america that I won't rant about here, but what is needed is managers with balls (regardless of their sex) and gumption, who can say "they buck stops with me, I'm responsible for the outcome". Not everyone else because "we're all leaders" not hired consultants you hired to c.y.a., not the "lack of talent",etc..

If you're in a team where someone says "all reviews and prs go through me" and they have they seniority and experience to back that up, count yourself fortunate!

It's not secret for example that most successful open source projects are run by a BDFL (not the least of which is the Linux Kernel).

Everyone in the car can't be responsible for driving it, same as they can't for navigation. With the approach in this post, my guess is instead of driving the car, proponents will be back-seat drivers.

Two more things: everyone in a team must trust each other to do their part, that includes the leader when they lead, and team members when they fulfill their tasks. In order to lead, you have to know where and how to lead others, the problem is people are put into leadership positions in corporate america using the system of "promotion until incompetency", where if a person is competent at all they are promoted, and they end up in positions where they have the least amount of competency, earn the most, and thus are at the highest risk of elimination, and this breeds: the modern middle manager that strives to spread responsibility that comes with their position so that they can take credit for success of their team, but have plenty of blame they can throw around for failures. Even when they want to do the opposite of that in earnest, it becomes impractical.

For everyone to be a leader, the way human psychology works needs to change. what you end up with is informal hierarchy immune from accountability, transparency and scrutiny by outsiders. Good people getting frustrated and leaving your team, and those who can manipulate the informal power structure well and help with the blame spreading, succeeding and staying

Failing upwards as some call it. And then enshittification. I haven't solved the part where things are actually working in a repeating cycle and will all be good some day.