Working with many tech leaders, I’ve come to realize that while each one of you is a unique and special snowflake, if you squint you can notice certain archetypes of behavior. One of the most critical aspects of that categorization is your stance: how you comport yourself, with the CEO and the executive team. I’ve started referring to these with simple electric circuit terms. Are you an open circuit? Resistor? No-op?
Stance Explained
A somewhat philosophical question that I sometimes pose to clients is plainly: if you were gone, how would anyone notice? I’m not talking about the meetings you won’t be able to attend, but about the actual things that would not happen the same because you were not there. You default stance is your automatic behavior, if you allow it to take place.
That’s when leaders work with a Groundhog Day sort of mentality: whenever there’s a change requested, if someone needs something, or an issue rises, you can already know that Bob will automatically pushback/do whatever asked/etc. That’s the default stance: when people can already assume what you’re going to say. Most such stances limit us. Let’s view the most common types I see, to help you spot whether you make this mistake as well.
Electric Circuits of Leadership
Perhaps it’s just my geeky brain, but for a while now I’ve intuitively referred to these stances with the terminology of electric circuits. Even though I only learned the basics in university (and therefore excuse any mistakes, fellow geeks), I find it a worthy analogy.
Think of an electric circuit that’s in charge of handling different requests, decisions, and business issues. You’re one of the nodes on that circuit. If you have a simplistic default stance, you usually do one of these as a knee-jerk reaction:
Noop: The no-operation (sometimes also written no-op). No one would even know you’re gone, because you have no impact, good or bad. When you’re asked to do something, you just relay the same request to your team. You don’t add any clarity, you don’t shape it, you don’t push back. Are you even there?
Open circuit: Now comes the person that everyone notices, because it’s the leader that blocks everything. I’ve written a lot in the past about the constant deflectors. Those who view any request as a new challenge: how fast can they bury the initiative? Not out of malice, but because they are change-resistant, because they want to “protect” their teams, for reasons of adhering to a process, or whatever excuse you tell yourself. At the end of the day, you’re acting more like an anchor holding the org in place than a catalyst of improvement and acceleration.
NOT gate: Like the sitcom child that always has to say the opposite. The cynical senior engineer that always plays devil’s advocate and makes the case to do the contrast of what others propose. There is value in playing devil’s advocate from time to time, but as with everything else in this article, once it is you default stance, people stop listening to you. They know you object to everything no matter what, so why even try to understand your reasoning this time?
Resistor: Not as bad as the previous one, but you’re just automatically opposed to changes until pushed enough. Your peers know they’ll have to endure a long meeting or two of objections, but that in the end you’ll change your mind once you’ve gotten used to the idea. You’re a no-op with overhead, mate! Some people mistakenly see this as due diligence or “making sure they are respected.” When you mix the theater of doing something with actually doing it, you get lost.
Be the Transformer
No, not one of those cool robots from the movies. But the person who isn’t always falling for the same default behavior. Someone who looks at each decision by itself and deciding how to treat it.
I like Friends and have watched all the episodes several times, but one cannot avoid noticing how in the last two seasons the characters become an exaggerated version of what they were at the beginning of the show. Over the course of the show, they got distilled into caricatures. We do the same when we allow ourselves to become automatic responders.
Put some thought into it. You’re not an LLM. Yet.