Great teams quit good leaders

Happy Friday!

I've started applying to podcasts to speak at. If you know of any that focus on engineering leadership, I'd love to know what your favorites are. Similarly, if there are newsletters you subscribe to, let me know.

One of the topics I'm pitching is, "Great teams quit good leaders." Not only does the title turn heads, but it's true, and I'm going to give you the goods first.

Just about everyone has a memory of a terrible manager who was one of the main reasons they quit a job. Maybe it was at some dead-end job where the bar was so low you'd trip on it. Then again, maybe it was at a job in your chosen career.

One sneaky bit about this is that we all knew this manager was problematic and felt that we would absolutely do better than they can even if we had no training. That's how bad they were.

This realization about how bad they are relative to our expectations is important.

Now let me tip the scales a bit. Let's say you build a truly exceptional team. The kind that is so good you'll never see a team that good again. They outperform every other team by impossible margins in every meaningful way and metric. They partner with folks and genuinely make things better. They see problems and provide thoughtful solutions. They self-manage almost everything.

They're that good.

The problem is that their expectations change. They know how good they are and now see that everyone around them isn't nearly that good. They see that they have to spend extra time making up for the weaknesses that are now surrounding them and dragging them down.

They start having to manage their peers and even their leaders. They do this to preserve their excellence and not compromise.

Now, there is a healthy version of this and an unhealthy version. This newsletter is the unhealthy version.

This team accomplishes what they do with almost no authority, but when the folks with actual authority intervene, things start to go sideways.

Suddenly, that senior leader, stakeholder, or other person with authority to alter the team's direction requires the team to take a different direction. The team sees that this new direction is significantly worse.

Now the folks on the team have a conundrum. Work in a place where they aren't allowed to do their best work, or take their chances at a new company.

There is a lot that goes into this decision, and I'm not getting into all of it here, but I've seen this play out before. I've seen 50% of folks quit when they realized how good they can be, and their bosses took that away.

This leads to great teams quitting good leaders. The leader who used to be good just isn't good enough anymore.

Which brings me to this: If you ask your teams to become great, you have to become great yourself.

Sincerely,

Ryan