Ticky-tacky Chickenshit Leadership Politics

Trying to help solve hair coherent strategic product leadership problems is an excellent and fun job. I loved every opportunity to navigate those challenges successfully and hated every time my efforts were obliterated, or I was angrily fired for suggesting empirical approaches to prioritization.

“You can’t have empiricism because nothing is predictable and knowledge work is SO COMPLEX!!!”

This excuse about knowledge work being complex has allowed sociopathic leaders to shirk their responsibility to their reports. So thick and heavy are the politics in executive leadership that there’s scarcely enough time to engage in strategy and decision-making that should be the primary focus of senior leadership.

I once asked a beleaguered director friend who badly wanted to do her actual job but was hindered by back-to-back meetings every day. Most leaders in these organizations are triple-booked every day or worse. When I asked her why she had to be in all these tactical, or worse, completely pointless, meetings, she said they were mandatory.

When I proposed working on a succession plan by delegating some of these meetings to senior managers who reported to her, she agreed that’d be a great idea but ultimately an impossible one to implement because of the reputational damage she’d suffer by doing so.

You see, the reason she had to be in all those meetings wasn’t that her input was valued in them or that the information in those meetings would help her run her organization better; it was optics. It was compliance. Somebody above her would have excoriated her for delegating any of her meetings.

So much of what happens in leadership is this kind of ticky-tacky chickenshit politics. All the platitudes about “getting shit done” and “never let anyone waste your time in useless meetings” are just that.

I was teaching product leaders about developing empirical proxy metrics for value, and the product leaders loved the ideas and were on board with creating these metrics. Organizations constantly whinge about being unable to get important work done, yet none are willing to establish meaningful prioritization patterns.

One director I worked with, speaking for his VP, to which he was very obsequious, inadvertently said the quiet part out loud.

”The problem with this method is that it’s empirical. Having the teams understand the prioritization approach and the costs of delay incurred from making such tradeoff decisions creates a problem for the VP. Sometimes, the VP promises something to another VP. That promise might allocate resources (his word not mine) away from something empirically more valuable. Still, he has to see that it gets done so he doesn’t suffer reputationally from letting down the other VP. The VP should never have to explain to the team why he wants this done.”

In my experience, a lack of responsible governance of senior leaders is the fundamental problem with prioritization and getting work done in an effective orderly manner.

There are many ways in which these politics cost enterprises more money than inefficient programmers or freeriding employees ever do.

I will write more on this in the coming weeks, but in the interest of brevity, I will leave it there.

More to come…