‘Becoming a Technical Leader’
by Gerald M. Weinberg

Definition

Leadership is “the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered.”
I.e. leading the process, not the people

The M.O.I. Model of Leadership

  • Motivation - the trophies or trouble, the push or pull that moves the people involved
  • Organization - the existing structure that enables the ideas to be worked through into practice
  • Ideas/Innovation - the seeds, the image of what will become

The Process of Innovation

  • Understand the problem
  • Manage the flow of ideas
  • Maintain quality

Growth/development in the real world always involves: practice, stepwise improvement, and occasional regressions. It’s a long, noisy process, but it’s the only way to get better.

Innovation

The Three Great Obstacles to Innovation

  • Self-blindness, concealing your own behavior, so you have no chance of changing
  • No-Problem Syndrome, convincing you that you already know the answer to all problems
  • Belief in the central dogma of academic psychology, blinding you to alternative solutions, even ones you could generate without help from anyone else

Writing in a journal (even just for five minutes a day) can be a great tool for developing self-awareness.

The problem-solving leader’s central dogma: “Any real problem has one more solution, which nobody has found-yet.”

Great leaders can recover from failure, because they are driven by an underlying vision. What is important to you? What change would you like to bring about in the world?

Motivation

Communicating with other people is hard, and you will fail unless you try to see things from their point of view. This is the first great obstacle to motivating others.

Satir’s Interaction Model

  1. sensory input - What did the other person say?
  2. interpretation - What do I think they meant?
  3. feeling - How do I feel about [interpretation of what interlocutor just said]
  4. feeling about feeling - How do I feel about that, based on my existing sense of self-worth?
  5. defense - Does [feeling about feeling] require me to defend myself?
  6. rules for commenting - By now a response is starting to form, which will need to be filtered through the social mores in play. (E.g. I may respond differently to the same comment, based on whether if came from a co-worker, my wife, or a friend.)
  7. outcome - What is the observable result of the process above?

This is all fleshed out much more in the book, but the point is that this process a) happens very quickly, b) includes several different steps, c) each of which is error-prone and/or based on asymmetrical information. Any error propagates forward into subsequent steps, and that’s before you even hear the result of my internal process, which is then fed back through your model as sensory input, causing you to react in some way which will then…

Theory of mind is hard.

Some Lessons about Helping

  • Wanting to help people may be a noble motive, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
  • If someone doesn’t want your help, you will never succeed in helping them, no matter how great you are.
  • Effective help can only start with mutual agreement on a clear definition of the problem.
  • Always make sure that the person you are trying to help, actually wants your help.
  • Even when someone agrees that they want your help, that agreement is not usually a lifetime contract.
  • People who want to help other people generally expect to get something for themselves, although they may not be aware of it.
  • Most people understand that helpers are (on some level) selfish, but also think they are exceptions to the rule.
  • Attempts to help are often interpreted as attempts to interfere.
  • No matter how strange it may look, most people are actually trying to be helpful most of the time.

Power is not a thing that you can own or control; it’s a relationship. It’s also useful to think about power is also a tool that you can use to change reality: “E.T. just really wanted to go home. What do you want?”

Just like every other interpersonal skill, Weinberg says that power is fundamentally about self-esteem. If you don’t value yourself and your goals, how will you convince anyone else to help you reach them? NB that this is the same as asking: how can you lead?

The chapter on ‘Power, Imperfection, and Congruence’ gets into a lot of Self-Concept stuff. It also brings in the Stoic idea that sometimes reality is painful, but more often our internal reactions to what is happening out in reality are actually causing us to suffer.

Organization

Power can be converted from one form to another. E.g. you can exchange technical power for organizational/political power at work, if people trust your judgment and decide to follow your lead based on perceived competence in previous interactions.

The structure of an organization will dramatically effect how it makes decisions, and the quality of those decisions. Consider individual initiative vs. strong leaders, voting vs. consensus-building.

Obstacles to Effective Organizing

  • Playing the Big Game
  • Organizing people as if they were machines
  • Doing the work yourself
  • Rewarding ineffective organizing

“A problem-solving leader’s entire orientation is toward creating an environment in which everyone can be solving problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions, rather than personally solving problems, making decisions, and implementing those decisions.”

Transformation

Leadership is a skill like any other. You can test yourself, and improve with practice.

Being a leader requires an extensive support system. Asking for help isn’t a sign of strength exactly, but it’s better than failing to ask for help when you need it.