Many other types of leadership can work just as well depending on the team.
The biggest downside to servant leaders is, IME, they split their focus and are often not held accountable.
For example if you prioritize growth as a servant leader are you held responsible if your team has a higher than average turnover? Are you rewarded if you have a lower than average turnover?
Is that more important than project success to the business?
Is this clearly defined anywhere for your project?
At this point in my career think the problem is always that somewhere in the chain of command is someone who sets arbitrary deadlines and then keeps changing the spec.
As an engineer I hated this- we would just get more and more work piled on us, arbitrary and counter productive of dienright stupid changes. Product managers who didn’t understand the user and would just throw random ideas in there without vetting.
When I got up to being CTO, I discovered my CEO didn’t give a flip about any kind of reality, just demanded more, kept making changes and wasn’t interested in hearing about how work related to schedule. He literally didn’t care that he made it impossible to deliver the product, and just blamed development (and eventually me.). My deal was structured such that I was ok being the fall guy but the abuse those engineers suffered was pointless.
This is not the only time I’ve seen this. In 20+ years I’ve seen it at companies like Microsoft and Amazon (from Bezos directly- the most incompetent CEO ever.) I’ve seen it at many startups too.
It seems non-technical “leaders” don’t give a shit about the fact software takes time. They think it should be trivial to change anything anytime.
Basically I’ve stopped working for other people because of this.
It’s not that software is hard to manage- it’s that MBA types have sero respect for the engineering department and just want to abuse engineers.
If you have a good situation it’s because somebody between you and the MBA asshole is protecting you. Or your CEO is an engineer.
My rule is, no more working for CEOs who aren’t real engineers (had done lie about that too. No your HTML page in high school without do much as a lick of JavaScript does not make you “technical.”)
Exactly! I just wrote a comment like this. When I work for "servant leader" leaders, the team often lacks direction and all decisions are made very inefficiently.
The biggest downside to servant leaders is, IME, they split their focus and are often not held accountable.
For example if you prioritize growth as a servant leader are you held responsible if your team has a higher than average turnover? Are you rewarded if you have a lower than average turnover?
Is that more important than project success to the business?
Is this clearly defined anywhere for your project?