Shit happens. What do you do when it does?
For a long time in my career, I have been fascinated by the topic of what makes someone a good leader. By no means there’s a single definition. In fact, it’s very situational, and no matter what the attribute we identify, it’s guaranteed that we can find counterexamples where some leader did the exact opposite and was also successful. However I did develop a series of observations on what best leaders tend to behave, and will gradually cover these.
Today is the first topic I want to cover, which involves what a leader does when shit happens.
Early in my career at Microsoft / Google, I first hand observed how top leaders jumped in whenever outages happened. I clearly remembered one Sunday at 3am, on the live call debugging a server outage, I heard the eng VP suggesting the team to check on some dependency to verify whether that’s also broken. In fact, he’s been listening on the call for a while, without saying much. But when he noticed the team missed some information, he voiced it on the call, and indeed that was the root cause. Once we mitigated the root cause, and resolved the outage, he said “good night everyone; take good rest and we’ll follow up Monday morning” before we ended the call.
I’ve also observed eng leaders who never joined live debugging discussions, since in their minds, they trusted wholeheartedly that their delegates were capable of handling the emergencies.
I debated in my head which approach would be better. In the end, my personal preference is towards leaders who roll up their sleeves when things are tough.
It’s not that these roll-up-sleeves leaders don’t trust their delegates. They do, but they are still ready to hands-on lead when it’s needed.
Going back to the above example I gave. The moment I heard the VP’s voice suggesting we check on the specific dependency, I immediately felt a sense of relief and certainty. I knew everyone on the call got a morale boost right then; I knew we’d have any resources needed to tackle the problem quickly. The team got stronger because the VP was there. The following Monday, when we were chatting about the issue, everyone commented how much they respected the VP being there.
One thing to note though, the VP didn’t start to call the shots from the moment he joined the call. I’ve seen those leaders too, who are eager to join live debugging but will take over shotcalling the moment they get involved. I personally don’t think this is the best approach, since it tips too much towards top-down culture.
When shit happens, good leaders roll up their sleeves, pick up a shovel, stand by to observe the situation and how the team handles the situation, and jump in to serve or lead the moment it becomes necessary.
That's a great example of leadership. If leaders are able to roll up their sleeves and lead by example, it tells others that they understand what happens in the frontline, hence makes it easier for people to have more confidences in the decisions they make.