In the 2010s, the morality tale was that it was all about empowering engineers as a fundamental good. Sure, I can get excited for that, but I don’t really believe that narrative: it happened because hiring was competitive. In the 2020s, the morality tale is that bureaucratic middle management have made organizations stale and inefficient. The lack of experts has crippled organizational efficiency. Once again, I can get behind that–there’s truth here–but the much larger drivers aren’t about morality, it’s about ZIRP-ending and optimism about productivity gains from AI tooling. The conclusion here is clear: the industry will want different things from you as it evolves, and it will tell you that each of those shifts is because of some complex moral change, but it’s pretty much always about business realities changing. If you take any current morality tale as true, then you’re setting yourself up to be severely out of position when the industry shifts again in a few years, because “good leadership” is just a fad.
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Goodhart’s Law is one of those ideas that’s so obviously true but is maddeningly difficult to address. You can’t simply assert that simple metrics are bad proxies for nuanced concepts without also aligning incentives to reflect this.
You see this in retention and performance evaluation decisions all the time. A classic example is the (excellent!) advice to “focus on growing impact, not headcount.” And yet, hiring decisions and recent layoffs often revert to simplistic discussions about if a given leader’s org is “big enough” to justify a title or whether they have “enough” direct reports to justify retention in a layoff.
Everyone knows that org size is a bad proxy for actual impact. It rewards empire builders, punishes those who take the “impact over headcount” to heart, and yet here we are.
We also see the opposite happening lately. Many firms are pushing leaders to be more agile, more hands-on, and less focused on organizational leadership. People who have led large orgs aren’t in demand because they are seen as “just” management.
Incentives are misaligned in both cases. Leading a large, complex organization does require different skills than leading a small team of ICs. And, building unnecessarily large organizations has often been rewarded with titles, status, and compensation.
All of this is to say that we do a disservice to each other by repeating the same advice without also working to build cultures that actually embrace nuance and context over simple proxies we know carry limited information.