Over past two decades (Oh man, it is starting to be a long time!), I have worked with a lot of leaders. I have liked some and had to tolerate others. Some of the leaders I had to tolerate were liked by the "establishment" - i.e. the top executives. So, I got confused - are these leaders actually competent and just happen to be difficult to work with? If that were the case, it was me who had to embrace these difficult leaders for the cause of the greater good. But then it is not a given that establishment always made the right choices.
I had heard that some lumanaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had been tough bosses. But is it that some leaders I encountered were only being nasty without getting us the upsides of the lumanaries?
After a lot of meditation and contemplation and cogitation, the concept of Lalta Leadership Style® dawned upon me. And I hereby bring to you this test of how to distinguish between leaders who are tough and effective vs just toxic.
When I was a child, my father had been provided a car and a driver by the government. One of the drivers we had was called Lalta. Now, assume that there is a Lalta who can speak fluent English and is confident about himself. However, Lalta does not have any knowledge about the domain that your company works in - he is a driver by profession.
Lalta leadership style test is - what fraction of work done by your leader can also be accomplished by Lalta?
If this fraction is uncomfortably high (say 50%+) then your leader is a lalta leader.Let's now look at some of the Lalta leadership traits.
Lalta understands that hard work is a prerequisite to success. So, Lalta often emphasises hard work. Corollary is that Lalta is vocal against people when he sees some people are not putting their weight in the mission. Note that this does not requires any domain knowledge, so Lalta can execute this very well.
This is also easy for Lalta to execute on. When timelines gets missed, Lalta makes his displeasure known to all. Lalta asks the team to reflect why it missed the deadline, and that it should do better job next time. Note that Lalta does not get into details of why the deadline was missed - that is too much of nitty gritty for Lalta who has wide scope. He would just berate people, ask them to do better estimation next time, tell them that business is adversely impacted, and then move on to next meeting.
One Lalta would never attend standups, but dropped in one standup meeting randomly. There was a project which had due date in past - as soon as we started discussing the project - Lalta asked why it was not delayed. Real technical discussions were beyond him, so this was the way he contributed in his cameo appearance in the standup.
Sometimes, Lalta can just ask some "whys" - particularly some Laltas may have done MBAs and they may know the trick of Five whys. Using such tricks, Lalta can show superficial concern of trying to get to the root of the problem.
When inevitably some systems go bad, it provides Lalta a great opportunity to exhibit his leadership skills. In a widely circulated email chain he can talk things like "Thorough execution is necessary for us to win", or that "Can you provide an RCA of the incident?", or "We need to get better at QA". Note that Lalta would not provide concrete directions about how better QA should be done, or change specific processes. Lalta would only provide the lecture and move on. If similar incident happens later, it is the junior people who have not learnt the lesson - Lalta had done his part.
Lalta does OKR planning - this term looks very good. Now how to do that - while avoiding any domain knowledge?
Lalta would ask all his product managers to come up with a list of things that they would like to do, and estimate business impact in dollars and also the effort in man-days. Never mind neither the impact in dollars nor the effort can actually be calculated. But Lalta insists that they do it. On the other hand Lalta asks engineering team to provide the man-days they have available. Next Lalta sits with a large number of particpants - looks at the projects and takes calls about which projects should be done based on the impact estimates and effort estimates and the avaialble bandwidth.
Some of Lalta's reports get creative and spend large amount of time in getting impact estimates - they would do surveys, or use data analysis to find business of the feature that does not exist yet. They would also pester engineering to find out how long would something take when what needs to be done is not known to anybody.
As the projects are inordinately delayed from the estimates, as well as business impact does not get realized, Lalta asks the team to get better at estimates and moves on to the OKR of next quarter.
Suppose all members of the team are busy with important projects, and a new, important, ad-hoc task comes up. The team would ask Lalta that they are all busy and asks him to take the call as to which of the existing tasks should be deprioritised. Now, Lalta does not know which task to deprioritise - so Lalta simply asks "who is the right person to do the ad-hoc task" - Let's say the team responds with "Ramesh". Lalta would ask "What is Ramesh currently doing?" Team would respond - Ramesh is currently working on feature X. Then Lalta would say - Can Ramesh work in parallel on this task while doing X? Or that "Can Ramesh work over the weekend and finish the tasks"
This way Lalta has cleverly avoided prioritisation, and simultaneously emphasized the value of hard work - all the while not needing any domain knowledge.