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No Issues Please!
One of the differences between a leader and a manager is the way that they handle status reports from team members. When a leader receives a status report from a team member, she zeros in on the issues/roadblocks section and gets immediately to work. She talks to the team member to ferret out the problem specifics. For those issues that are out of the control of the team member, the leader becomes proactive and goes out and resolves the problem. It’s that simple.
What does a manager do with an issue? A manager ignores it. Hell, it’s work and thus, it’s outside the scope of her responsibility. After a few weeks of submitting issues and seeing no action taken, team members flip the bozo bit on the manager. Trust and respect, which are hard to earn but easy to lose, go right out the window.
Leaders rule, managers drool.
Upstream Bullies
In the aerospace and defense industry, a system engineer is the equivalent of a business analyst. They’re supposed to specify and record clear and unambiguous software requirements for the software development team, and then help the team get the requirements right.
In my experience, excellent system engineers are very hard to come by. The vast majority of them drop open-ended one line bombshells like “The system shall detect targets with a probability of detection of 95%” on the development team. Then these “shallocators” disconnect and distance themselves from the programming team and morph into glorified project managers, but without the responsibility. I call these types of system engineers upstream bullies because they’re always looking over your shoulder and telling you how to do your job even though they’ve never written anything bigger than “Hello World!”. Upstream bullies also demand that programmers dot the I’s and cross the T’s even though their own work, which is the input to the software team’s work, is a useless POS.
Ever wonder why you frequently read about large software-intensive government projects that are massively late and over budget? Besides poor leadership, another big reason is that upstream bullies are at work. If you’re a software developer and you have a choice, stay away from upstream bully shall-meisters.
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