Leadership

[simont]

I think I'm going to interrupt the generally festive mood I'm seeing in other people's diaries around now, take a total change of direction, and muse for a while about the concept of leadership, specifically leadership as it applies to me personally.

I've said a few times in the past that my preference in social landscapes is roughly the same as my preference in geographical ones. Hills, valleys and other vertical landscape features are all very nice to look at when you go on holiday somewhere scenic, but I do like spending most of my time in nice flat Cambridge where hills and valleys don't cause me inconvenience on a daily basis. And I feel much the same about commanders and subordinates and chains of command and other hierarchical social structures that put some people higher up than others: they make for good fiction, to read or watch for a few hours and then put down, but for my daily life I much prefer a flat social landscape in which nobody has power or control over anyone else, and all interactions are between equals. I don't like taking orders, but I dislike having to give them just as much.

It has therefore been a constant strain trying to reconcile this attitude with my undeniable position as the PuTTY project leader. On the one hand I really do dislike telling people what to do; on the other, I have an apparently dedicated team of three people who seem to spend a lot of their time on doing things I want done.

I think the key point which reconciles these two facts is that I don't tell the PuTTY team what to do; they simply form their own opinions about what needs to be done, and then they do it. I suppose that I'm a leader in the sense that I have the final word on policy and long-range direction for the project, but I'm not a manager in the sense of actually having to direct my teammates' activities. In particular, although I occasionally make a clear policy statement in a reply to some PuTTY user's email and later find my teammates quoting or paraphrasing that statement to other users, it's at least as common that one of them makes their own judgment on an issue and sends a reply to a user without bothering to consult me, and I honestly can't remember ever having had to contradict such a judgment after the fact. So I'm not entirely sure to what extent the team is following my vision and my wishes; it might simply be that we all naturally agree on the right things to do in the first place. (And if so, I also don't know to what extent this agreement arises from us being right, or whether it's more to do with a shared mindset from having been similarly trained, forged in similar sorts of experience and just having known each other for a while.)

In fact, thinking about this the other week, the rather amusing phrase that I found springing to mind to describe my role in the team was ‘High Priest’. The other members of the team don't serve me (and neither would I wish them to), but rather both they and I serve PuTTY itself; my only authority is that I have the clearest view of what plans PuTTY has for us in the future. (And as I hinted in the previous paragraph, I'm not entirely sure how much that view comes from my personal whims and how much it's an objective judgment of the right thing to do. I think in practice this is probably true of other high priests as well! :-)

So, until now, that has been my way of reconciling my dislike of hierarchy with my clear status as some sort of leader. But this week I've had an interesting experience which has made me wonder if there's another factor involved.

That experience was the simple act of cooking the Christmas roast a couple of days ago. I've been involved with my family's cooking of a roast dinner many times before, but always before someone else has been in charge: knowing what needed to be done when, keeping track of all the different bits, directing the kitchen helpers when spare pairs of hands were needed. And following the orders of the chef-de-cuisine has always slightly grated on me; partly that was because the tasks tended to be menial (stirring gravy, laying the table, fetching and carrying), but also partly it was because I couldn't anticipate the tasks precisely, so I'd tend to suddenly be assigned something just as I was about to sit down for five minutes. And in addition to that, I tend to feel a bit panicky near the end of the process, because there are so many different things on the go at once and I can't work out whether we've remembered them all. It seems very difficult for me to relax and trust that the person in charge will make sure everything gets done.

This Christmas, I was the one in charge. Mum said afterwards that she'd had no idea whether everything was going OK or when to do what; the only person in the kitchen keeping track of it all had been me. And this felt much better; I enjoyed the preparation of Thursday's roast dinner a lot more than I've ever enjoyed one before. It felt good to know what was going on, to know I wasn't going to get surprised by anything short of the oven exploding, and to be confident that everything was being taken care of. Also – and here's the bit that slightly disturbed me – it also felt very good to have other people doing the menial jobs like table-laying, and covering for me when I had to stop stirring a pan to do something else important.

So despite having always claimed that I don't like giving orders any more than I like taking them, it seems that I actually do enjoy being the one in charge more than I enjoy not being. And thinking about it, I can apply this just as easily to the PuTTY case as well: I honestly could not imagine myself joining someone else's development project in the way that three people have joined mine, and I think this was one of the things that has always surprised me about my situation. So this makes me worried that I might have severely misjudged myself, which I always find disturbing.

I think I can see how there's a common attitude running through these situations, but it's difficult to know exactly how to describe it. If I were feeling uncharitable toward myself, for example, I might use the phrase ‘control freak’: I have a hard time trusting other people to be doing the most important jobs properly, and the easiest way to solve that problem is to do them myself. And there probably is an element of that involved.

But I think what it mainly comes down to is that I tend to find the big, important and key tasks (among which is often the overall planning) inherently more interesting and more motivating, so if I have the choice then I prefer to be doing the big central things rather than the fiddly bits around the edges. Put like that, it strikes a chord even in things I do by myself: in a solo programming effort, for example, I usually feel much more enthusiastic when I'm putting together the basic framework and structure of the program and solving the central and most important problems, and I start to lose interest once I get down to fixing unimportant fringe bugs, writing documentation, polishing up for a release and so forth. I suppose there's an element of diminishing returns involved; the big important tasks give me a strong feeling of a major result for the effort I've put in.

So that seems to be it; it's not so much that I like to be in charge, but it's that if I have a choice between doing big central pieces of work or tidying up on the fringes, I much prefer the former if I can get it. Thus, if I'm to be a leader at all, I want to be leading from the coalface; rather than being a supervisor standing back and just telling people what to do, I want to still be getting my hands dirty, making a major physical contribution to the work that gets done. And if I can be surrounded by the type of person who likes to run around tidying up the little details around the edges, so that I don't have to worry about them and can move on to the next big task, then I feel in my element, not because people are scurrying to do my wishes, but simply because that way I get to spend all my time doing the bit of the job I enjoy the most.

In my annual reviews at work, they always ask whether I'm displaying leadership, whether I should be, whether I plan to do so more in the future, and things like that. I've never really felt that I was able to communicate helpfully with my boss on this point, and I've never really known whether we simply don't understand one another or whether I've been unable to communicate my attitude clearly. So now that I've actually devoted some effort to thinking it through more than I've done before, I wonder if I should show him the above piece of writing, and whether it would help. Hmmm.