The Engineering Executive's Primer

Chapter 8. Developing Leadership Styles

For a long time, I found the micromanager CEO archetype very frustrating to work with. They would often pop out of nowhere, jab holes in the work I had done without understanding the trade-offs, and then disappear when I wanted to explain my decisions. In those moments, I wished they would trust me based on my track record of doing good work. If they didn’t trust my track record, could they at least take the time to talk through the situation so I could explain my decisions?!

I longed for a more distant CEO, one who defined a clear process for how we worked, benevolently approved my headcount requests, and occasionally sent me a note confirming my inherent genius, but otherwise left me to do my work. As I spoke with industry peers, I was surprised to realize that the CEO-at-a-remove does exist. In fact, there are many CEOs who are removed from daily execution, but my peers working with those CEOs weren’t celebrating them. Instead, they were quite frustrated. Where I’d imagined an absentee CEO would feel empowering, executive teams working with such CEOs in practice often found they couldn’t move important decisions forward. When the executives did make progress, it was by accepting whatever outcome they could build consensus around, rather than making the best possible decisions.

From that realization, I came to more fully appreciate that there’s no one style of executive leadership that’s applicable everywhere, and that particularly effective ...