39. Atlas

The team’s leader excels at (almost) everything.

You love visiting Erica’s team. She runs a development team of about twenty-five people, and it is one of the best in the company. They ship great products. They hit their dates. Many of the best, young, new hires want to work for Erica, so she has her pick of the top talent when there are openings. But openings are few because team members tend to stay a long time. They come because they know they will learn a lot. They stay because, over time, Erica helps them develop their technical skills, from the most basic to the most elite.

It doesn’t take much insight to see that this success is due in large part to Erica’s leadership. She does everything for her team. She drives product planning and the development of release schedules, and she takes part in most architectural decisions. If some of the junior developers fall behind toward the end of a release cycle, Erica will jump right in and help them finish on time.

Erica is just as effective in dealing with the corporate side of things. When it comes time for performance reviews and salary planning, Erica would rather do them herself than impose such administrative work on her hard-working leads. When her team needs to coordinate efforts with teams at other sites, Erica is their ambassador. In fact, most of the people at other development sites have never met anyone from Erica’s site other than Erica.

You love visiting Erica’s team, but you wish that things could be different.

Erica is doing just about everything you could want from a leader, except one. By being the total leader and manager, she is not leaving any significant leadership or management work for her teammates to do. She is, as a consequence, not cultivating them as leaders.

Consider what a team like Erica’s looks like structurally. She has a total of twenty-five people divided into smaller sub-teams. There are several teams of developers, a team or two of testers, and a couple of technical writers, as well as two or three individual contributors in various specialties. Each of the smaller teams has a team lead. If they’ve been chosen well, these team leads are the Ericas of the future. Some, of course, will not want to move up as managers. They may wish to stay at a level where they can remain at the technical leading edge. But some will see something of themselves in Erica, or in the managers above her. To follow in her path, they need the initial opportunity to do a small part of Erica’s job, so they can learn her whole job, one piece at a time. By insisting on owning every aspect of leadership and management, Erica is starving potential leaders of essential learning experiences. She loves them, but she’s stunting their growth.

We’ve already enumerated the many significant virtues of Erica’s team and those like it. Let’s consider the other consequences of her leadership style. The most obvious has already been stated: Potential leaders are not developed as leaders. But there are two other consequences that may not be immediately apparent.

First, Erica’s model does not scale very well. Erica probably started by leading a group of four-to-six developers. She managed each individual directly. By her intelligence, skill, and drive, she has come to the point where she is leading a very high-performing team of twenty-five, divided into, say, five smaller teams. On the org chart, Erica manages the team leads, and they manage the team members. But when you take into account her style of leadership, it becomes clear that although she may have five team leads, she is still managing all twenty-five individuals directly.

When a challenge comes along that requires a team of one hundred, can her boss look to Erica to lead that new team? Almost certainly not. While an extraordinarily talented first-line leader like Erica can succeed with a team of twenty-five, her methods will not work on a team of one hundred. As effective as Erica’s style is in the small, managers who are limited to it cannot take on large assignments.

Second, what if Erica is suddenly gone? Who steps in? Who takes over the team and enables it to continue such fine performance? If you are Erica’s manager, you are now very worried. You have exactly one realistic option, and it is inherently risky: You need to bring in a new leader from outside the team. You will either have to hire from outside, or you will have to redeploy one of your other managers. Either way, the new leader has a tough road ahead.

Erica’s team has been completely imprinted on Erica. It will be a major challenge for a new leader to win quick acceptance. In addition, the new leader cannot be expected to do a perfect imitation of Erica’s style, which means that he or she will now have to call upon the team leads to do more of the work of leadership and management than they have previously been expected to do. If the new leader is very fortunate, some of these team leads will rise to these higher expectations and quickly grow into the leaders they always had the potential to become. If not, some of the team leads themselves will have to be replaced, further traumatizing the organization, just as it’s reeling from the departure of the manager who did (almost) everything for them.