Notes: Servant Leadership at Scale

http://www.meetup.com/ctoschool/events/222013916/
Jude Allred, CTO at FogCreek.

How big is engineering at fog creek now? looks like ~30 from the photo

## "Rapport doesn't scale"
* giving context at every decision point and helping with interpretation / 
 outcomes is not possible
* therefore scaled servant leadership is indirect (ie culture)

## What is Servant Leadership?
* comes from Joel
* the most capable people are making decisions
* management, if any, is minimal - what does exist is for obstacle removal
* every manager has a different flavor of Servant Leadership
* speakers version
** most informed decision makes
** leaders remove obstacles, provide context
** individuals given high autonomy, organization depends on them to use it and 
 take initiative

### structures which assume success (lead with habits)
* model of success: lots of trying small experiments and occasionally get a 
 rocket.
* incubate a product (pitch, execute for a week)
* lots of failures but did build habit of taking initiative

#### Teams by initiative (fight goal creep)
* large team on maint with a dozen goals
results:
** lots of incoming reqs
** unable to focus on "MRR increase"
* solution: two teams sharing codebase/clients/etc
** defensive team (uptime, support, sales team guaranteed bets)
** change revenue (speculative features)
** Outcome: two small teams out performed a large team.

### diminishing returns to consensus
* expectation that all qs will come to full consensus answers
** not true
* small teams do lend well to this
* sometimes go with 80% consensus - cost of getting that last 20% is more 
 expensive than being wrong
** "people should not say i told you so"

### decision-making as a service
* a problem: sticking points that don't matter to org or clients
** if someone is hedging on making decision because they are nervous / afraid 
 of being wrong
* speaker offers a way to help "hey, what do you think you should do? that? 
 yeah that sounds like what you should do."

### creative space for empathy workers (ie support folks)
* emotional labor is hard work
* typically viewed as a cost center
* see Rich Armstrong talk
* give these folks autonomy and creative space - they are thinking about your 
 customers all day
** their impl: 1 day a week outside out queue allowed to do devwork
*** reduce burnout, allow invest in self, put forward feature prototypes/etc

### default remote (dogfood your culture)
* like Zach Homan article - https://zachholman.com/posts/remote-first/
* when channels of communication are different it is a trap
* assume remote for interactions

## overall theme
* communication and structures
* facilitate people to take initative, being ambitious, following practices 
 you want

### servant leadership is more of a constraint
* say you want to turn everything to AWS, mandate this?
* communicate with context? hard to scale.
* if want this action, create structures that may indicate that action. if that 
 doesn't happen, maybe the hypthesis was wrong to begin with?

## wrap up
* what is it to be a CTO w/o giving orders
* how do you enable them to do that

spectrum: command and control --to-- servant leadership

to move to servant leadership
* give context over conclusions
* build structures and culture to support initiative
* let your expert players emerge

# Questions
How to deal with low performance?
* small enough to not be a big issue
* initiative fizzle is indicator
* pay attention when there is rumbling

When to not use servant leadership?
* sales team is not
* servant leadership most valuable in creative things
* it is a spectrum

Firing people?
* performance improvement plan (1 mo)
* if you want to leave, get extra 1 mo severance

Remote team is very far apart in timezone?
* team leads bless people with big timezone differences
* site reliability team has largest gaps which is good for that team