How to be a leader when the vibes are off (chaoticgood.management)

This blog was essentially my exact strategy over the last few turbulent years. I know it helped my people and I don't regret it. but, man, did it take a lot out of me. I've seen a quip out there before about the perfect recipe for burnout being the combination of high expectations with minimal empowerment to achieve those expectations. and this current market is burning leaders in this industry out like I haven't seen in 15 years.

“Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment. When acting “in public” (all-hands, department meetings, the #general channel), this is mandatory, as contradicting the bosses in a broad forum can kill the credibility you have the leadership across the wider team“

Take this advice with a grain of salt. If bad decisions can lead to very bad things and you know it you must push back even if that means getting fired. This is particularly important when the life and wellbeing of others are at stake. Just look at Boeing to see how prioritizing a job over ethics can actually kill people and destroy companies.

> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. "Yeah, this new policy sucks, [...]

If you're a manager in a company that does sucky things, does (inevitably) being quoted saying a policy 'sucks' risk you losing your manager job there?

I'm an OG techie, who ends up doing some manager-y things, and I'm going to be very straightforward with everyone. But on something like sucky policy, I might not say "sucks".

Instead, maybe acknowledge they're concerned/upset, ask questions about how it affects, ask/discuss how that can be fixed/improved, and honestly say some of what I will try to do about it.

Example of last part: "Thank you, I'm going to escalate this, and I plan to get back to you within the next 2 days. If anything comes up before then, let me know."

Great write up! I've found these techniques pretty effective in tricky times over the years, and they don't only apply to tech workplaces.

That said, they're very much geared toward "polishing shit" leadership. Getting yourself and the people you're responsible for through the hard times is a crucial skill. Getting them out and onto something better is important too, even if it can be tougher to square with the mandate middle managers work under.

This reads like "How to follow orders and resignate". Only shows that companies are dictatorships where workers don't have a say

> Across the board, execs seem more efficiency-focused, financialized, and less mission-driven

The last point is what I've been experiencing the most.

I walked away from a job because it became clear that the other leaders in the organization were hopelessly lost with regard to mission. The wild part is they weren't even chasing money, efficiency, etc. They were chasing some kind of weird internal management/org chart tribalism with zero value-add. All for a 10~20 person company. None of this was a problem before 2020. We were aggressively customer oriented and very agile with the product stack.

I think covid got a lot of people trapped in really bad "lifestyle choices" that are effectively impossible to get away from. The consequences of these things extend far beyond the person who engages with them. The more employees and capital you are responsible for the worse all of this gets. I wish our culture was more open to the idea of being honest about all of this and getting help. Imagine how beneficial it could be for other employees in the same company to know their CEO isnt some inhuman freak by way of a frank and honest internal email. To know that the last 3 years of your life wasnt you taking crazy pills, it was literally them taking crazy pills. The other employees might even be compelled to seek out similar help under this kind of leadership.

> Return to Office feels like trust has been broken. Teams that continued to work well (or in some cases, better) after everyone in the industry went remote are now being told to come back to desks in offices. I’ve even heard tales of this happening despite there not being enough office space for everyone, which seems very silly

I sometimes wonder what it feels like to work at a place like this. On the one hand, you're still employed, and that's saying a lot in the tech industry right now. But on the other hand, you must, deep down, know that your management are either (a) incompetent or (b) beholden to majority investors that are using the company as a pawn to prop up commercial real estate valuations. If you don't believe that the higher-ups have the company's best interest in mind, why bother working hard? In the words of Office Space, "you know Bob, that'll just make someone work just hard enough to not get fired".

A lot of this I think is interest rate driven rather than AI driven.

> I’ve even heard of people being told they need to be “at their desks at 9am” and “expected to stay until 5pm at a minimum.”

PMs always manage to end their day on time with "I'm heading out for a bit, I'll be back online later tonight for a quick check in on progress so send me a link when the ticket is complete" and I'll be able to finally say without guilt or shame "I'm heading out too and I'll continue working on your ticket tomorrow from 9am."

It is all true. I do the same. But it is not the healthy thing. C suite abuse should not be tolerated. People needs money but not at the cost of healthy.

I have someone in my family heavily affected by this mentality. 25y of treatment and it was never enough to bring him fully back to himself

I can't over-emphasize the role line managers play in decoupling the delusion expectations of leadership and the ground truth of employees' lives. I think a lot of CEOs would burst into flames if they saw an average IC's day, but those ICs can still be high performers and achieve the goals of the business. Having automonomy and flexibility is huge for ICs. The role of the line manager is to provide plausible deniability both ways by tolerating a necessary amount of deviation from the black letter "law".

A great example is my friend, who works in a non-technical office job. She has always gotten great performance reviews and gone above-and-beyond because she's very passionate about her work. She's been doing this for over 10 years. Lately she has experienced some pretty severe burnout, and her immediate manager didn't know how to handle it so they immediately punted her to HR for a disability leave.

Of course because HR is involved now there's paperwork and doctors and insurance implications. A competent manager could have navigated the situation "unofficially" and preserved a valuable employee, instead of sending them on a 6 month odyssey of navigating the healthcare system. Ultimately the business got less value out of the employee because she's stressed and has to take a bunch of time off to deal with administrative BS.

> In public, you have to support the policies, but when you’re in private with your manager and your peers, that’s the time you can safely push for change.

They are actually advocating being two-faced as a form of leadership.

There are literally subreddits about how to abuse the trust of remote work, but there have always been people doing that. I think the main thing that changed is that amazing revenue multiples that made it possible for companies to ignore these issues are no longer there. Meanwhile the costs of everything, including salaries has skyrocketed. So I think it's lower valuations + higher costs -> more pressure on efficiency. Companies that don't become efficient have their valuation collapse or go under.

> The right thing to do in this situation is to acknowledge that you see the situation the same way they do, but do it privately, within your immediate team only or in 1-1s. “Yeah, this new policy sucks, I get it. It’s going to affect me in negative ways too.” It’s really important that you validate the emotions that all of these aspects are bringing up in people.

This I wish more leaders did. It can be really demoralizing to the point of leaving a role when you hear company stuff that's blatantly false, in bad faith, or whatever - and your leader, who you know damn well is smart enough to see it as well, looks you dead in the eye and repeats the company line.

In other words, "don't piss on my shoes and tell me it's raining." I'd rather be told you're screwing me than being screwed and gaslit about it. No matter what, in the end I'm going to remember I was screwed and how you approached that.

In their mind, I guess everyone is a strong leader, as they say everyone judges themselves by effort and others by results.

From a employee's perspective. I think you get a good idea, when working for a company, if your leader's vibes are off.

If they have a ego or can have a adult conversation or like to avoid it. Since life is not a 'silver lining'

You will meet some behaviours (which you can call toxic or not ) But times are changing, and people are less patient.

Even as a jaded person I’m surprised how many people read this and immediately go to statements about hypocrisy, having no integrity, or bad leadership. Get a grip! Real life doesn’t always let you be a crusader. It’s called choosing your battles and it’s something that most of us have to do almost every day.

Nothing in this advice suggests being two-faced. Nothing suggests lying or being deceitful. What it does suggest is to try and do the least bad thing in a set of less-than-ideal circumstances, most of which are outside any of the rank-and-file’s control.

Edit to add: nothing says you have to publicly agree with an unpopular policy while disparaging it in private. Staying quiet is an option and probably the most sensible one.

> how to be a leader: total and complete capitulation while you wait for it to blow over

yep. that's leadership.

This headline reminds me of a headline a while back that was something like how to do founder mode when you are not the founder. It all goes back to some Orwellian newspeak vibes. The words for what we are doing sound horrible. Can we just change word meanings so it sounds good?

If you are not the founder f founder mode. They can make you a cofounder if they want founder mode behavior from you.

If the vibes are off its because upper management is toxic and hostile to humanity. All you can do is protect your own job. I've made the same mistake the author made and had some immature naive dipstick employee I managed confront the upper management because of course they could not be evil ghouls. Almost cost me my job and destroyed any chance of a future at the company.

The other part of this is the AI wave. Every SAAS company in the world is vulnerable to someone with higher AI driven pace, or better AI features to overtake them.

Even Google is an example, it seemed like the most defensible business. They could coast for years, but now they are literally at risk of losing vs openAI.

I'm going through this right now where all expectations have been reversed after an acquisition. Ex: I'm not big on metrics, I rather have direct communication with my team to understand issues we are facing and any challenge an individual is struggling with. Looking at metrics hardly tells you the full story. Well, after the acquisition, metrics are in! story points, number of comments on PR, number of PRs, etc.

I don't believe in these methods, but the company as a whole is going to align. I do not pretend I'm excited about it, but I remember that I am in a room with full grown adults. I've addressed the issue, and made sure to frame it with "we are aligning with the rest of the company" as opposed to just saying this is the way forward, deal with it.

Edit: Coincidentally one of my blog posts is on the front page right now and addresses similar issues -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45359604

This is depressing to be sure, but rest assured there is a long history of middle management being "the buffer" between upper management and everyone else. It's a common trope in TV shows and such.

I think one of the most important things this write up is maybe missing (though I am not super clear on how this has changed recently) is when middle management are acknowledging to their reports that the C suite are a bunch of cunts, is that they also need to be saying the same thing to the C suite themselves. "Going out to bat" literally means feeding back to upper management that what they're doing isn't going to work. This should be a fight that is ongoing. Again, privately, one to one, but you do actually need to be doing it. If you can back it up with numbers, even better.

Don't vote for anyone who thinks ZIRP is a good idea, and floods the world with overly-cheap cash that gets wasted on extravagences, that need to be over-corrected now

Good essay!

Jason, if you read this - the form to subscribe doesn't work on Android (in Firefox or Chrome). I can't input my address or press the Subscribe button.

Another factor with the vibes being off (at least in the US): mass outsourcing of jobs thanks to remote work. You used to have to be a multinational company with global entities and offices. Now you can be a 10-person startup with half your people outside the country.

When the world went remote many folks were happy with the better work-life balance. But it means that we compete in a ruthless global labor market.

That's why companies rejecting remote work is good for the American worker in some ways.

"How to suck up in public but bad mouth in private" is I suppose some good advice if one doesn't mind hypocrisy or lying or having integrity. But if you're middle-management in a company being described here, you've long since lost any revulsion to hypocrisy. If my manager was saying one thing to one person/group and another to me, I don't think that's good leadership at all, mainly shitty humanity.

I found the take a little too much on the doomer side for someone who presumably has several years of management experience. Yeah there's been a lot of social media posts and talking about the efficiency era, AI slop etc but over there in the real world you're working with humans. Some are going to be operating under a shareholder- or investor-derived goal to improve margins and some are not, but even for those who are "improving margins" looks different at every business (depending on e.g. current headcount, COGS, whether you use contractors, etc). I feel like it's a super reductive take to go "aaah, this current culture is anti-human or anti-empathy" rather than like, look at the actual actions that are being taken, who is benefitting, and what specific negotiating room yourself and your team have in this value context.

I find the actual advice here very worthwhile, though.

> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment.

No, not for a staff engineer. You keep your mouth shut in the #general channel when something crazy is said, or you ask a single question in a thread when you don't understand at all.

The sound of a dozen people not clapping is the perfect rebuke to management mistakes.

One of the things he doesn’t say is you have to be extra careful when your boss is replaced by an outsider; it’s exactly as if you changed you changed your job and have to prove yourself all over again.

The new guy also comes with an inflated sense of self-importance; he’s there to fix things which the old guy messed up.

I feel like OP has either never worked outside of tech startups/Silicon Valley or never worked pre-2012 (dont wanna assume tho and this is not meant in a disparaging manner)

A lot of these things exists in other industries for awhile. Like lack of trust (you have to be from 8 to 6 in a lot of Wall St firms) and fear of layoffs (everyone who worked during the financial crisis in 07-08 know this all too well). I would say they are the norm, and the things that OP missed was the exception

checking in as someone who successfully ducked two rounds of RTO by just getting a different job. The first one absolutely outright told us they were bringing us back to an office where there isn't enough room for all of us. They justified it by saying we're hybrid 3 in 2 out and can figure out amongst ourselves who will be in when in order to optimize desk space, and on days where we have all hands or some other reason to have everyone in the office people can sit on the floor or in the lobby. The other tried to bring our remote team back to the office for in-person collaboration only to realize that I'm fully remote as per my hiring agreement and the rest of the team is split across Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Dallas and one of our contractors is secretly working from his family's horse farm in Jalisco. So we all had to dress nice, commute and pay to park in order to sit on teams calls in an empty office rather than sitting on teams calls at home in comfort for free. We eventually figured out that our employer also owned the parking garage adjacent to the building and was counting on us as a $12/person/day revenue stream. The trust is broken because someone looked at the trust and said "I'm gonna break that to see if there's money inside."

> part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment

this is not chaotic good, this is lawful neutral. and really bad leadership.

You - the “leader” - is responsible for the off vibes

So basically, leadership is coping? No thanks.

>I see lots of people worried that the aim of all of this is to ultimately have a robot do their entire job

Correct, this is the aim and tons of capital is being deployed to this end. Worse, it looks inevitable, not just plausible, if you look at the progress of the technology. To be more specific, though, a robot doesn't need to do their entire job to devalue their job. One senior engineer doing 10x work with an LLM is someone who has cut 10 roles.

>Let them know you’re still on their side

You're not and never have been. You're on the side of your company.

>This too shall pass

That's the problem. "This" is their gainful employment and possibly a host of other protections and dignities up-ended, such as privacy, enabled by AI.

The reality is that, even if people don't put it in these terms, we are all held hostage to this existential nightmare engine because a few billionaires want infinite power and eternal life and nobody is stopping them.

Anyways, yeah, you can't be ethical in this position because your role, as explicated here, is to attempt to alleviate natural and very understandable pressures that could harm the company rather than let them boil over, which they likely should. Framing what's good for the company as what's good for the employee is part and parcel of this mentality.

> This too shall pass

Funny how most people only use this when they don't like how things are going.

Who ever saw a blog post about, "This too shall pass" during remote-ZIRP-brain era?

As others have expressed, sycophancy is not leadership.

How do you "safely push for change" in private if your executive leadership display sociopathic or narcissistic behaviors, where they expressly do not care about the harm they inflict on others?

Polls show that about a quarter of employees see something unethical, and half don't report it because they think nothing will happen OR they will be retaliated against.

https://www.gallup.com/workplace/648770/unethical-behavior-g...

This means that individuals who are doing misdeeds perceive there are no consequences. Part of your role is to surface that there are consequences; and you bringing them up now is far less expensive than a lawsuit later.

We know this pattern of behaviour is not beneficial - in the context of NPD the worst version of this is becoming an enabler - https://www.choosingtherapy.com/narcissistic-enablers/

While you can absolutely choose your battles and there are some things that are ultimately harmful for you and achieve no great outcome; you are not a leader if you do not advocate for your team when obviously unjust things occur.

Alternative title: "I'm just here for a paycheck. Maybe you should be too."

The capital class didn't like the power employees had during covid. They hated pretending that they care about employee health or well-being. So now they are vindictively sticking it to everyone. This phase, too, will pass.

AI (LLM's) is like cloud - the promise of lowered costs to incentivize organizations to migrate, then a few years later your business is paying double what your Colo and skeleton IT costed.

AI will be the same (if it ever achieves its hype, which might be like Tesla FSD) - you lay off half your tech staff, lose your training pipeline, then in a couple years you're paying more than you were.

The toxic "leadership" has always been there - kind of like the racism on the right of politics - it's just that it's viewed as "ok" to be shitty now.

Also, leadership is in quotes because there's not really much of it around, despite angry comments to contrary to follow.

"How be a good C-suite sycophant and not trigger a revolt from your team"

TL;DR "yes men" middle managers keep their jobs.

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> Even when you don’t agree with decisions the company leadership is making, part of your job is representing and facilitating those decisions with full alignment.

Naw, man. Do your work as you were hired to do, as an expert, disagree and push back against idiotic and clueless decisions, loudly and publicly. None of this militaristic, jingoist "the C-suite always knows best and we have to follow their 'orders' blindly because they have the title, we can't possibly know all that they know." Fuck that. You were hired for your skills, your form of "loyalty" that they so desperately want is showing them why they are wrong and doing good work. Dangerous? Yes. But you have to be prepared to leave as well.

People are so hopelessly inured to the craziness of corporate life they forget that they, the laborers, have -all- of the power in the relationship. And don't forget that you -are- the labor until you get on the list of "major holders".

None of these generalizations are new to people who have had to work in service industry or customer service.

I have no sympathy for tech workers griping about these changes. Before I transitioned to I.T. I worked in the some of the most demanding call centers in the BPO world.

There was no remote work, every single minute of your day was monitored and you felt like you were in a fish bowl where every word and kpi was being analyzed by management. If you didn’t meet all 10-15 metrics you basically had one foot on a banana peel.

Put your big boy pants on tech bro. Winter is coming!

Well, this advice is all tailored towards "how to keep your job and make your money as a leader when the vibes are off". But I and almost everyone else would prefer the question you're asking to be "how to start the revolution when the vibes are off"; explanations on how best to not fight the ways everything is going to shit are explanations of how to be complicit with it. For example, buying into the company message while privately criticizing it---good job advice, but morally, that's cowardice; it's pathetic; that's the behavior of a person who is trying to have their cake and eat it too, who's just there for the money; whose friendship is a lie. That's the spineless substitute for leadership we've come to expect in our disappointing world. "Yeah it sucks, it affects me negatively" in private only counts if you are also taking a non-infinitesimal stand against it in public; if your actual moral position comes out in favor of the right thing. Otherwise it is a lie, manipulating your employees to make them feel like they have a friend while not actually sticking up for them.

If everyone felt and acted morally then the place would be forced to improve. Or at minimum, to fire all of you, but they should be forced to actually do that, morally, and suffer the political and economic consequences of doing so. But for that to happen people have to be systematically standing up to them in the first place, saying "do better, or else".