“You manage things; you lead people.” (Grace Hopper)

I don’t manage people. That’s a deeply inhumane way of thinking about people. For Hopper with her military background, leading might be a term that works. For me as an antimilitarist it does not. It’s a loaded term like managing.

Marcus Blankenship recently in his great newsletter talked about how all titles are fiction. Someone invents them and gives them to you. This sometimes is helpful, for example as a shorthand description of your role. Sometimes it is not, because it prevents people from connecting to you as a person and not a role.

So where does that leave me? I don’t say “I am an engineering manager” (although I slip sometimes), my wording is “I work as an engineering manager”.

And I don’t “lead or manage a team”, I work with a team. I’m sort of an administrative contact for them. As such I don’t tell them how to do something. I’m an information hub between different teams and hierarchies with a harddisk full of previous experience. If this is helpful, I’m happy to do so. But otherwise one of my most important skills is to get the f*ck out of the way.

This is also where my talent and special interest topics come into play. I’m interested in people, communication, groups, knowledge management.

I deeply despise telling people what to do. Well … sometimes I have to, but I try to keep it to a minimum. I look dominant, but I’m not.

So, here I am, the non-managing non-leader. I will not tell you that I believe in teams “with absolutely no hierarchy”, because that’s a harmful myth. But that’s a story for another post.

Photo by Jason Goodman