Behaving like a leader doesn't mean you will get to lead: part 2

This post is a continuation of yesterday's (2024-11-29) post on the difference between behaving like a leader and being a leader.

What prompted these posts was a conference presentation that I saw about leadership and engineers. The intent of the presentation felt positive, and it includes actionable advice that engineers could use to increase their chances of effecting change when communicating with stakeholders.

However, one of the things that I thought the presentation missed the mark was the stereotyping of engineers. Right off the bat, it suggests that engineers generally only care more about cool, new technologies; enjoy spending time bike-shedding minute technical details; and they don't know how to communicate with stakeholders effectively. I have never seen any use of data that back these claims up, and it's no exception in this presentation.

Anecdotally, and contrary to that stereotyping, many experienced engineers I have worked with do consider business needs at every stage of a (possible) project. If nothing else, good engineers at all levels are consciously and constantly making both technical and non-technical trade-offs with every design decision they make and every line of code they write. I'm not too sure if you can say the same for similar functions in other professions.

Another point where I thought the presentation missed the mark: it overemphasised the importance of practising leadership skills for engineers over other roles in an organisation. In an efficient organisation where everyone is meaningfully contributing to the mission, nobody is actually more suitable to be a leader than anyone else: engineering may be closer to the internals of a product than anyone else, but support is probably closer to the user than anyone else, and sales is closer to the customers than anyone else, and so on.

That brings us back to a point I made in yesterday's post:

... I believe that everyone can, and probably should, behave like a leader when the opportunity arises.

If you subscribe to that belief, perhaps the questions we should ask ourselves are not questions like "Who is a leader?" and "Who is suitable to become a leader?". Rather, maybe we should be asking ourselves questions like "Do we have a culture that recognises and facilitates leadership?" and "How do we empower people exhibiting leadership to be leaders?"