There are the leaders that — like samurai — embrace death. They see their role as protecting and empowering the people below them who do the real work and it’s an honor to serve the team’s interests even if things do not go well for them personally.
But some people don’t process risk in that way. Those leaders get drawn into trying to outrun death, which is as impossible metaphorically as it would be literally. You can’t avoid taking responsibility forever. Eventually there will be some disappointment or mistake that you will be called on to answer for.
The leaders who have a low tolerance for risk — and I say leaders instead of managers because on engineering teams these concepts also apply to Staff and Principal engineers — will respond to risk by either avoiding it outright or figuring out how to spin the situation so that it is Not Their Fault(TM)
These leaders ultimately become bureaucrats. The perfect job is the job with the glamorous title and the big paycheck where no decisions and no risks need to be taken. These leaders end up in startups more often than you might expect. That’s because continuing down a career where you’re running from death all the time does real damage to you psychologically. It’s important to understand that even though it seems like these people don’t care they are still human and they still have the same basic needs and feelings as anyone else. Fleeing death doesn’t just hurt the people they throw under the bus, it also hurts them. They want to be respected by their employees and often know they are not. They want to be admired and often know they are not. They also feel guilty screwing people over to survive.
It starts out weird but this is an amazing article about leaders’ appetites for risk and how that plays out within companies.
https://medium.com/@bellmar/why-is-this-idiot-running-my-engineering-org-c6e815790cdb
