#0141: Attitude, Altitude, and Agency

Photo by Harpal Singh on Unsplash

Braingasm

The question “what makes a good leader?” comes up quite a lot. It seems that if I ask any three randomly selected people, I am likely to get at least 4 subtly different and perhaps incompatible answers. This is true in tech specifically and more generally across disciplines into general management and leadership.

The uncertainty here makes things difficult on two fronts. Firstly, as an aspiring leader, it is hard to work out what to do, and what behaviours to model to improve their leadership. Equally, as someone who might be hiring, leading, or investing in leaders, it is not always obvious what dimensions or factors to use to make an evaluation. There is a lot of contingency in the assessment, and what works in one context might not work in another.

It seems like a lot of leadership evaluation ends up being subjective and riddled with biases, which is probably the primary source of the adage that “people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses”.

Given the uncertainty and upheaval that we have been through during 2020/2021, every person in a leadership position has had many things to consider as they reflect on their performance and those in their charge. The Great Resignation and its attendant fallout are amongst the most significant signals to leadership that we might not have managed to get everything right.

In a recent conversation with a colleague, we ruminated on the question of good leadership and stumbled onto the notion of altitude. In the first incarnation of this idea, it was simply a description of the “height of flight” that a leader might choose to operate at that balanced leaning-in but not micro-managing with leaning-out but not disengaging.

I refined this basic idea into a simple framework that can help a new leader think about their “personal leadership process”, but it is also a valuable framework to help someone evaluate whether or not a leader was doing a good job.

This simple framework for good leadership is called The Three A’s, where the A’s stand for:

• Attitude: a leader’s ability to plot the right direction that an organisation or team should be travelling in to achieve its objectives
• Altitude: a leader’s ability…