Alpha clowns
How to deal with leaders that fall short
If you work in a large enough corporation, you will encounter several people in a leadership position. Their primary job is to be strategic, a bridge between the vision set at C-level and the execution carried on by the “frontline” teams.
A strategy needs to be “visionary” enough to be resilient to changes in circumstances, and “executable” enough to be translated to actual work. It must convey information about the direction of travel and the route to follow. A leader must know where they are going, and work out how to get there.
This is very hard to get right, and in my (limited) experience it’s more likely to encounter leaders that get it wrong to some extent.
No direction and no route
I worked with a VP of Business Planning once. He had no direct reports (just a random analyst to do some data pulls), and he was placed in the role by the Chief Product Officer as a personal favor. Textbook nepotism.
The guy had no real job and a big title, so he needed to justify his existence. He didn’t have any real mandate, he was just parroting company priorities. He filled the emptiness with arrogance and volume, deluding himself that he could make things happen based on his aura and him saying so. He was literally that Shia LaBeouf meme.
He was childish and unproductive, quick to escalate if his “get it done” didn’t lead to anything because … well, that’s not how the real world works.
I call this type of person alpha clown. They think that they don’t need to do anything concrete, just expressing wishes should be enough. If something doesn’t happen, just express is louder and try to intimidate more, as if saying something louder makes it more achievable.
The response to this type of person is: don’t match the energy. Stay calm, and redirect to something specific: what’s the actual blocker, what do you need, let’s work out a solution. This approach highlights their behavior directly (i.e. they are just whining useless little children), without taking a fight, and makes you the adult in the room that actually tries to solve a problem.
This response only applies to encounters with alpha clowns, as a way to merely ensure survival and to get out of the situation unscathed. The combo no direction - no route is incredibly dysfunctional and I have been exposed to it only in a tangential way. If you are living under a leader like that, I cannot imagine a solution other than leaving as soon as possible.
Direction with no route
Imagine being FDR at the onset of WW2, and you are briefed by your top generals, and when you ask for strategy proposals the answer is “the strategy is to win the war”.
There was a time when we got re-orged under a VP of Product that ran her entire strategy on one sentence like “Data is great to use”. Engineering leadership dismissed her planning documents as vague and ungrounded almost immediately. She lost credibility fast, and within a year she was gone.
Being a visionary is seductive because naming a destination feels like making decisions, but it costs very little work. Nobody can disagree with “Data is great to use” the way they could disagree with a specific resourcing tradeoff or a specific bet.
The problem is that vision is not a strategy. Vision is a wish.
The visionary leader harms the team with the vacuum they create. Usually the vision is too up in the sky and too disconnected from the reality on the ground, especially the resources available. The people underneath fill the vacuum the best they can, which is typically just keep doing what you were doing before. The most politically capable person fills it with their own agenda and calls it “executing the strategy”.
The response to the visionary is to treat the gap as an opening. Write the sequencing yourself: what happens in month one, who owns it, what gets cut, and bring it back for a yes or no. Getting someone to approve a plan is far easier than getting them to originate one. It is not a guarantee, because the plan will be constrained by the reality on the ground, and it will be a washed out version of the vision. The visionary might be disappointed by how far we are from their wishes, but it’s worth trying.
Route with no direction
This is the opposite of the visionary: plenty of action, but no destination. Most people are promoted into leadership role from the trenches, and sometimes they never leave the job they were promoted out of.
Tactical work is comforting in a way strategic work is not. It’s concrete, it’s right in front of you. Ticking a box from a todo list is an adrenaline hit. You know what to do because you have done it before.
This is an understandable feeling. The more you distance yourself from IC work, the more the work feels “paper shuffling”. You feel that when you go from IC to manager, and the higher you climb in the org chart, the fluffier it feels. Going back to working on an incident makes you feel useful.
The problem with the trench dweller is that the demand they generate is mostly random and short-term, without any direction, purpose or meaning.
The response to the trench dweller is similar to the visionary: try to fill the direction gap. I reckon it is harder compared to the visionary. The trench dweller might not feel the urgency to come up with a direction, when there are so many things to do around us. However, a team led this way hits its deadlines and still can’t tell if any of it mattered. A lot of action, but little progress.
Direction and route is hard
Getting the right balance is very hard, so if you are working with someone who is able to do that, consider yourself lucky. Defaulting to vision from the stratosphere or day-to-day busy work is a coping mechanism to fill the empty space. Not great, but still better than being an alpha clown.
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