Technical Leaders Absolutely Cannot Be Absolutists

According to Google's AI,

The phrase "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" originates from Eastern philosophy, likely starting in ancient China with Confucian teachings and then brought to Japan, where the imagery of the Three Wise Monkeys was developed. The concept was popularized in Japan through a clever wordplay on the verbs for "see," "hear," and "speak," which sounded similar to the word for "monkey" (saru). The most famous visual depiction is a 17th-century carving at the Tōshō-gū shrine in Nikkō, Japan.

Early on in my career a senior technologist I admired had a statuette on his desk of the Three Wise Monkeys, one covering its eyes, one its ears and one its mouth. "How odd" I thought to myself at the time. "How appropriate!" I think to myself now. Working with technical leaders, their direct reports and their peers, brings this phrase to my mind almost weekly. And those adorable monkeys. Sometimes I think every senior technologist needs such a reminder on their desk or on their office wall.

Technologists tend to be absolutists by nature and this compounded by our training and our medium (information technology). As technical contributors we are not selected for our grasp of subtle nuance. Or our comfort with ambiguity and inconsistency. We tend to live in high contrast: almost total black and white. Some options are better than others but more than that, often one option is right and all others are wrong. Objectively, provably, definitively so.

Pity the technologist newly promoted to technology leader, who suddenly deals more with people than with technology. Most people not only swim in ambiguity and inconsistency, but also find rigidity to be childish and annoying. This culture clash forces technology leaders to be bicultural, which means knowing when to see no evil and when to see all the evil.

Similarly pity the MBA newly promoted to technology leader, who suddenly deals with people who don't find indirectness polite or imprecision disarming. Most technologist do not want their leader to gently break the news that a technical decision has been botched by an ignoramus, but an ignoramus with clout. They want their leader to fight for the right decision and win. Even when the battle is not worth fighting.

Technical leaders can get by being either black-and-white, which will please the department and antagonize everyone else, or by being more open-minded, which will please most people but risks alienating their staff. Technical leaders excel when they know when to be political and when to be technical. You need credibility with both sides in order to bridge the cultural divide.

You aren't doomed by your past: you can learn a new culture. If you came up through technology, you can learn to flex and to understand ambiguity or outright misstatement. If you came up through management, you can learn when math and logic are the criteria, making feelings mostly irrelevant. Either way, most of us have to learn at least one new culture when we take up the mantle of leading a group of technologists. This isn't easy. Pythia Cyber can help.