Humility breeds success

In 1975, a man named John Riccardo became CEO of the Chrysler Corporation.^[1] Chrysler was in a bad place. They had been struggling for a decade or more and had nothing on the horizon to change that. Mr. Riccardo made a bold bet on something called the K-car Platform. That project, in and of itself, is a great example of taking bold bets on underlying capability, but he actually did something much more interesting. He realized that he didn't have the skills required to pull the company out of the hole that it was in. He then went and found his replacement, hired that replacement, and stepped aside to allow that person to be successful.^[2]

Think about that for a moment. This person was the CEO of a large, internationally known company. He was at the top. He could go no higher. Yet, he had the humility to really put the company's success ahead of his personal success. He decided to serve the organization rather than serve himself. That decision was enabled by a stupefying amount of self-awareness and insight into the needs of the company, but he was able to make that decision because of his humility.

I had a peer once who reveled in solving problems. He was an executive in an organization, but he liked making decisions, he liked stepping in to save the day, and it felt like the right thing to do. Often times as a leader, it is rewarding to step in and solve a tactical, concrete problem that's relatively easy to solve. You don't get too many of those when you are focused where you should be. So this leader jumped in and made those decisions. Every instance where there was a technical or architectural question, he would jump in and provide the answer. Where teams made decisions without him, and those decisions didn't line up with where he thought things needed to go, he would inevitably undo them. Over time, his organization stopped performing. They stopped being able to get software into production. This individual would rail against the uselessness of his teams and how they were all failing. However, if you stepped back and looked at the structure of the organization he had built, it looked like a bottle where he stood at the neck. Every decision had to flow through him. He was one individual and there wasn't enough time in the day for him to make every decision. So work simply stopped flowing. When teams couldn't get his time, they made the most conservative decision possible and dragged their feet moving forward. He had built an organization where he, personally, was critical. It felt very good to run, but it couldn't get software out the door, and it was a pretty challenging organization to work in.

Contrast that with a friend of mine, the CTO of a much smaller corporation than Chrysler. This friend had recently brought in a VP of Engineering, restructuring his organization to take advantage of the additional leadership. Once complete, he was disheartened. On paper, it looked like all of his responsibilities, all the important things that he was doing on a day to day basis, were moving to his VP of Engineering. There would be nothing visible left for him to do. He felt like he was disappearing. But after a little while, my friend realized that feeling wasn't the whole story. Having those tactical tasks taken off his plate allowed him to focus at a higher level, on things that would change the fundamental structure of the organization for the better. Those would be less visible, but far more important. He leaned into the discomfort rather than fighting it.

Humility breeds success.

You are a manager of some stripe. You were successful as an engineer and moved into a management role. You know how to do the Individual Contributor role, but that isn't your job. Your job isn't to build a product. Your job is to build an organization that can build a product. It is one of the most ego destroying jobs you can have, if you are doing it right.

You won't be the person diving into the incident to resolve it. You won't be the person presenting the technical design of new architecture. You won't be the person saving the day. In fact, if you are doing things right, things will just slowly get better over time.

So start with the idea that your goal is to build an organization that doesn't need you. Work on pushing decisions down into your organization to the lowest level possible. If they make sense, allow your team to make decisions that you don't agree with. Be willing to allow your teams to fail, but structure it such that those failures will not kill them.

Provide guidance and mentorship. Set the constraints that keep failures survivable. Then get out of the way.

The hardest part isn't the work. It's the silence that follows when you do it well. You'll sit in meetings with nothing to add because your team already worked through the problem. You'll watch an incident unfold and realize no one called you. You'll disagree with a technical decision, let it stand, and watch it work out anyway.

The reward for doing this job right is the unsettling feeling that you're not needed. That's the point.

Riccardo made one enormous, visible sacrifice. He walked away from the top job at a company known around the world. Iacocca called him a hero.^[3] Most acts of leadership humility aren't like that. No one is going to write about the meeting where you kept your mouth shut. No one will notice the decision you let your team make without you. These small surrenders don't feel heroic. They feel like disappearing.

But they compound. A team that can operate without you can scale. An organization where decisions flow without bottlenecks can ship. You're not building a monument to yourself. You're building a machine that runs whether you're there or not.

The test isn't whether people know your name. It's whether the organization you built can thrive without it.