Comment by NhanH
3 days ago
Leaders should not need to know every single detail (ie how this incident happens, or all the tiny process changes that are happening toward their visions). That is different than knowing nothing in detailed.
The baseline expectation in the original post also applies to the SVP: he knew enough to know that things aren't unreasonable to start with, this expectation might not apply to all companies.
An analogy that might make more sense is horizontal scalability vs. vertical scalability. A leader's ability to understand all the details of the proposal brought to them by the team inherently caps the organization's ability to scale up.
Offloading the detail onto the team allows the org to scale higher by allowing the leader to bring more teams/problems into the mix. But it also introduces the complexity of keeping those teams in close enough alignment that the overall effect is still positive.
This is by no means guaranteed to be positive, and there's a lot of details to get right for leadership in making this work. But they are different details than what each individual team was bringing to leadership.
Abstractions are helpful, in business management as much as in systems architecture.
The top-level comment that started this discussion was mentioning that a "leader" said "I don't need to know the details" but that they wanted to know what comes next. The comment I responded to claimed that there are valid reasons to need to know what comes next that don't stem from a lack of trust. I asked whether the same logic should apply to wanting to know the details (since to me it seems pretty reasonable that it should). The response said "no".
It seems like you're trying to rebut my argument by presenting my argument as being against a less strong version of the original claim rather than understanding it as being literally just a counterargument to the specific version of the claim I thought was too strong.
You, and this entire thread is missing the point. Nobody is wrong but, the point being missed is that "leaders" isn't one thing.. there are leaders at every height of the organizations hierarchy and even to the sides. As a basic example, do you mean the immediate manager? their manager? their manager? The CTO? Each operates at ever more abstract level of detail.