On Leadership Qualities, Part 1

I've always found the concept of leadership uncomfortable. In my experience, the best leaders tend to be the most reluctant ones — by which I mean, reluctant to lead lest they fail in their duties, not reluctant to lead because they'd rather be doing something else.

I believe everyone knows this Winston Churchill quote about democracy:

Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

This is an excerpt from a speech he gave in the House of Commons on 11 November 1947. (It's worth a read, but I must warn that it is quite lengthy.)

However, and as it pertains to leadership, I think it's far more interesting to get a fuller version of this particular passage:

The last sentence about "Ministers who are their servants and not their masters" very much brings to mind Robert Greenleaf's servant leadership, something that I've heard from a few of the managers and directors I've worked for in the last few years.

The reference to the Blaise Pascal quote is also worth some scrutiny (translated from French):

Man is neither an angel nor a beast, and the problem is that whoever wants to act like an angel, acts like a beast.

All to say that it's well and good to take on a leadership role, but you must always keep in mind that ultimately you do so in service of those you lead, and not with an ambition for more power, wealth, and success. Unfortunately, leadership roles do tend to attract these types of personalities. Which is not to say that they're not accountable, but they are usually less accountable than their reports. They might develop a certain skill set that allows them to stay, or even thrive, in a leadership role, while actually being corrosive to the organization they lead. A good example of this is Jack Welsh, who is regarded to have been one of the very first "celebrity CEOs". Welsh focused so much on short-term gains that it ended up costing GE dearly in the long term. He was known to be "impulsive, somewhat aggressive, restless, ambitious, impatient" — very much the opposite qualities that employees look for in a leader today.

Besides having non-toxic (in a social sense) personality traits and having adequate respect for those who work under you, it's also crucially important to have a lot of knowledge in the field in which you lead, and equally so a lot of experience. After all, how can you truly serve those you lead if you do not understand the kinds of challenges, setbacks, and complications they face on a regular basis? How valuable can your advice be?

Over the next few weeks, I will be discussing the qualities I believe a good leader should always strive for. Some arguments will be a bit longer than others.

Part 1 (this entry):

• Patience
• Kindness
• Embracing Diversity

Part 2:

• Having a Process to Rely On
• Having Deep Knowledge and Significant Experience in your Field
• Being Able to Read Quickly, And Parse and Distill a Lot of Information
• Being Organized, Disciplined, and Consistent
• Knowing What and How to Prioritize

Part 3:

• Having an Appreciation for Psychology
• The Ability to Teach and Inspire
• The Ability to Forgive and Move On

Part 4:

• Knowing How to Present
• Being Able to Make a Strong Case
• Being Able to Commit
• Being Able to Change Course

Part 1 below covers the first three items: patience, kindness, and embracing diversity.

Patience

This is actually one of the most difficult things for a leader to have and maintain. The main reason is that there is always a lot happening, and the urge is always to make decisions, to guide, to impact. The desire for these end states is somewhat at odds with being patient, but I don't believe they're mutually exclusive: they just require discipline and having trust in the process that's been established by leadership.

It's also crucially important to learn to be patient with your reports. This applies to the high performers as well as to the ones who are struggling. Every individual comes with their own set of challenges, and you must remember that it's difficult for people to break out of their habits or to get out of their comfort zones. It's your job to guide them and give them advice as well as direction to help them through this, but ultimately it's not your journey — and you have to accept that they will not necessarily have the same ease with certain things than you will, though they may pleasantly surprise you with how easily they can do certain things that you find challenging yourself.

Of course, this does not mean having a purely laissez-faire approach to management: you must have a clear and mutually understood set of expectations, performance level, and availability, for example. You must hold your reports accountable to these responsibilities and the role they've been assigned. But it should come with an understanding that progress in some areas may stall or regress from time to time, and may require a different approach or set of circumstances to break out of the einstellung effect.

Patience doesn't always feel like it pays off, but when it does, it usually pays back tenfold.

Kindness

Kindness can help you have patience, but it's also something that is distinct enough from it that it warrants its own blurb.

I don't remember all of my teachers, but my 5th grade teacher will always be someone I remember fondly because, while he was demanding in class, and would let you hear it if you missed an assignment or didn't take his lessons seriously, he was also always happy to see his students, would invite cohorts of them over for lunch (with parental permission, of course), and never held a grudge or punished students out of some perverse need for domination or any kind of power trip. Even at that age, I understood he was upset that you weren't taking yourself seriously, because he was taking you seriously. I knew he just wanted what was best for me and for my classmates. When he yelled at me for something I was very much guilty of, I didn't feel like he was being a jerk, I felt like I had let him down. Somewhat ironically, that is true power: his being upset was a reflection of my own failures, things that I actually had control over but chose not to act upon. It naturally led to introspection rather than detachment or rebellion, something I experienced numerous times with other, empathy-challenged or less skilled educators. All the best teachers I had, at their core, were truly kind and generous people. They also had high expectations for me, and would often challenge me to rethink what my limitations were.

I believe competent leaders must channel a genuine kindness from their core to be able to unlock performance, growth, and trust.

Embracing Diversity

I understand that currently, the words Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are a bit triggering to some individuals. And I don't care to make this a political stand, as it isn't the point of this particular opinion piece. Simply put, it's just good business.

I've always been a big fan of good writing, whether in book form or in TV shows or any other artistic expression of the written word. But sometimes, it's just so obvious that the writer or writers have no familiarity at all with a particular culture, gender, or religious group, and it immediately degrades the quality and reputation of the story. No matter how eloquently you can express a sentiment, if it's grounded in biases and inexperience in the subject matter, it will be painfully obvious and will make many people uncomfortable.

Growing up, I was a huge fan of The Adventures of Tintin. Tintin was one of my heroes: he was clever, resourceful, courageous, kind; sort of a Belgian, comic strip version of MacGyver. But unfortunately, the early Tintin books were painfully racist — the series debuted on 10 January 1929, at a time when Belgians had been fed so much propaganda that Hergé's (The phonetic abbreviation of the initials for the name Georges Remi, the author's actual name) talent and cleverness could not disguise the very real biases that he had come to accept as universally accepted truth:

... In June Hergé began serialization of the second story, Tintin in the Congo, designed to encourage colonial sentiment towards the Belgian Congo. Authored in a paternalistic style that depicted the Congolese as childlike idiots, in later decades it was accused of racism, but at the time was uncontroversial and popular ...

Tintin in the Land of the Soviets was a work of anti-socialist propaganda, while Tintin in the Congo was designed to encourage colonialist sentiment toward the Belgian Congo, and Tintin in America was designed as a work of anti-Americanism heavily critical of capitalism, commercialism, and industrialization.

A major turning point in Georges Remi's life was befriending the Chinese artist Zhang Chongren. It's worth quoting the Wikipedia entry on the origin of The Blue Lotus (emphasis mine):

While The Blue Lotus still had many issues and obvious biases (e.g. white saviorism when Tintin saves Chang from drowning; painting the Japanese in a rather unflattering light), there was nevertheless a paradigm shift in how Georges Remi approached storytelling from that point forward. Imagine how much richer and more engrossing the early Tintin stories would have been had he gotten the opportunity to collaborate with Russian, Congolese, and American artists like he got to do with Zhang Chongren. How much more compelling the Japanese villains might have been had he befriended a Japanese artist. As the Vietnamese-American novelist Viet Tanh Nguyen so succinctly put it:

"Hergé's work is deeply flawed, and yet riveting narratively and aesthetically. I have forgotten all the well-intentioned, moralistic children's literature that I have read, but I haven't forgotten Hergé."

"But Yacine," I say to myself as I pretend to be someone playing devil's advocate, "we're talking about the business world, not the art world." This is true, but ultimately it is about the same thing: quality, truth, context, and authenticity. Whatever products or platforms businesses put out to the world are a direct reflection of those who built them. With the continued and accelerating adoption of LLMs, it's more important than it's ever been to make sure that we have clarity on baked-in prejudices (emphasis mine):

... Beneath their impressive capabilities lies a fundamental challenge: these systems inherit and amplify the biases embedded in human-generated training data.

Bias represents the systematic favoring of certain groups, perspectives, or outcomes over others. Within language models, this manifests as learned patterns that unfairly associate demographic groups with particular traits, roles, or characteristics, thereby perpetuating societal stereotypes and inequities.

These biases operate at two distinct levels. Intrinsic bias becomes encoded in the model’s internal representations during training, while extrinsic bias emerges when models perform differently across demographic groups in real-world applications.

Bias in LLMs is fundamentally unavoidable because they learn from human-written text which contains centuries of accumulated societal biases.

Human bias affects small groups, but LLM bias systematically influences millions of users through automated systems that appear objective and authoritative. These models do not simply reflect existing societal biases; they actively reshape how information is presented and decisions are made.

Only two countries are dominating the LLM models market currently: The USA and China. I think it would be far more interesting if we could see LLMs trained on data and culture from Africa, Central and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, and from more Asian and North American countries as well. Even current American LLMs would stand to benefit from getting input from indigenous, African American, and Latine culture, books, and experiences. But the barrier to entry is unfortunately quite high and gated, and that makes it challenging.

I understand and appreciate that it's a lot more work to take all these things under consideration. It can be difficult to find diversity in certain professions and fields. And even with a very diverse team, biases will still find their way to the work put out. We can never get it perfect, and we have to accept that mistakes will always occur.

But in spite of these numerous challenges, and probably because of them, it matters more than ever for leaders to strive for diversity. Not because it's a way to virtue signal or align oneself with a political leaning, but because it creates resilience, encourages adoption, and ensures inclusion. And that's exactly why it's good business.

Coming Up Next...

As this piece is turning out to be a lot longer than I initially anticipated, I decided to break it down into chunks (another quality one must have as a leader! Or as an engineer, for that matter). Next week, I will address the following leadership qualities:

• Having a Process to Rely On
• Having Deep Knowledge and Significant Experience in your Field
• Being Able to Read Quickly, And Parse and Distill a Lot of Information
• Being Organized, Disciplined, and Consistent
• Knowing What and How to Prioritize

I hope this resonates with others; I have been finding it to be a useful exercise in my own understanding of what it means to manage teams. As always, if you have any opinions you'd like to share with me about this work, please reach out!

About Walnut

I fostered Walnut for Pupstarz Rescue for about a year, when I was still fostering dogs. I got him when he was about 14-18 months old before he got adopted by a lovely person in Brooklyn who has been taking excellent care of him since. He was a goofy guy, loved chasing tennis balls, was best friends with the neighbors' dog Kaia (a hound mix), and was one of my proudest adoption stories because even though he could be challenging — he had some anxiety around strangers, would pull on walks, had a lot of energy to burn — he was also incredibly sweet, funny, open to learning, and very clever.

He taught me a lot about my own patience, the importance of consistency and predictability, and learning to adapt to his personality as opposed to trying to impose a rigid set of rules that made no sense to him. It was also very humbling to have this little dude show so much faith in me and to be willing to go with whatever I would try out with him. I had to learn what was the best way to exercise him, what foods would upset his stomach and what he didn't like eating (though he was not especially difficult about that), and what he could be trained to do and what was not worth wasting time on.

Managing dogs is, of course, not at all like managing humans. But what it teaches you about yourself is applicable in multiple facets in life, as it turns out. The biggest takeaway is the commitment, but having better emotional regulation and learning to be even more organized also play a huge part.