Leadership

Let me be honest: I have zero personal experience with leadership. So it was super interesting to interview Charity Majors, Madhuri Yechuri and Wei Lien Dang, all of whom do, for the column I wrote this month for The New Stack about how to grow into a leadership role as a founder.

Perhaps my favorite part about the conversations we had was that they cut through some bullshit. I find a lot of conversations about leadership either focus on how to be charismatic and likable, or how to throw your weight around and bully people into doing what you want. The theme that came out loud and clear in the conversations I had was that real leadership will sometimes require you to do both, and it’s naive to think you can be a great leader and always have everyone like you. Sometimes being a good leader means doing things that will piss at least some people off, while also not being able to explain your reasoning for confidentiality (or other) reasons.

The column is focused on entrepreneurship, but many of the lessons are just as applicable for a maintainer of an open source project with no plans for commercialization. In fact, there are a lot of parallels between open source maintainers and startup founders — including the need to motivate people with a vision. Even though startups do pay employees, Yechuri made the excellent point that startup employees often take a pay cut to join the team, so you have to sell them on the vision. An open source maintainer asking someone to contribute in any way similarly has to inspire. Maintainers also can face hard calls about how to enforce codes of conduct or even whether or not to accept PRs. You likewise just have to accept that your decisions will not make everyone happy.

Anyway, check out the article here and have a great weekend!