How Hard Could It Be?: My Style of Servant Leadership

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And Michael and I could have spent the time, in theory, doing something a lot more valuable. Indeed, I had pulled Michael away from an important project in order to help me with the blinds. He was implementing a program our customers had been begging for -- a feature that allowed them to prepay for a year's worth of service. That program promises to increase our bank balance substantially, and it won't cost us one extra cent.

But as I'm sure you've guessed, I was trying to make a point, just like the sergeant major. In our company, management's job is to get things out of the way so that all the great people we've hired can get work done.

This is not just lip service.

Getting glare off the computer monitors so that people can write code actually is my highest priority.

I'd love to imagine that I'm the most valuable person in the company, that my time is so precious that I have to optimize every minute. But it's not true. At this point, I'm probably the worst developer in the office. And people have made so many changes to the tools we use to develop FogBugz that I don't even know how to compile new features, let alone develop them.

Our company was built on the idea of hiring smart and productive people and then clearing the decks. The late, great minicomputer company Digital Equipment Corporation, better known as DEC, was so adamant about this idea that people in the company used the word administration in place of management and modeled its corporate hierarchy on that of a great research university.

The brains behind the university are the professors. They do the groundbreaking medical experiments on rhesus monkeys and gain insight into the psychology of man by closely observing the behavior of college sophomores. Obviously, these geniuses shouldn't waste a moment of their valuable time on administrative tasks.

Thus, universities hire support staff to collect tuition payments and figure out who should get that great parking space near the duck pond. (At the very most, a good university might rotate the administrative tasks among the faculty, but ideally, it has a team of professionals to keep the trains running on time.) DEC behaved in much the same way.

And that's my model, too. Not everybody gets it. Not long ago, we had a management trainee who sat around waiting for us to give him a formal title and promotion so he could "get stuff done." Problem was, he had never managed to win enough respect or influence from the development team to actually do things. He didn't work out so well; despite being smart and competent, he didn't earn the leadership position he thought he deserved. He would have been better off thinking about new features we should develop, writing specs to outline the benefits of these features, and winning the developers' trust through action instead of waiting for the title.

Another management trainee didn't care what his title was: He came up with a new idea for a program and persuaded the team that it was a good idea. I think he'll go far.

That's the kind of leader I want to nurture at my company. I'm working hard to make Fog Creek Software a place where authority and respect are earned and not bestowed. A place where management is an administrative function -- and not a particularly glamorous one at that. I'm betting that's the kind of company that can attract and keep the software talent that I hope will invent the future. And while those people are busy doing that, I'll keep an eye on the blinds and the toilets.

Joel Spolsky is the co-founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software and the host of the popular blog Joel on Software.

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