Beware the leadership hydra

The siren song of multidisciplinary leadership teams and how it goes wrong

Photo by Deon Black on Unsplash

I was talking to a friend from Google the other day of the new leadership structure their organisation has adopted. They call it leadership quads. Where every area has a group of people from four different disciplines co-leading: engineering, product, user experience and program management. The underlying goal is a sound one: make sure that you have people with differing skills and perspectives as part of the decision making process. Diversity of perspective should lead to better decision making.

The problem this attempts to solve is that it can be hard for people from non-engineering or product roles to get a seat at the table when things are being decided. This leads to problems later on and people working at cross purposes to each other. In theory if you have alignment from the different roles in your teams early on then things will work out.

The problem is it assumes that a one size fits all leadership model works. It’s an artificial grouping that attempts to force a structure onto something rather than teaching people how to work together. One way of looking at it is looking how many healthy relationships there are in a 2-leader model of product and engineering. The answer is not many — the most common dysfunction I have seen in engineering teams is that product and…