Asymmetric Workloads: One Way Leaders Can Poison Their Culture

Matt Schellhas
7 min readOct 2, 2021

There aren’t many leadership articles I like. Most are written for managers rather than leaders, or are written as idyllic self-help propaganda. Yes, I appreciate the irony… Most of them are by Rands, and one of his articles was particularly helpful in getting me to think of the various tiers of leaders (team lead, lead of leads, director) as having their own responsibilities in the org.

It also was the source I remember being responsible for the concept of leaders being a force multiplier. Good leaders take their team and make them capable of more than they are individually. Good leaders use process and culture and coaching to build the proverbial levers and pulleys that allow humans to move the giant boulders that are in their way! It was all very alluring, and a far cry from my stereotypical programmer’s view of the pointy haired bosses.

Years later, I realized that this model of leadership was good at describing a certain kind of leadership pitfall as well. Instead of making a small change or doing a small bit of effort to make things easier for their entire team, these leaders had the opposite effect. They would use their leadership leverage to amplify their small effort into making things harder for those around them. It created an asymmetric workload, where most of the cost fell to others.

Most times it is accidental. The leader guesses that their actions will have a positive effect, but guess wrong. We are not going to talk about those honest…

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Matt Schellhas
Matt Schellhas

Written by Matt Schellhas

Dour, opinionated leader of software engineers.

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