This very short article really resonates with me, so much so that it helps to explain a recent work experinece I have had.  I would brazenly call myself one with a ‘Leader Mindset’ instead of an employee mindset.  In the above article, Dan Coughlin describes this mindset as:

People with The Leader’s Mindset say, “After I identify the desired end result, I will build my activities around the priorities necessary for achieving that vision.” Their greatest desire is to be effective in terms of accomplishing the vision. If things don’t work out, they say, “I selected the wrong priorities to focus on,” or “My process for achieving that goal has flaws in it. I will need to think through what worked and what did not work and then try again.”

He constrasts this with what he calls the Employee Mindset which follows:

People with The Employee’s Mindset say, “Tell me exactly what you want done and I will go do it.” Their greatest desire is clarity of assignment. If things don’t work out, they always say, “I did exactly what you told me to do.” They accept no responsibility for the failure.

The problems arise, when management is not quite ready for employees with this leadership mindset, since they have built their thinking around the norm.  In Coughlin’s conclusion, he says:

By far, the greatest time-waster that I know of is when individuals allow other people to interrupt their schedule. This is particularly true of subordinates allowing their supervisors to pull them away from what they have decided is the most effective use of their time. Top performers simply do not allow this to happen. They have the courage to say to others including their boss that they are currently working on something else. 

This works fine in theory, but in practice lead me to being fired from a small company where I recently worked (with almost no notice) for  ‘insubordination’ and ‘difference in management style’.  Just as deadly coffee is still as dangerous with cream and sugar, these ideas can still be quite threatening when they challenge management who have been promoted with what Couglin calls the ‘Employee’ (tell me what to do so I won’t have to be accountable) mindset. 

Poor management has quite a bit of patience for normal employee hi-jinx (drinking at lunch, stealing minor company resources, dragging out deadlines, watching you-tube) because these are in a way reassuring that the employee is still in a way childlike and management is adultlike.  Poor management goes into crisis mode over challenges to the fundamental way that work is viewed and accomplished.  

 Paul Graham actually believes that the only hope for very effective employees, and apparently especially programmers, is in startups which statistically should only be in startup cities.  This is a little harsh, I still haven’t given up on more established companies, but so often I feel like I am banging my head against a wall when I try to accomplish what makes perfect sense to me in an effective way.