Great teams make the difference in tech – not great leaders
There’s a way of viewing the past called the ‘Great Man’ theory. Born two centuries ago, but with its tendrils throughout western culture up to our current political moment, the idea is that history is shaped by a select, chosen few who leave their mark on the world.
The names may change. For some it might be Churchill versus Roosevelt, or Napoleon versus Shakespeare, but the intellectual foundation is the same: it takes a few singular minds to change the course of history and those leaders were born with the traits that made them great.
The problem is, within the IT and broader tech sector, we have repeatedly fallen, hook, line, and sinker for this theory. The (male) founder gets lionized, initial investors championed as visionaries. But like most businesses and organizations with any ambition, they would fall apart without a good administrative assistant or two taping the proverbial ship together over Google Calendar invites and lunchtime venting sessions.
Collaboration, not some dogged lone wolf concept of economic order, is how things actually get done.
Not only that, but the concept of those select few being born with the traits that made them great leaders should be a good cause for us to roll our eyes. There’s a reason that royalty through the ages have spent much of their lives with tutors and teachers, much as there’s a reason professional development sessions and free educational resources have been at the core of technological innovation over the last thirty years.
It turns out one does not come out of the womb a fully formed software developer or UX designer anymore than they do Canada’s next Prime Minister. Primed for nepotism? Maybe. Primed for greatness? Hardly.
Now, the next topic in this discussion tends to be ambition. I’m not here to say that ambition doesn’t play a part in any innovation – just look at how the US tech world talks about AI – but a solo version of that can only drag a company so far. I’m not calling Musk, or Bezos, or Zuckerberg, a trio of Icaruses, but I do think they are flying closer to the sun than anyone in the tech sphere has in modern memory.
One of the issues with this is that their attitudes have filtered down into, to use the organizing term, some segments of the rank and file. If a lot of workers think they’re closer to the billionaire than the unhoused person at the front of their giant office building, then there’s a problem. Bootstrapping can only take a singular person so far – even cults require a leadership team that works together.
While there’s a resistance argument to this, that the leaders making odious decisions have a hard time implementing them if their employees refuse to cooperate, there’s also a more optimistic view on the whole thing.
Collaboration is the point
Companies that build cultures of collaboration win, not just in monetary terms, but in reputational and innovational terms. I do a lot of health reporting, inside of tech and outside, and one thing you notice pretty immediately is that each academic paper one covers that holds within it not just the voices of the authors, but tens to hundreds of viewpoints. They might be from folks who built longstanding data gathering processes, they might be patient voices, they might be the journal’s promotional team.
The story of progress doesn’t happen without a whole bunch of cogs, to borrow a metaphor that isn’t part of Greek mythology, working together.
We don’t need to turn to the history books to see this in action. Efforts to show off the collaborative nature of good business are sometimes public via platforms like YouTube. For example, I chose to use Kit (formerly ConvertKit) as my newsletter provider precisely because it’s open and has a transparent creative director in Charli Prangley. Also a content creator, Prangley publishes regular videos discussing her firm’s work culture, alongside her work routine and side hustles. In 2020, years after the company made an ill-advised rebranding decision, founder Nathan Barry also shared an in-depth post about that decision making process.
What is clear in his writing is that the decisions weren’t revolving around just him. It’s impossible to keep everyone happy, as Barry’s post shows, and a staffer’s view is only one data point.
But collaboration begins at the core of any good workplace. I didn’t do a psychology degree so don’t worry, I’m not suddenly going to present to you a Maslow-like hierarchy of business needs, but there is no world where going it alone has any staying power despite the fact that most of these “great men of history” were verifiably obsessed with their own legacies.
So, how do we foster collaboration in an IT and tech industry that often sees it as little more than a buzzword to chuck out on an annual report or during a shareholders’ meeting? Well, it’s the same as in other industries: you start looking around.
Who can you connect to at work? Who can you ask about mentorship? Which educational resources can you use, not just to upskill, but to feel like you’re a team player more than you are an outsider. These companies, many of whom are fixated on citing collaboration for their return to office mandates regardless of the productivity benefits of remote work, have actually given you the perfect opportunity to reimagine what collaboration looks like in our current ecosystem.
Hint: it’s got very little to do with the folks making millions, who biographers fifty years from now will call on the wrong side of history.
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