the inner-anarchist concedes

Posted on in weekly notes

I was in Antalya, Turkey for the company offsite last week. This is a reflection on the past week. photo dump.

The worst type of leader is the one who needs to be the leader. The second worst type is the one who just can’t accept that they are the leader.

I’m a leader. Writing this fills me with dread because it sounds megalomaniacal to my ears. However, it’s true. I am a leader. I’ve been a leader for some time—I’ve been the technical lead of my team for the last three years. Although they had been calling me that for some time, I think I never really assumed it. I always treated it like a symbolic title that they needed to give me not because I deserved it but because conditions demanded it. Somebody had to fill the void, and no one else was going to.

Dunno what really changed but this year I started to feel I fit the position. It’s not like I had impostor syndrome and I finally got over it. I was confident with my technical abilities for quite some time.1 I just started to feel comfortable with the idea of being the leader. This required a lot of convincing for my inner-anarchist who has zero trust for the symbolic capital of the title. My teammates have done most of that convincing by looking up to me and putting their trust in me. Another part was my peers, superiors, and customers, and this never-ending feeling of being the adult in the room.2

Last week was one of the most challenging weeks for my team. We needed to finish a pretty daunting release that required us to work long hours under great pressure. We were at the company offsite which required us to participate in a lot of meetings and discussions. At the same time, the team needed to finish the development and testing of big features for the release. We did it. I am grateful to have wonderful teammates who never hesitate to laugh under stress and never cease to support their fellows no matter how tired they are. And they shape me as well. It’s a dialectical process—just as leadership shapes the team, the team shapes the leader.

  1. Not because I think I know everything—I just trust myself because I notice that I’m confused and I don’t shy away from learning from others. ↩︎

  2. OK, now I definitely sound like a megalomaniac. In Urla, İzmir, there’s a saying: “without excess, there wasn’t enough.” ↩︎

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