As of December, my role at Cisco has transitioned from a leadership role back to an individual contributor.  Gone are the constant approval emails;  gone is the stack ranking of employees;  gone are the performance reviews and the one-on-ones.  It’s both relieving and eerily quiet.  As I make this transition back, after nearly eight years, I thought it would be a good time to reflect on leadership and what it means to me.

I never wanted to be a “people manager”.  When I first started in networking, way back in the early 2000’s, I was explicitly clear about this to my boss.  I loved hands-on work.  I wanted to be in the trenches.  If I were a cop, I wouldn’t want to be a detective–I’d want to be in the patrol car.  I also lacked the self-confidence to take on a team.  Routers I could handle; people not so much.

I worked in Cisco TAC, then at a partner, and then at Juniper Networks.  In all those years, the idea of managing people never once came up.  I didn’t ask for it, and nobody asked me to do it.  I was happy being the hands-on guy.  When I got married in 2012, I told my wife to never expect me to be in a leadership role.

That all changed when I came to Cisco for the second time in 2015.  I had landed my dream job as a technical marketing engineer.  I loved having a lab, doing Cisco Live presentations, writing blogs and books, and working with customers.  I was quite fine with this when my boss, Carl Solder, one day stunned me in our 1:1 by asking me to lead a small team.  I objected lightly–I want to do hands-on work, not manage people.  Don’t worry, he said, you still can.  To my surprise, as well as my wife’s, I said yes.

My first team had 12 people on it, covering Software-Defined Access, Assurance, and Programmability.  A bit of a hodge-podge.  The day the team was announced I was pulled one-by-one by my new team members into a room, to listen to each of their demands.  What had I gotten myself into?  My boss later told me that two experienced managers who were sitting outside the small conference room rolled their eyes and simultaneously said:  “welcome to management!”

The management philosophy I brought to my team didn’t come from books or coursework.  It came from my own observations.  Simply put, there are two management styles:  negative and positive.  Negative leaders are the most common.  They lack empathy and are thus unable to work with people.  They manage by assigning tasks and tracking metrics.  They pile on their people.  They are hard on their teams, task masters, and are mainly interested in their own self-promotion.  They see their team as a tool to achieve their own personal goals.  I’d had many such leaders, and worked poorly under them.  I struggled to remain motivated, and would usually do just enough work to get by.

Positive leadership looks at employees as individuals.  Positive leaders try to understand their employees’ needs and help them grow in their careers.  They look for potential in employees and try to develop that potential.  They try to align assignments to employee’s skills rather than forcing work upon people.  They look for strengths and play to those strengths.  Positive leaders are “servant leaders”, as much as I hate the cliche.  They care more about their people than themselves.  They promote their people rather than themselves.  Under this style of leadership, employees work hard because they feel their leadership cares about them.  They usually want to make their boss look good, and feel personally disappointed when they let their boss down.

I learned a simple rule from my first boss, Henry Sandigo, who practiced this style of leadership.  When your team fails, you take the blame as the leader.  When your team succeeds, you give them the credit.  Negative leaders do the opposite.  When their team succeeds they take the credit, and when their team fails, they blame their team.

One time, my team held up a software release due to critical bugs.  This upset engineering, who pushed back.  One of the product management leaders was furious with me.   He came to me, stood an inch from my face, and with bloodshot eyes yelled at me:  “I want the name of everyone who was in that room making the decision.”  I said to him he could have one name, mine, because it was my team and I was responsible.  It turns out we were right, but I had to endure the fury of that leader for a long time.

If negative leadership is so ineffective, why is it so common?  The answer is simple.  Negative leaders tend to be ladder-climbers and self-promoters, whereas positive leaders are humble by nature.  Negative leaders are always out for themselves, and in the corporate world, that tends to advance you to higher positions.  Additionally, if negative leaders are in power, they have no respect for positive leaders.  They tend to promote people with their own leadership style, and view positivity as soft and weak.

As a leader, you become involved in people’s lives, often quite intimately.  I had two employees go through bitter divorces while on my team.  My philosophy was to give them the room they needed to recover and get back to work.  I had interpersonal conflicts that went to HR.  I had one employee drop from a cardiac arrest and who has been in a coma for two and a half years.  I’ve been in the room with him and his crying family, and dealt with his long-term leave of absence.  Configuring routers is easy in comparison to the harsh realities of life.

I’ve also had to lay people off more times than I can count.  One of the main reasons I didn’t become a manager for so long was that I never wanted to lay someone off.  It’s an unfortunate reality in the corporate world today.  When I’ve made that call, some have been angry, some have cried, most were just quiet.  I can only say I hated having to do it, and that I fought hard to not do it.  In fact, I’ve been criticized for fighting too hard to save jobs.  I cannot really complain as it’s much harder to receive the call than to make it.  But I tried to see my employees as humans and to help them as much as I could.  The unfortunate reality of the corporate world is that people are just seen as OpEx, as numbers on a spreadsheet, and not as human beings whose lives are horribly affected by losing their jobs.  I don’t know if I will ever return to leadership, but I’d be happy if I never had to make those calls again.  (For what it’s worth, I once was on the receiving end of the call.)

I also got to make several happy calls.  Promoting people is one of the great joys of management.  I helped several people get director and principal promotions, which are very hard to get at Cisco.  Although they did the work, I did the back-end negotiation, and I’m proud of each one of them. 

I tried to go the extra mile for my employees.  During the COVID lockdowns, I drove around to each of my direct’s houses and surprised them with a Christmas gift.  They were grateful to see a co-worker after so much time in lockdown.  When one employee, a gin lover, had a really bad day with a difficult VP, I sent him a nice bottle of gin, at my own expense.  I found little touches like this go a long way in building loyalty and positivity in a team.

We all learn from the great leaders we worked for.  I mentioned Carl and Henry.  Bask Iyer was another one. Bask came in as CIO of Juniper at a time when working in IT was like working in a morgue.  We were all depressed, beat up by the business, and unmotivated.  Bask would defend us in company meetings when we got attacked.  He went to bat for us.  He was a great technologist, but what really impressed me was his ability to stand up for us.  Gary Clark, who reported to Bask, exuded the same positivity.  When you met with Gary for the first time, he had a series of lego blocks with different personality traits.  He would arrange them in order while he was talking to you, building a model of your personality.  In other words, Gary wanted to know who you were, how you thought, and meet you where you were.  I always appreciated that.  

At my peak, I had 50 people reporting to me and multiple layers of management.  Then, through attrition, it dwindled to 30, 20, then 8, and now none.  A team of 50 seems like a distant memory to me now.  It’s hard to believe I did that.

Many technical people come to the same fork in the road that I did.  Do you stay technical, or do you take a management job to advance your career?  Notice I put these in opposition.  I can affirm that when you go into the management track, your technical skills atrophy.  As much as I tried to maintain and work in a lab, it became nearly impossible.

There was one day when I was invited, as a senior director, to a meeting on software-defined access architecture with a bunch of distinguished engineers.   They were discussing an idea around multicast.  As I listened, I decided to interject:  “If you do it that way, you’ll break PIM registration.”  One of the DEs rolled his eyes, but then another said “wait, Jeff’s right!”  It was nice to know I still had it.

Those moments, however, become rare.  I know that all of my employees respected that I had a technical background.  It’s important that leaders in technology companies know technology.  But if you go the management route, you will definitely find the technical side of things recedes as people become your main concern.

The hardest thing about being a team leader at a company like Cisco is pleasing all the factions that will ultimately provide feedback on you.  The second you step into leadership, there is a target on your back.  The corporate world is Machiavellian.  Nice guys finish last.  If you try to partner with and please one leader, another leader will get upset.  Pivot to him, and the first guy gets mad.  This was especially true for TME, which is seen as a service organization.

It’s important to remember that the corporate world is vicissitudinous.  Over the course of the years, you will see roles come and go.   I’ve seen executives who were flying high one day shown the door the next, and a whole new regime comes in.

As I said at the beginning, in some ways it’s a relief.  On the other hand, one of our product management VPs saw me with my team and said I was like a “proud papa.”  While it’s nice to do things myself again, I can say I was proud of the teams I lead, and I miss taking pride in my team instead of myself.

Will I ever lead a team again?  Who knows.  If I’m asked I will gladly do it.  If not, I’ll do my job as an individual contributor.  I don’t think there’s much room in the corporate world for leaders with my style, anyways.

The upside is, I can now spend time in the lab.  My routers won’t ask for raises.