Berserk Management

Managers and founders coming from a technical background like to get their hands dirty. The value of their expertise can not be underestimated. However helping their teams to cope with the most challenging tasks may give leaders a false feeling of being able to handle any issue single handedly. In a growing organization such assumption is a dangerous fallacy.
Berserk Management - Teamleadsky
How does this anti-pattern impact the team?
  • Impact
    Starting from the moment when the leader is not able to know the details of every project (which eventually happens with growth), overruling decisions taken collectively by the more informed teammates endangers the quality of implementation. As well when the leaders have their "berserk" mode on, they tend to overestimate their own capacity, take a bigger bite than they can chew and fail to meet the deadlines.

    This anti-pattern impairs the ability of the team to Deliver.
How can you spot this anti-pattern?
  • Signals
    • "Yes, that was the outcome of the brainstorming session, but as always now the CTO has a better idea."
    • "Team leader took over this important refactoring herself, and it is still ongoing. We don't know what is the current status."
    • Team members avoid having technical discussions in front of the leader.

    These signals are the "red flags", that indicate it is worth taking a closer look to check whether the anti-pattern is present.
Let's review this anti-pattern on different levels:
  • Events
    On the level of events one can say: "An important deadline was missed despite the team leader working on the project nights and weekends."
  • Patterns
    On the level of patterns one can observe: "Team agreement does not allow to merge changes to the master branch before two other engineers have reviewed the code. However the team leader often does that and sometimes breaks the master."
  • Systems
    On the level of systems one can state that "Ignoring the increasing complexity of the challenges makes the decisions of the leader error prone and puts the projects at risks."
Berserk Management - Teamleadsky
  • Mental Models
    The presence of the Berserk Management anti-pattern often indicates that the leaders perceive growth as purely quantitative change. They ignore increased complexity of the challenges, and stay convinced that when they intervene they are always able to make better decisions than the teams.
Written by Alex
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