Thread by @shreyas

There are 2 types of leaders within organizations: Naturals & Experts

Organizational dysfunction often stems from vertical & horizontal conflict between these types.

Type incompatibility between an employee and their manager is often the root cause of Sunday-night blues.

A🧵:

Naturals are born leaders.

Naturals are charismatic and confident.

Naturals make you feel like everything’s under control and everything’s going to be fine.

Naturals can make you feel like a million bucks, if they want.

Experts are born creators.

Experts are intelligent and curious.

Experts invent new things and they relentlessly work to make these inventions available to everyone who’ll benefit from them.

Experts consistently deliver results, as long as you can keep them motivated.

Very few people (about 1 in 10) are a Natural+Expert hybrid.

The rest of us have a clear primary type (even though we may demonstrate *some* traits of the other type).

Experts and Naturals both start at the bottom rung of the organization. They climb the rungs at a different pace though.

A Natural’s entry in the business world is often rocky. Naturals are not great at getting things done all by themselves. Within a year or two, most organizations get dissatisfied with a Natural’s performance in their entry level role.

But because they’re likable and have a plethora of other redeeming qualities, most organizations are reluctant to fire them. In particular, managers appreciate an entry-level Natural’s ability to see the bigger picture and to motivate & influence other team members.

After shuttling from one assignment to another, Naturals develop enough organizational support to be promoted to a manager role. And if they can’t achieve this in their existing organization, they’re able to use their experience to get a manager position at another organization.

This story repeats a few more times and ultimately a Natural ends up in a position of serious responsibility. In most organizational cultures, a Natural can reach this position at a significantly faster pace than the Expert.

An Expert’s rise within an organization is more conventional, like you’d read in career management books. They work hard, develop a greater depth and breadth of skills, and achieve results. They inevitably run into failures along the way, temporarily hampering their rise.

With enough diligence and time, Experts will also rise to positions of meaningful responsibility within the organization. They will typically take much longer (1.5X to 2X) to do so than an equivalently-gifted Natural counterpart.

Most organizations are unwittingly biased towards placing Experts in the “doing” role and Naturals in the “telling” role. It wouldn’t be crazy to postulate that most of the business world is Natural-optimized rather than Expert-optimized.

So far, it isn’t looking too good for Experts, is it?

But reader, there’s a twist in the tale (and a good one, if you’re an Expert).

The best organizations—as measured by long-term business performance—recognize this Natural-optimized bias and actively eschew it as they grow.

(they typically learn it the hard way, after hiring a Natural early on, realizing the mistake, and quickly firing them).

I’ve personally worked within a couple of Natural-optimized orgs and a couple of Expert-optimized orgs. The difference in how they operate is quite staggering. And as someone who isn’t a Natural, the difference in the quality of my experience as an employee was also staggering.

I worked for several years on the AdWords team at Google, a perfectly Expert-optimized organization. Rewinding back a few years from my time at Google, when I started at Yahoo! In 2006, it was largely a Natural-optimized organization.

I’ve written about Google vs. Yahoo! here:

quora.com/What%E2%80%99s…

Back to the topics we started this thread with: Naturals, Experts, and organizational dysfunction due to vertical and horizontal conflict between these types.

There’s a lot to cover here and, unfortunately, not enough time today.

But I’ll leave you with this: if you’re having a “difficult” relationship with your manager (or a direct report), consider that type incompatibility might be playing a role in the difficulty you’re facing.

Are you an Expert and are they a Natural, or vice versa?

This is a common root cause that has come up in hundreds of mentorship conversations I’ve had with leaders (PMs and managers of PMs mostly).

Experts actively seek out high-ranking Naturals as their managers, feel great about working for them initially (“I’ll learn so much from Bob”), over time get frustrated (“Why is Bob unhappy with the results I’m delivering?”), and develop self-doubt (“What am I doing wrong?”)

If there’s sufficient interest, I’ll expound some more on this situation and similar situations of Expert / Natural type incompatibility in a future thread.

Until then, share your feedback / thoughts and stay safe.