I can totally attest to that. I once worked for a company where the CTO that was 3-4 levels above hired me directly and I reported to him. It felt very empowering and motivating because I was working on what he considered a critical area for the day-to-day of the company. Once he was gone, I suddenly was a huge problem to all the middle managers that disagreed with the CTO.

If you happen to be in that situation, better to watch Game of Thrones (which I did only for entertainment not for work-related reasons). Ignore politics (like I did) at your own peril.

What would you have done differently? Built a better relationship with the middle managers? Kept your ear to the ground and left before the CTO did? Interviewed every quarter so you'd be able to leave and land elsewhere? Something else?

I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved.

So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific CTO but was a common agreement. If the CTO wasn't doing that, I guess I should have called his attention to it or done it myself.

To be honest, middle managers not thinking it was important is just baffling but that's another long story.

As for keeping ear to the ground, I wouldn't even attempt that because I really suck at that (and it's distracting, I'd rather leave). But many people have success with that approach.

>>"He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved."

I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a more chaotic place.

So, I just want to say top-down management isn't the worst thing. I'd prefer that to no top down management at all.

I'm on the same page. The problem in this case was a very hands-free approach to management that suddenly changed to top-down when the chaos produced almost daily outages. So the very relaxed environment now had to somehow have rigorous engineering practices... mandated from the top.

Reminds me of holacracy and how companies picked up the pieces after that fad went away.

There's a troubling/fascinating implication here: generally we just want to 'do the thing', but it's rarely that simple.

Often to be able to just 'do the thing' you have to game out a bunch of this political/strategic stuff, and start maneuvering across those dimensions, in order to create or maintain the conditions under which you can just keep doing the thing.

Yet the more you do that, and the more you think in that way, the less of the thing you're doing...