Informal Leadership

Leadership as an activity and process rather than a title — influence through voice, delivery and credibility without formal mandate.

Also known as: uformell ledelse / leder uten tittel, uformell leder, leder uten tittel, ledelse uten personalansvar, å være leder vs. å drive med ledelse, title-less leadership, ledelse er en prosess (ikke en person), rolle vs person

How authors use it

Oldest first (extraction date when no publication date is known).

Documents (9)

• Alex Ewerlöf's Post Alex Ewerlöf · 2026-10-08 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  On the Y-shaped career ladder, Staff Engineers — unlike Engineering Managers, who spend their discretionary time on people-admin — should put their extra time into deepening technical skill and staying hands-on in code and architecture, because the alternative is sliding into an 'Ivory Tower Architect': elevated pay, voice, and autonomy without the grounding that earns it, which working engineers quietly route around.
• 5 Things World-Class Engineers Do That You Don't Steve Huynh · 2026-07-01 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Elite engineers are distinguished not by raw intelligence or effort but by five deliberate practices the author claims to have observed repeatedly across podcast conversations with principal/distinguished engineers: measuring growth monthly rather than waiting for reviews, amplifying colleagues instead of maximizing solo output, absorbing complexity so customers experience simplicity, deliberately avoiding the crowded competitive path, and converting personal failures into institutional lessons.
• The engineering manager role is splitting in two Stephane Moreau · 2026-06-09 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  The engineering-manager role is fracturing into two divergent futures — the code-adjacent tech lead manager and the non-technical multi-team EM — and because AI-shrunk teams are driving the split as an unplanned byproduct of flattening, engineers on the management path must diagnose which future their company is building and prepare accordingly rather than aiming at a single 'EM' destination.
• 4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2026-06-01 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Hierarchy is not optional in any group of more than a few people — it arises structurally from division-of-labour pressure plus external groups' need for a single point of contact — and the agile/teknologi/flat-struktur ideology that pretends otherwise does not eliminate hierarchy, it only makes the actual operating hierarchy invisible, unspoken, and harder to challenge; therefore the work of leading well is not to flatten but to operate at the correct abstraction level for the role one is in, to recognise the role-vs-person distinction, and (for a developer becoming a leader) to walk a real sorgprosess of identity loss before gaining a different kind of relevance.
• Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering Ben Linders · 2026-04-15 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Becoming a principal engineer requires deliberately cultivating leadership skills beyond technical expertise — especially by bringing skills from outside work, engaging in tech communities, and public speaking — and these activities create compounding positive feedback loops that accelerate career growth.
• 12) Greger Teigre Wedel: Når sjefen har svaret, tier resten Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2026-03-01 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  When the boss already has the answer (and shows it), other voices fall silent — so a hands-on technical leader's most important discipline is choosing, situationally, when to suppress their own answer and create space for the team to find one.
• 6) Catherine Janson og Kjerstin Wester: The power of two! Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2025-12-01 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  {'english': "Two-person leadership — 'the power of two' — is not a designed pairing or a formal structure but an emergent, trust-based working relationship between leaders whose strengths are complementary and whose explicit rule is 'if something feels off, say it once'; when it works it produces psychological safety, faster organizational metabolism (one leader pulls long-arc direction while the other lands structure and detail in real time), and a refusal of the leader-as-individual-hero default. The conditions that make it possible are not personality alone but a culture of explicit non-competition, mutual fremsnakk (talking each other up in their absence), and willingness to operate fluidly across hierarchical configurations — over, under, sideways — without the relationship breaking. The episode is also, by demonstration, an argument that this dyadic leadership is itself a competence layered on top of conventional leadership skills (listening to technologists, translating across disciplines, setting OKR-style direction, accepting that mistakes will happen) — and that you discover the pairing rather than plan it.", 'norwegian': "Toleder-relasjonen — 'the power of two' — er ikke et planlagt par eller en formell struktur, men et fremvokst, tillitsbasert arbeidsforhold mellom ledere med komplementære styrker, hvor den eneste eksplisitte regelen er 'sier vi det én gang hvis noe skurrer'; når det fungerer, gir det psykologisk trygghet, raskere organisatorisk metabolisme (én leder drar de lange linjene mens den andre lander struktur og detalj i sanntid), og et avhopp fra forestillingen om leder-som-ensom-helt. Forutsetningene er ikke bare personlighet, men en kultur for eksplisitt ikke-konkurranse, gjensidig fremsnakk og evnen til å bevege seg fritt mellom hierarkiske konfigurasjoner — over, under, sideordnet — uten at relasjonen knekker. Episoden er også, ved demonstrasjon, et argument for at toleder-praksis er en kompetanse på toppen av vanlig lederkompetanse (lytte til teknologer, oversette mellom fag, sette OKR-retning, akseptere at det vil skje feil) — og at par-forholdet oppdages, det planlegges ikke."}
• 3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel Truls Jørgensen og Audun Fauchald Strand — Heis Podcast · 2025-10-27 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  Title-less leadership is influence through clear, accountable public voice — anchored in actually delivering working software and a financial freedom that lets you keep telling the truth — and it is one legitimate, complementary mode of leadership in a tech industry that needs many such modes, even though it has real costs (intimidation effects, defensive listeners, and an asymmetry where formal leaders take credit when title-less leaders' ideas do get adopted).
• Update on Software Engineering Career Ladder jamesshore.com · 2024-08-20 source ↗ Reader 🖥️
  OpenSesame's redesigned career ladder deliberately shifts the organization's definition of engineering seniority away from individual ownership and self-promotion toward teamwork, peer leadership, and manager-verified skill fluency -- trading the old system's clarity and perceived fairness for reduced self-promotion/tenure bias, at the real cost of a heavier, judgment-intensive evaluation burden that falls unevenly on managers depending on how well they already know their people.

Propositions touching this concept (3)

By publication month, oldest first (extraction month when no publication date is known).

2025-10

• explicitTitle-less leadership is a chosen, legitimate, and complementary mode of leadership — not a consolation prize for those who couldn't get titles.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel · p1
• explicitTitle-less leadership has real costs: the bearer becomes intimidating to less experienced colleagues, gets either uncritical agreement or defensive rejection, and can no longer function as a normal team member — costs that a bounded formal role would absorb.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel · p5

2026-06

• explicitThe evolutionary form of leadership is selection by the gruppe of an uformell prototype; the modern practice of being chosen by outsiders is 'unaturlig' but not 'feil.' The split between formell and uformell leder is permanent and the gruppe will appoint a new uformell leder if the formelle leder fails to serve them.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki · p10

Open gaps (26)

• incompleteThe two-way split erases the technical-track / IC-leadership ladder. The article scopes itself to 'the management path,' and even its code-adjacent option, the TLM, is defined by managerial load (1:1s, career conversations, project coordination) — i.e., it is still a manager. The staff → principal → distinguished ladder, where one leads through technical judgment and influence with no personnel responsibility ('leadership, not management'), is collapsed into 'management' or left out. For a reader on exactly that ladder, the dichotomy is a false binary: there is a third future — the technical leader who is neither a people-manager nor a coder-with-reports.
  The engineering manager role is splitting in two — read next: Read against 'Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering' (the whole IC-leadership-ladder case), heis-12 (a principal engineer orchestrating ~40 architects with no personnel authority, forced into a non-coercive leadership style), and 'kill your org chart' (staff/principal engineers holding project leadership) — all of which name the technical-leadership track this piece omits.
• incompleteNeither the newsletter nor the strategies it highlights address a leader who leads through expertise and design judgment rather than formal headcount authority — the entire framing ('if you manage people who manage people,' 'empower your employees') assumes direct reports and formal decision-right transfer are available levers. A technical-track or informal leader has no equivalent formal authority to 'push down.'
  What to Do When There's Too Much Work — read next: Corpus material on informal leadership and leading without a title — how influence-based leaders redistribute decision-making capacity without formal authority to delegate.
• incompleteThe episode does not address whose work is *invisible* without a title — those without platform, conference speaker credibility, financial cushion, or social safety to speak controversially. Gorman names her own preconditions (cheap living in Drammen, ability to return to retail work) but does not extend the analysis to those whose preconditions do not hold. Title-less leadership in her account is universally legitimated but materially restricted.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read against Cutler on institutional overload and 'who gets to think' / power and space (TBM 413); against work on visibility and credit allocation in tech (especially gendered patterns); and against critiques of 'thought leadership' as a privilege economy. The Bekk/Kodemaker consulting ecosystem also deserves examination as the platform infrastructure that makes Gorman's mode possible at all.
• incompleteWhen is the formal title load-bearing? Gorman gestures at the answer (taking unpopular fights, decisive 'I'm not paying for that' moves) but does not theorize when title-less voice strictly cannot substitute. The carpenter renovation analogy works because the homeowners had authority — Gorman in a team without it cannot replicate that pattern.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read Morten Eikeland (Heis ep 4) 'det finnes alltid et hierarki' as the explicit counter-claim. Also read Una Aamodt Mathisen (Heis ep 10) 'lede uten fasit' as a complementary refusal-of-answer-key mode. The cross-cutting question: which leadership functions can be unbundled from title and which cannot?
• incompleteThe asymmetry of credit ('formal leaders take recognition when title-less leaders' ideas land') is named as a price Gorman is willing to pay, but not analyzed as a systemic problem. Who benefits from this asymmetry? It serves the formal leadership class — both the leaders who take credit, and the system that does not have to compensate the title-less.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read on credit assignment in collaborative work, on academic citation/recognition norms, on the labor economics of 'thought leadership' (Substack, conferences). Connects to Cutler on 'directly responsible individuals' from the recognition side.
• incompleteThe framing of public-sector dysfunction as 'budget growth instead of value delivery' is a strong claim presented anecdotally. The implicit comparison to private sector ('we are on the same team') under-acknowledges that private-sector alignment is also engineered and partial — shareholder vs. employee interests, sales vs. engineering, short- vs. long-term.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read Nils Brede Moe (Heis ep 9) on the AI-paradox and learning culture; read public-sector reform literature (NAV's 'optimizing for fast flow' is on the user's list). Also read industrial-organization work on aligned vs. misaligned incentives across sectors.
• incompleteImplicit premise about authority and self-correction ('I trust my own thinking only because I have to argue for it') is asserted as autobiographical but generalized. The argument that formal authority degrades judgment by removing resistance deserves more scrutiny — many formal leaders maintain rigorous self-criticism, and many title-less voices ossify.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read on epistemic humility and authority (Annie Duke on 'Thinking in Bets' framing of belief-updating; Greger Teigre Wedel (Heis ep 12) 'når sjefen har svaret' on the inverse problem). Also Beck on Tidy First / TDD as institutionalized self-correction independent of authority.
• uninformedThe episode does not engage with how AI coding agents change the picture of who counts as a 'delivery-grounded' practitioner. Gorman's 'basis' criterion is rooted in writing code yourself — but what counts as that basis when much code is now generated and curated? The 'AI replaces ticket-converters' framing is correct but stops short of asking what the basis becomes.
  3) Christin Gorman leder uten tittel — read next: Read Heis ep 11 (Vilde Opsal / Anders Sveen AI special) and ep 13 (Tobias Torrissen on code quality + AI); read the user's Kent Beck Tidy First and Claude Code material — what is the 'basis' equivalent when the medium shifts?
• incompleteThe thesis 'det finnes alltid et hierarki' is rescued from triviality by Eikeland's broad definition (formell + uformell + kunnskaps- + framing-makt), but the same breadth makes the claim nearly unfalsifiable. Every conceivable group has some asymmetry of influence on some dimension; calling that 'hierarki' wins the argument by definition. The conversation does not engage the harder question of when the unit of analysis is wrong — when treating a temporary, context-dependent, weak asymmetry as a 'hierarchy' obscures more than it reveals.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Compare to network-and-influence literature (Cross/Parker on organisational networks, Vedres/Stark on structural folds) where the alternative unit is the network of weak ties rather than the layered hierarchy. Also Heath/Sunstein on consensus-driven decision-making to test where 'hierarchy' really is the operating frame.
• incompleteThe claim that flat-org rhetoric is selvbedrag is supported by Eikeland's clinical observation and the innvandrer vignette but not by counter-evidence from organisations that have made the rhetoric operationally real (or that have failed in distinctively non-Eikeland ways). The conversation does not engage Holacracy, Buurtzorg, sociocratic governance, or the long literature of self-managing teams. The result is a strong descriptive claim resting on a single vantage point.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Read Laloux Reinventing Organizations, Buurtzorg case studies, Robertson's Holacracy critically — both for examples of self-organisation that genuinely changes which hierarchy operates and for documented failures that Eikeland's frame would explain well. Pair with Lee/Edmondson's typology of self-managing organisations.
• incompleteThe role-vs-person distinction is presented as universal but it conflicts with a strong current of contemporary leadership literature (authentic leadership, bring-your-whole-self-to-work, vulnerability-based trust à la Lencioni/Brown) that holds that role-thick depersonalised leadership is itself the failure mode in knowledge work. The conversation does not engage these counter-positions; it treats them only implicitly via the Trump example, which is a one-sided foil.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Read Brené Brown on Dare to Lead, Goffee/Jones 'Why Should Anyone Be Led by You?', Lencioni on vulnerability-based trust against Eikeland's role-thick line. The most interesting test case is: are there role-domains where role-thickness is right (dommer, kirurg, politi) and other domains where it is wrong (product-team leadership, R&D leadership)?
• incompleteEikeland's developer-to-leader sorgprosess prescription is rich on the loss side but thin on the gain side. The transition presumably brings new sources of meaning (impact through others, system-level effect, mentoring, organisational design), but the conversation barely names them. The risk for the listener is to internalise the loss-frame and miss the path through.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Camille Fournier's Manager's Path; Will Larson's Staff Engineer/An Elegant Puzzle on the IC-vs-manager fork; Lara Hogan on growing engineering leaders. Pair with Olga Khazan or Lori Gottlieb on the psychology of mid-career identity transitions.
• incompleteThe illusion-of-explanatory-depth intervention (ask for mekanismer not meninger) is presented as reliably productive but Eikeland admits it provokes forbannelse and ejection from rooms. The conversation does not address how to make the intervention land without burning the relationship — i.e., the practice question of how to descend into mekanisme safely. This matters because the intervention has weight only if it can be sustained inside an ongoing leader relationship.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Edgar Schein on humble inquiry; Marshall Goldsmith on stakeholder-centred coaching; Patterson et al. Crucial Conversations. The Heis-internal pairing is with Brede Moe (ep 9) on psykologisk trygghet as the precondition for being usable as a diagnostic outsider.
• uninformedThe argument that teknologene have gained makt at the expense of 'litt enklere selgere' is named as a flagged trade-off but not analysed. The conversation does not engage the broader political-economy story of which professions rise and fall with each kunnskapshierarki shift, or the consequences for democratic and labour-market dynamics when one type of fag becomes dominant. Eikeland's clinical vantage is not designed for this question; the gap is honest but real.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Read Daniel Markovits The Meritocracy Trap, Michael Sandel The Tyranny of Merit on the consequences of credentialist hierarchies. For the Norwegian case specifically, NAV's own reports on labour-market polarisation.
• incompleteEikeland insists hierarchies are inevitable but does not develop how to design good hierarchies versus bad ones. Hierarchy as a design object — its arity (span of control), its time-horizons per level, its dual lines (formal/uformell), its rotation, its accountability — receives no operational attention. The descriptive claim therefore stops short of a constructive prescription beyond 'operate at the right abstraksjonslag and recognise rolle vs person.'
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Elliott Jaques on requisite organisation and time horizons per level; Stafford Beer's Viable System Model; James Mwangi on adaptive governance. Pair with Printzell Halvorsen (ep 8) on the Vend operating model as a worked example of an explicit, designed hierarchy that honours these structural pressures.
• incompleteThe claim that ledelse-as-coordination kicks in around eight people is asserted as 'avhenger litt av hvor mye interaksjon du trenger' but not defended against the broader social-science literature on group size, span of control, and self-organisation thresholds. The number is plausible but the conversation does not engage why eight rather than five or twelve, what happens in distributed/asynchronous groups, or how the threshold shifts with technology.
  4) Morten Eikeland: Det finnes alltid et hierarki — read next: Robin Dunbar's hierarchies of group size (5, 15, 50, 150); Christopher Allen's optimal group sizes; Tuckman's small-group dynamics. For the distributed case, GitLab's all-remote handbook on team sizing and the post-COVID literature on async coordination.
• incompleteCultural specificity is unexamined: Wedel never tests whether 'when the boss has the answer, the rest stay silent' depends on Norwegian (or Nordic, or hierarchical) defaults. In flatter or more confrontational cultures, the chilling effect may be weaker — or it may show up differently (silent disagreement vs. silent compliance).
  12) Greger Teigre Wedel: Når sjefen har svaret, tier resten — read next: Cutler TBM 423 on undiscussables (which treats power-asymmetry-creating-silence as general, not culturally specific) and Edmondson on psychological safety across cultures. Also Hofstede / Trompenaars on power distance dimensions in Nordic vs. other workplaces.
• incompleteDecision criteria for posture-switching are underspecified. Wedel says leaders should choose among coaching, deciding, hands-on, whiteboarding, director postures situationally — but he names only one explicit trigger (the over-coaching failure mode that calls for cutting through). When to take which posture is left as 'judgment'.
  12) Greger Teigre Wedel: Når sjefen har svaret, tier resten — read next: Kent Beck on tidy-first vs. mess-first decision rules; Heifetz on adaptive vs. technical work; Cutler's TBM 418 on campfires/trails/quests as posture-selection frame.
• incompleteThe interaction between explicit mode-switching ('lederhatten av') and team-level psychological safety is asserted but not unpacked. Saying 'we're in whiteboarding mode now' presumably only works if the team trusts that the leader will actually honour the signal — which is itself a function of trust built elsewhere.
  12) Greger Teigre Wedel: Når sjefen har svaret, tier resten — read next: Edmondson on psychological safety as accumulated track-record; Schein on rituals and their preconditions; Pocock's 'alignment is not AFK' point about why alignment work must be live, not formal.
• incompleteAI-as-amplifier is asserted in both directions (good practice → better; bad practice → worse) but the magnitude of asymmetry is not addressed. If AI amplifies bad practice faster than good, the policy implication ('defer AI until guardrails exist') may be stronger than Wedel states.
  12) Greger Teigre Wedel: Når sjefen har svaret, tier resten — read next: DORA 2025 detailed findings; the Dave Farley YouTube series Wedel mentions; any empirical work on AI adoption velocity vs. defect rates.
• incompleteThe six product-org first principles are alluded to but not enumerated in the conversation. Only the first (deep user/customer connection) is discussed.
  12) Greger Teigre Wedel: Når sjefen har svaret, tier resten — read next: stuff.greger.io blog series on product organisation first principles.
• incompleteThe four driver categories (strategic, personal, market, analyst) are presented as a taxonomy but never resolved when they conflict — the talk narrates the exact scenario of a strategic/partnership-mandated tool colliding with a team member's moral objection ('I don't support the political orientation of where this company is located') without saying how the conflict was actually adjudicated.
  Presentation: Platform Engineering for Everyone - Success Can’t Be Coded — read next: Corpus material on informal leadership and leader restraint for how leaders adjudicate genuine value conflicts within a team without either overriding the objector or letting one person veto a strategic commitment.
• incompleteThe article never addresses the tension between breadth (community, speaking, diverse skills) and depth (deep technical mastery). Principal engineers are typically expected to have both, but the article focuses entirely on the breadth side. An engineer following this advice exclusively might develop excellent leadership skills while falling behind technically — which would undermine their credibility in the role.
  Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering — read next: Will Larson's 'Staff Engineer' or Tanya Reilly's 'The Staff Engineer's Path' for the technical depth dimension; also the original talk video for potential coverage of this balance
• incompleteThe feedback loop claim is asserted via metaphor ('systems thinking terminology') but not demonstrated. There is no evidence that these activities actually compound rather than merely accumulate. The mechanism by which speaking leads to organizing leads to centrality is never specified — it could equally be a survivorship bias narrative.
  Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering — read next: Research on career capital theory (Cal Newport's 'So Good They Can't Ignore You') for a more rigorous framework on how skills compound
• uninformedNo acknowledgment of structural barriers to community involvement and public speaking: geographic isolation, caregiving responsibilities, financial constraints, neurodivergence, visa/immigration constraints that limit professional visibility. The advice assumes a degree of privilege and freedom that many engineers don't have.
  Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering — read next: Literature on equity in tech careers; Lara Hogan's work on sponsorship as an alternative path for underrepresented engineers
• incompleteThe article is a journalistic summary of Weston's talk, not an independent analysis. The real intellectual content is in the original QCon presentation, which likely contains more nuance, caveats, and audience interaction than this compressed version captures.
  Developing Your Leadership Skills toward Principal Engineering — read next: Watch the original talk: 'The Principal Engineer's Path' by Sophie Weston, QCon London