We are so enamored with an engineer’s technical abilities that we conflate the ability to execute with the ability to lead. We keep promoting folks to management roles who can get a task done, but who are also woefully inadequate in terms of vision and direction.
As a result, these folks do get great execution with excellent JIRA tracking on their plans with awesome breakdown on Epics, Stories, Tasks and Subtasks along with dependencies and schedules all laid out cleanly. But their plans get us nowhere because they lack one essential element—-vision. Far too many of our directors, senior directors, VPs, SVPs are just that—only great at execution, but they have zero vision, and zero ability to chart a correct new course.
They have a facade of the ability to lead, but once you scratch the surface to open, there is nothing inside that can lead.