Leadership and management — C1

At B2 you could describe your job, work in a team, and follow basic business communication. At C1 you need the register of modern US management writing — the dialect of Harvard Business Review, Reforge, Lenny’s Newsletter, The Knowledge Project, Andy Grove’s High Output Management, Camille Fournier’s The Manager’s Path, Will Larson’s Staff Engineer, Adam Grant, Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead, Patrick Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions. That means servant leadership, transformational leadership, psychological safety, blameless post-mortem, retrospective, OKRs vs KPIs, 1:1s, skip-levels, delegation, accountability, radical candor, the manager-IC track, the staff engineer, the cone of uncertainty.

US management vocabulary has its own pronounced flavors: the agile / scrum dialect of software engineering (sprints, retros, standups), the Big Tech management dialect (1:1s, PIPs, calibrations, levels), the consulting dialect (deck, slide, frameworks, the matrix), and the leadership-development dialect (servant leadership, transformational, situational). A C1 student should move between these without slipping.

The 2020s have also added a layer: hybrid and remote-work management vocabulary (async, sync, async-first, return-to-office), psychological-safety vocabulary (Amy Edmondson, after the Google Project Aristotle research), and the post-2022 layoff-cycle vocabulary (efficiency, focus, PIP, RIF, performance management, the Year of Efficiency).

Leadership styles — the canonical models

The classic dichotomies

• leadership — influencing others toward shared goals
• management — coordinating people and resources to deliver outcomes
• management vs leadership — Drucker: management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things
• a manager vs a leader — overlapping but distinct roles
• command-and-control — top-down authority; the old-school model
• bottom-up vs top-down

Named styles

• transactional leadership — exchange of rewards for performance
• transformational leadership (Bass, Burns) — inspiring vision and change
• servant leadership (Greenleaf) — leader serves the team
• authentic leadership — Bill George; led by personal values
• situational leadership (Hersey-Blanchard) — adapt style to maturity of the led
• adaptive leadership (Heifetz) — leading through complex change
• inclusive leadership
• distributed leadership / shared leadership
• charismatic leadership
• laissez-faire leadership — hands-off
• the great-man theory — older, largely deprecated
• level 5 leadership (Jim Collins, Good to Great) — humble + driven
• executive presence — the bearing expected at senior levels

Management and the IC track

US tech companies in particular have institutionalized two parallel tracks: management and individual contributor.

• a manager / an engineering manager (EM) / a product manager (PM) / a design manager
• a first-line manager / frontline manager — manages individual contributors
• a manager of managers / a senior manager / a director
• a VP / a vice president / an SVP / an EVP
• the C-suite — CEO, COO, CFO, CTO, CMO, CIO, CISO, CRO, etc.
• the CEO / the chief executive officer
• the COO / chief operating officer
• the CFO / chief financial officer
• the CTO / chief technology officer
• the CHRO / chief human resources officer / the CPO (chief people officer)
• an IC (individual contributor) — non-manager track
• a senior IC / a staff engineer / a senior staff engineer / a principal engineer / a distinguished engineer / a fellow
• the IC ladder vs the management ladder
• the staff plus track — senior IC roles
• calibration — leveling discussions across teams to ensure consistent ratings
• levels — formal seniority bands (Google L3-L9; Meta E3-E9)
• a level-up / a promo — promotion
• a promotion packet / a promo packet — promotion case document
• the promo committee
• the manager track vs the IC track / dual-track

The day-to-day management vocabulary

Meetings, reviews, and check-ins

• a one-on-one / a 1:1 / a one-to-one — recurring manager-report meeting
• a skip-level / a skip-level 1:1 — meeting your manager’s manager
• a staff meeting / a staff — team-level recurring
• an all-hands — company-wide meeting
• a leadership team meeting / LT meeting
• a town hall — open Q&A
• a status update / a status meeting
• a standup (agile) — daily short sync
• async standup — written rather than meeting
• a sync vs an async
• sync-first vs async-first culture
• calendar tetris — strategic meeting layout
• a no-meeting day
• a focus time block

Performance management

• a performance review / a perf review / an annual review
• a 360 review — feedback from peers, reports, manager
• a self-review / a self-assessment
• peer feedback / peer reviews
• a calibration meeting — managers compare and adjust ratings
• stack ranking — forced ranking; controversial (associated with Jack Welch’s GE)
• a rating — performance score
• forced distribution — required spread of ratings
• HPF (high-potential) / HiPo — identified as high-potential employee
• succession planning — preparing future leaders
• a stretch assignment — challenging assignment that develops new skills
• a stretch goal — ambitious goal
• a development plan / an IDP (individual development plan)
• career conversations / career ladder / career path
• a growth plan vs a performance improvement plan (PIP) — opposite ends
• a PIP — Performance Improvement Plan; often precursor to termination
• PIPed — placed on a PIP
• managed out — pressured to leave without formal firing
• separation / let go / terminated / fired — euphemism ladder
• the layoff / the RIF (reduction in force) / right-sizing / the workforce reduction

Delegation, accountability, and ownership

• delegation — assigning responsibility to others
• delegate (verb) vs a delegate (noun) — different pronunciations and meanings
• what to delegate vs how to delegate
• the Eisenhower matrix — urgent / important quadrants
• the delegation matrix — Tannenbaum-Schmidt continuum (tell / sell / consult / participate / delegate)
• autonomy vs structure
• micromanagement — excessive supervision; pejorative
• macromanagement — hands-off (sometimes too hands-off)
• trust but verify — informal management heuristic
• a single-threaded owner (STO) (Amazon) — one person clearly accountable
• the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) (Apple) — same idea
• RACI — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed
• DACI — Driver, Approver, Contributor, Informed
• accountability — being answerable for outcomes
• ownership — taking responsibility as if it were your own
• bias for action (Amazon Leadership Principles) — favoring decisions over deliberation
• disagree and commit (Amazon) — voice disagreement, then back the decision
• dive deep — examine details rigorously
• escalate — raise to higher authority
• escalation paths — formal procedures
• deescalate — defuse a conflict
• a swim lane — clear ownership boundary
• a turf war — conflict over ownership

Psychological safety and team dynamics

Amy Edmondson’s psychological-safety research has reshaped US team-management vocabulary in the past decade, especially after Google’s Project Aristotle.

• psychological safety — the team’s belief that it’s safe to take interpersonal risks (speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes)
• Project Aristotle — Google’s 2012-2016 research; psychological safety as #1 predictor of team effectiveness
• a high-trust team vs a low-trust team
• the Trust Equation — Maister; credibility + reliability + intimacy / self-orientation
• vulnerability-based trust (Lencioni)
• the Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Lencioni) — absence of trust → fear of conflict → lack of commitment → avoidance of accountability → inattention to results
• a learning culture vs a fear culture
• a no-blame culture / a blameless culture
• calling out vs calling in — public confrontation vs private, gentler engagement
• psychological harm / psychological threat at work
• the safe space — varying connotations; popular in DEI training
• the brave space — newer alternative framing
• belonging — feeling part of the team
• inclusion vs diversity vs equity — DEI vocabulary
• DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) — formal HR program area
• DEIB — DEI + Belonging
• microaggressions — small slights with cumulative impact (now contested term)
• the dominant culture / dominant group
• code-switching — adjusting language / behavior to setting
• the affinity group / ERG (employee resource group)
• allyship — supporting marginalized colleagues

Feedback frameworks

• feedback — information about performance or behavior
• positive feedback / constructive feedback / negative feedback
• upward feedback / downward feedback / lateral feedback
• continuous feedback — ongoing rather than annual
• real-time feedback — immediately after the event
• radical candor (Kim Scott) — care personally + challenge directly
• the radical candor 2x2 — radical candor / ruinous empathy / obnoxious aggression / manipulative insincerity
• SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) — concrete feedback framework
• COIN (Context-Observation-Impact-Next) — variant
• the feedback sandwich — positive-negative-positive; widely critiqued now
• direct feedback — explicit, not hedged
• specific feedback — concrete examples
• actionable feedback — can be acted on
• a feedback culture
• giving and receiving feedback
• soliciting feedback — actively asking
• the praise / criticism ratio
• kudos / shoutout — informal positive recognition

Real example: Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead workshops emphasize that feedback should be specific and immediate — the further from the event, the less actionable the feedback becomes. “Specific, in the moment, and grounded in care” is the SBI move done well; “you’re not collaborative” with no examples weeks later is everything wrong with traditional annual review feedback.

OKRs, KPIs, and goal-setting

• a goal — desired outcome
• a stretch goal — ambitious target
• a moonshot — extremely ambitious; high-failure-rate goal (Google X)
• a SMART goal — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound
• OKR (Objectives and Key Results) — Andy Grove / John Doerr; ambitious objectives + measurable key results
• objectives — qualitative aspirations
• key results — quantitative measures
• the 0.7 OKR philosophy — Google’s; if you hit 100%, your OKRs weren’t ambitious enough
• OKRs cascade — alignment from company to team to individual
• the alignment session — for cascading OKRs
• a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) — ongoing operational metric
• a North Star metric — single defining business success metric
• leading indicators vs lagging indicators
• a vanity metric — looks impressive but doesn’t drive business
• a counter-metric — guards against optimizing one metric at another’s expense
• the dashboard — collected metrics view
• the metric — generic
• goal-setting / objective-setting

Agile, scrum, and the post-mortem culture

• agile — iterative, adaptive development approach
• scrum — specific agile framework
• kanban — visual workflow board / framework
• a sprint — fixed-length iteration (typically 2 weeks)
• sprint planning / sprint review / sprint retrospective
• a retro / a retrospective — what went well / what didn’t / actions
• the standup — daily quick sync
• the standup format — yesterday / today / blockers
• a blocker — what’s preventing progress
• a Scrum Master / an Agile Coach
• the Product Owner / the Product Manager
• the backlog — prioritized work list
• a story / a user story — unit of work in the user’s voice
• the story points — relative estimation
• the velocity — story points per sprint
• the burndown chart — work remaining over time
• the definition of done (DoD)
• the definition of ready (DoR)

Incident response and post-mortems

• an incident / an outage / a failure
• a SEV (severity) level — SEV-1 (critical) through SEV-5
• the incident commander (IC) — runs the response
• the on-call rotation / paged — alerted to incident
• MTTR (mean time to recovery) / MTTD (mean time to detection)
• the post-mortem / the post-incident review — analysis after an incident
• a blameless post-mortem — focused on systems, not blame
• the five whys — root cause analysis technique
• the action items — what we’ll do differently
• the corrective actions / CAs
• the runbook — operational procedure document
• the playbook — strategic guide
• the SLO (service-level objective) / SLA (agreement) / SLI (indicator)
• the error budget — allowed downtime / failures
• chaos engineering — deliberately injecting failures to test resilience

Decision-making frameworks

• a decision — choice between options
• reversible decisions vs one-way doors (Amazon) — easily undone vs not
• the decision quality
• the disagree and commit principle
• the consultative decision vs the consensus decision vs the autocratic decision vs the democratic decision
• the decision-maker / the DM / the DRI
• a decision log — record of decisions and rationale
• a pre-mortem — imagine the project failed; what went wrong? (Gary Klein)
• a red team — designated critics
• the steel-manning — strongest version of opposing argument (vs strawman)
• the working backwards document (Amazon) — start with the press release
• the PR / FAQ — Amazon working-backwards format
• a one-pager — concise written proposal
• a six-pager (Amazon) — full written narrative document
• the meeting starts in silence (Amazon) — read the doc first
• the swimlane for decision authority
• the decision rights matrix

AmE-specific leadership and management vocabulary

Collocations and high-frequency phrases

• lead by example
• set the tone
• set expectations
• align on a decision / a direction / priorities
• buy in / get buy-in / buy-in from
• drive a project / initiative / outcome
• own a project / a decision / a metric
• take ownership of
• take accountability for
• circle back — return to a topic later
• table a discussion — postpone
• park an issue — postpone (similar)
• the parking lot — list of postponed items
• scope creep — uncontrolled growth of requirements
• scope down / scope up
• descope — remove from scope
• deprioritize / reprioritize
• double down on / lean into a strategy
• pivot — change direction
• iterate on / iterate quickly
• ship — release the product (ship it, ship fast)
• MVP (minimum viable product)
• launch / soft launch / GA (general availability)
• kill a project / sunset a product
• EOL (end of life)
• drink the Kool-Aid — accept company doctrine wholeheartedly
• the eng-product partnership — engineering-product collaboration
• the build vs buy decision
• make vs buy — alternative phrasing

Common Russian-speaker mistakes

1. Chief for any boss. In English, chief is used in C-suite titles (Chief Executive, Chief of Staff) and military / police contexts. For your direct manager, use boss, manager, supervisor, my manager. My chief in a corporate context sounds wrong; my boss is the casual default.
2. Director for any boss. The English director is a specific senior level (above manager, below VP at most US companies). The Russian директор maps to CEO or general manager in small businesses. My director — only if your manager’s title is literally Director. Otherwise use my manager / boss.
3. Project ambiguous. In US tech and business, a project is typically a discrete piece of work with start and end (a redesign project). A program is broader and longer (a wellness program, a leadership program). An initiative is strategic-level. Russian проект is broader; map carefully.
4. Responsible for vs accountable for. Distinct in US management: responsible = does the work; accountable = answerable for the outcome (RACI distinction). I’m responsible for the launch (I’m doing it) vs I’m accountable for the launch (I’m answerable, even if others execute). At C1, this distinction is worth respecting.
5. Make a decision vs take a decision. AmE always make a decision. Take a decision is British and unusual in US contexts. Russian принять решение often calques as take — switch to make in American writing.
6. Control for monitor / supervise. Control in English is stronger and often pejorative (controlling boss, micro-controlling). For checking on work use check in on, follow up on, monitor, supervise. Russian контролировать maps imperfectly; I control the team sounds harsh in American English.
7. Career singular. A career is the long-term professional trajectory (she has a great career). A job is current employment (I have a new job). Work (uncountable) is the activity (work is busy). Russians sometimes use career for current role: my career is a developer — wrong; my job is to be a developer or I’m a developer by profession.

Summary

• Styles: transactional, transformational, servant, authentic, situational, adaptive, level 5; command-and-control vs bottom-up.
• Tracks: management track vs IC track; staff+, levels, calibration, promo packets.
• Day-to-day: 1:1s, skip-levels, all-hands, standups, retros, syncs vs asyncs, calendar tetris.
• Performance: review, 360, calibration, stack ranking, HiPo, IDP, PIP, managed out, RIF.
• Delegation: micromanagement vs macromanagement, RACI / DACI, DRI / STO, bias for action, disagree and commit.
• Psychological safety: Edmondson, Project Aristotle, Five Dysfunctions, vulnerability-based trust, learning vs fear culture.
• Feedback: radical candor, SBI, COIN, continuous feedback, real-time, direct, specific, actionable.
• Goals: OKRs (objectives + key results), KPIs, North Star, leading vs lagging, vanity vs counter metrics, SMART, moonshot.
• Agile: sprint, retro, standup, scrum, kanban, backlog, story points, velocity, burndown, SLO / SLA / SLI, error budget.
• Incidents: SEV levels, blameless post-mortem, five whys, runbook, playbook, on-call, MTTR / MTTD.
• Decisions: one-way doors vs reversible, pre-mortem, red team, working-backwards doc, six-pager.

Next theme: Personal development — self-actualization, deliberate practice, deep work, productivity systems (GTD, Pomodoro), habit formation, identity-based habits, ikigai.