Episode 449: My tech lead ignored my warnings and I don’t know what my leadership style is

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Hello, long time listener first time question asker. I work for a medium sized tech company and I recently moved teams. Right now my old team is attempting to refactor a bunch of code I wrote to use a library that’ll make life easier. I don’t blame them, I tried to do the same thing. It does not work. I asked the tech lead “did you run into the same framework bug I did when I tried this refactor”… “nope” he said. So out of curiosity I pulled down the branch and guess what I saw, the same bug when I tried this refactor 3 months ago. Now I am in a weird position. Do I tell the tech lead again (he was the tech lead when I tried this same refactor) that this does not work or do I ignore it because I am no longer on that team? I don’t want to overstep my bounds but I also know its a lot of work to refactor all this code, so much work they’d need to stop delivering features and add this to their roadmap.

2. I have been interviewing for leadership roles and I keep getting asked “What is your Leadership Style”? I am honestly not quite sure how to answer this as I don’t really understand what they are asking. I have searched the internet for a clean, 5th normal form database that lists the available styles to no avail with no definitive tables. It seems this is truly a soft skill. From your experience, what is the interviewer really asking in this case, how can I better identify common styles, and what can I do to grow my skills in this area?