Comment by anon9001 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anon9001 | Hacker News Reader

> What if you don’t speak your mind and create an organization that continuously lowers its expectations, or have to let these people go eventually?

As a manager but not an owner, what actually happens is that I keep the same salary but the expectations are lower. I'm comfortable with that.

The only way to get a meaningful raise is to change jobs every few years anyway. That's pretty common knowledge.

If people are fired or bullied out of an organization by others, but I'm friends with them, then I have a bigger network that can help me get employment at another organization. I look at every friendly coworker that leaves as a probe sent out into the world to see what might be better elsewhere.

It's far more valuable for me to maintain a positive relationship with my coworkers than it is to provide negative feedback. Pick your battles. Who cares if one of your workers isn't very efficient?

There's so much incentive to expand my network of people that would love to work with me or for me, and so little incentive to crack down on employees to try and get them to perform better.

This is a great explanation as to why small companies can be so much more efficient than large companies. If at a large company you as a low level employee notice that a 15 person department that could be outsourced to a SaaS product and let management know, it probably will not end well for you. The 15 people in that group will hate you, the manger of the group will hate you and you will be told that you are incompetent for not understanding how important the 15 person department is to the company.

In contrast at a small company, if you notice that the CEO is spending 20% of their time on a task that could be outsourced for $100/month you are likely to be praised for helping make the company more efficient.

Basically what you do is to put "fences" around dangerous areas as a manager and don't confront them unless it is "too much" - where too much depends on a situation.

That was what I observed when working as developer of a factory control system, while testing I was sitting in place where you basically should not sit ... but I was in control of system so I knew what I was doing. No one confronted me about that, next day there was fence preventing access to that place. First thing I thought was "someone could just tell me", but yeah if you can fix thing without confronting and you have loads of other things to do in a day I totally understand someone rather put a fence than confront some guy he does not really know because he is a contractor.

I can see it is easier to move people to other projects if they don't get well instead of having discussion to make things clear. But such discussion can take too much time and energy from everyone involved.

"Basically what you do is to put "fences" around dangerous areas as a manager and don't confront them unless it is "too much" - where too much depends on a situation."

In your example, putting a fence was apparently an efficient way to mitigate the risk. Just like in risk management, you need to establish your risk tolerance and know in advance what type of behavior you are willing to accept.

Once you have identified the risk, discover the root cause, and then you can choose whether to avoid, accept, transfer or mitigate the risk.

Some risk often remains, and often new risks come as a result of controlling the original risk (https://teamsuccess.io/risk). For example, firing a liked employee might lead to others leaving too.

Lots of companies and teams don't establish a risk tolerance / risk threshold, which leads to managing the situation poorly.

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