Three signs you have a management problem. And that problem might be you
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Sources of Power by Gary Klein[1] is a great read about decision making and there's a whole chapter about communicating intent and motivation.
"When you communicate intent, you are letting the other team members operate more independently and improvise as necessary. You are giving them a basis for reading your mind more accurately."
The U.S. Army actually uses a Commander's Intent statement, which was streamlined into:
- Here's what I think we face.
- Here's what I think we should do.
- Here's why.
- Here's what we should keep our eye on.
- Now, talk to me.
Obviously this can be applied to any organization. It's always in your best interest to tell someone why they should be doing something and not just what they should be doing.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-Decisions/dp...
As a adjunct to learning about "Commander's Intent", the USMC's Warfighting provides a fairly simple background of theory.
Invariably, you get a lot of good thought.
The reason I have found over the years is that great designs are iterative and by giving out a starting point - even if it is wildly wrong, the team can use that to build upon.
If you simply say "give me a design" you get a lot of hesitancy, especially when in a group environment like a whiteboarding with the team.
If you say "here is an idea, whats wrong with it" you get a lot more engagement from the team because the people involved don't have anything at risk, instead each individual only stands to gain should they be able to improve the design.
If there is a headstrong tech in the group who is divergent in opinion, this approach can provide him with an opportunity to say exactly why his opinion differs and an alternate plan inclusive of his comment can be drawn in parallel and then either direction can be taken. with the other plan as a backup.
This is an absolutely classic rule of managing any organisation where competing priorities must be settled.
Chains of command have a very high cost, but they can ameliorate internal politicking and remove uncertainty about what, if anything, has been decided.
However, decision making power must come with accountability for the decisions, or it will NOT turn out well.
A purely flat organisation will wind up with de facto bosses, minus any institutional constraints on their activities and minus any accountability. If you're dealing with a sociopath the damage they can wreak will be magnified by the lack of structure to constrain their power.
It's the lack of an active vision that creates problems not the hierarchical or flat structure of the organization.
For example a democratic process can be used to maintain an organizations active vision including resolving disruptive people and processes.
The idea of a democratic process presupposes an institution, which includes explicit divisions of power, which is independent of the individuals taking part.
It is still a hierarchy as someone will hold the power. It is an explicit hierarchy because those powers are enumerated. That the process of replacement is democratic is slightly besides the point (though not entirely, as it prevents all-or-nothing power acquisition).
Whereas a loose, "flat" organisation with no differentiation between the rights, responsibilities and power of members is utterly vulnerable to the first sociopath who happens upon it. Such a person will wind up with an informal dictatorship and everyone else will be stuffed.
I agree that a loose "flat" organization is prone to serious problems :)
Even then, we still run into "misfeatures". I have no idea how you could tell a dev to wing it, let him work for months with no oversight and then be shocked when he came back with something unexpected.
I hope he's exagerating the examples for effect. It can't really be that idiotic, right?
Good stuff. I think leaders in general need to be more proactive pruning their employee tree if they want it to bear good fruit.
I'm amazed how difficult it is for managers to admit that they made a hiring mistake, even if the person that needs to go is just a contractor.
As a result, HR can often make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, to hire backfills or additional staff and hence managers quickly learn that it is better to retain a 60% effective person than have no-one at all.
This lesson is even further reinforced when managers are forced to sack staff to hit some corporate cost take-out target which means they have to cut staff regardless of the teams actual resource needs and without the 'low performers' in the team, you would have to cut the good performers.
It's a sad state of affairs, but one I've seen on so many occasions.
I bet they would, but such a system would be wide open to abuse. So the market has fixed it: contractors. You can get rid of them easily when no longer needed, but you pay a premium while they are.
I forwarded it to my VPs of Product and Engineering, swearing I didn't write it myself. :-)
A real gem (describes many "ghosts of employers past"). Most employees don't even want to do "whatever they want" since they know at the end of the day they have a job to do and if they're doing "whatever they want" it means they're flying blind and hoping they don't crash.
The best you can do is try, and ask your employee's forgiveness when you slide back into micromanaging.
One good way to move the process along: Never let an employee come to you with a problem unless they have 2 possible solutions. The solutions can be ridiculous, but they need to have 'em.
It gets them involved in the decision-making process from the get-go, and tends to prompt discussions among team members before you, the manager, has to get involved.
This is not a vague problem definition. And "Create an automated test suite for the website." is not "I just wanted something that pinged five URLs and checked for 500s."
It's unclear when the manager would consider the website 'tested'. If a manager said something like this and the first thing that came to mind was 'Selenium, full test-suite, 1 month', then the next thing to come to mind would be "that's probably not what he meant, since he doesn't want me gone for a month'.
"We need to ensure that the site remains up. It would be helpful to know very quickly when it goes down. I need you to write a test suite to do that."
Without the framing of knowing why something is asked for, the risk is that the work will zoom off in unexpected directions, or, just as bad, get stuck on a triviality.
Staff can do their bit by asking for intent, if the corporate culture allows it.