Company, Team, Self
lethain.com
lethain.com
It's backward because it's advice given to employees, when it needs to be given to be given to management.
Employees will and should do self-interest. It's the EXECUTIVES's duty/problem to ensure that they make workers' self-interests clearly aligned with Customers/ Company/Team/Self.
It's an interesting exercise to consider how to make it in an employee's self-interest to perform actions that prioritize the company's interest over the team. Of course managers have a perverse incentive here to prioritize a narrative that the team is always excelling in all ways, and thus may have an incentive to penalize/fire employees who put the company ahead of the team (e.g. by admitting the team's project is useless/redundant/poorly-defined).
I'm shocked by how few executive understand that their managers are a great threat to their company, because they have a huge vested interest in promoting dishonest narratives about the needs/successes of the company. The larger the management chain, the more likely a BS-er is in that chain.
I do see what you're saying, but I don't think that quality of work and caring about oneself only are mutually exclusive.
You can care about the quality of your work without really caring about the fate of a particular company. Employees with great output are in high demand, so you know that you can just continue somewhere else.
I happen to care about the quality of my work and the company, but even then, the company's future (unless I own it) comes way below my own needs (thinking of my family here in particular).
I don't think it's possible to make a significant portion of your workforce altruistically care about the company. Hence, the original commenter's suggestion is that managers are responsible for correctly incentivizing workers.
If I put the company and then the team first, and the team and company think the same way, who is there to look out for me?
Only a sociopath, and a stupid one, would put their company ahead of their family. And there aren't that many sociopaths in society.
Loyalty must be earned, and most companies have earned not loyalty, but resentment and deep distrust.
(I have been lucky that I have mostly avoided such companies, because I have a fairly rare talent, but not entirely. Oh, boy.)
> People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software. That’s great, particularly if you avoid writing software with strict dependencies. Some managers get energy from coaching others. That’s great. Some get energy from doing exploratory work. Others get energy from optimizing existing systems. That’s great, too. Some get energy from speaking at conferences. Great. Some get energy from cleaning up internal wiki’s. You get the idea: that’s great. All these things are great, not because managers should or shouldn’t program/speak at conferences/clean up wiki’s/etc, but because folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.
A think I've found challenging about management is that /people are different/. What works for one person in terms of motivation or style of work won't work for another person. A big part of effective people management is understanding that and figuring out what style works for each of the people you work with.
This realisation hit me when I was in a heated debate with my (then) product manager about what did and did not provide value for our customers. Then suddenly he said, "I'm pretty sure almost half of what I ask your team to do is not because it's valuable to our customers, but because it's clearly important to your team, for whatever reason I don't have to care about."
I had no idea until that point, but it did make a lot of sense.
P.S. Recommended reading on this topic, "Obliquity" by John Kay is excellent.
> balance off various values against each other
This is still optimization. It’s just better optimization because it’s longer-term and considers more variables and their interaction effects.
Why should an employee put the company interests above their own with that incentive alignment? The company should work to make the company's interests serve the individual interests of the employees
Certainly all the good gains in my career happened as a consequence of achieving big things for the company, which I wouldn't have landed with me-first thinking.
You did me-first. You just had situations where what was good for the company was good for you too. If you repeatedly did what was good for the company but never got anything for yourself you would probably stop. A lot of people are in a situation where what’s good for the company doesn’t give them any reward or is even negative (lose their job, more work).
The company's goals are usually a derivative of customer goals. Why are Customers not considered?
Any ways, I like being individual focused, but we all work for this Company for a reason (interest?) and so we should probably just say something like; the company goals should be such that they can be reasonably accomplished with <100% of available resources, time and efforts. Leaving time for some independent individual development. Something like what Google theoretically did with their 80/20 policy. It's up to you to figure out what the right X/Y mix is.
And may I suggest a simple method: have employees vote for executives
Incentives align naturally when there is two way feedback
When the interests of employees are put ahead of the success of the company, in the long run the employees end up losing because the company will fail, or at least need to lay people off.
Also, most employees simply aren't capable of understanding or judging executives more than a few levels above them. I'd hate to work somewhere where the junior devs get to pick the engineering directors, for example.
Maybe employees will make intelligent informed decisions about who is actually capable as an executive. Maybe they will make more effective decisions themselves if they have a greater say and commitment to the company.
Maybe not. Maybe we shall fall into totalitarian dystopias and the dream of universal suffrage will enter myth.
maybe
> Maybe employees will make intelligent informed decisions about who is actually capable as an executive. Maybe they will make more effective decisions themselves if they have a greater say and commitment to the company.
Yes, intelligent decisions. Such a red herring. For what is an “intelligent decision” in the market economy? Maximizing profits. So either the workers work within the bourgeoisie logic of maximizing profits—creating the same problems for themselves as they had under command economy rule—or they make “unintelligent decisions” by proritizing their collective selves. With the former they “fail the test” of this red herring scenario because intelligent decisions according to the workers are not the same as intelligent decisions according to the bourgeoisie.
What's left is politicians wanting to do something for the home crowds, and realising wrapping themselves in the flag won't cut it - so they go for stuff that will benefit everyone - build a railway from the tip of Italy to the top of Sweden ? Yeah why not that ought to provide a stronger market. We can sell that back home.
If you are diverse enough the phase space of intelligent decisions becomes fairly narrow and surprisingly good for everyone.
Say I've seen a QA engineer designing an elaborate formal verification framework that took a lot of time, but failed to test anything engineers or customers cared about. Can't tell if he himself was happy with the result, but I wouldn't want to be in his shoes.
Most employees, especially in the West, especially in USA, are going to be biased towards their individual interests. Aligning their interests with the collective organizational interest is an extremely hard problem, but an extremely important one. Definitely something that could burn out a manager. But very much worth trying if you want a successful, healthy organization.
No... I hate doing ABC.
What's in my immediate interest is to quietly paper over problems, and pass them along to someone else.
What's also in my interest longer term is the organization to fix operational issues to help ensure there is a 'longer term' for the organization to continue in to. To think I'm not thinking of that, and just wanting to do bullshit busy work because "he's a dev! that's what they do!" is patronizing to say the least.
Many people are capable of looking at things from a few perspectives.
Let's assume you are right, you are seeing some real threat and have a solution in mind.
If others were "ready" to see it, they'd already see it on their own and you'd have nothing additional to offer.
The reason your perspective is valuable is because you are seeing something others aren't, but it also by definition implies that they aren't ready to see it.
This is a universal thing - the gap between your insight and the org's awareness is directly related both to the value of your insight and how much of an uphill battle the sell is.
If you can become the person who can both see issues and drive others to see them through persuasive education, you become immensely impactful. Otherwise you are limited to only making impact on things where others are already sold on the issue while being frustrated by this limitation.
Have you got any tips or advice for getting better at "persuasive education" or inspiring others to see the same things?
In fact, what distinguishes executives is their experience, ability and willingness to get others to see and rally around a problem or goal - which is why I positioned this to the person I was responding to as an opportunity. If you can figure this out, your career (and life) unlocks to the next level.
Now to answer your question, some practical advice:
1. Most often, people conflate problems and solutions and just say "we should do X" without making the person first understand and agree that there's a problem to which X is a solution. So when you get pushback on X, is it because the other person doesn't think it's a good solution, or did you not even help them understand that there's a problem to begin with?
2. People often fail to evaluate whether problems are relevant, and to communicate that relevance. EG, have a solid answer to "who gives a fuck?" Like "this system is not well designed and I want to refactor it" - "who cares?". "This system is hard to work on, and we work on it all the time, so our feature delivery velocity is only half of what it could be" - now I am listening.
3. If you lost people, troubleshoot where you lost them. "You don't agree with my proposal to refactor the system, so I just wanted to double check if I had explained the problem well. To remind, do you agree that our feature velocity is slow? (yes/no) If yes, do you agree with me that the root cause of the slowness is the complexity/messiness of the underlying system? (yes/no) Do you agree that my proposal to refactor it will address it (yes/no) Do you just think now is not the time we can afford that investment (yes/no)." etc. Walk them slowly through the conversation, and if you ever get a "no" you didn't expect - dig into that. Is it because you didn't explain something, or because the person knows something you don't? It's not THAT different that debugging code, by trying to find the place where it disconnected from what you expect. But it takes time and confidence to stick with this process.
4. Write it down and have someone read it and tell you if you actually got the point across clearly. Writing things down helps me establish the logic to my intuition which is what enables me to do #3 better.
5. Realize this will never feel easy because it's hard, as long as you're trying and learning from the experience you're doing all you can be doing.
6. Take a class or read a book on negotiations (negotiations is just a process of understanding the other side's position as well as your own and talking through it in a way that finds a solution that works for both).
Good luck. Happy to answer anything else.
Suppose I were to ask you to explain to somebody non-technical why your application shouldn't have 12 different databases. It's incredibly easy to provide hand-wavey claims about inefficiency, but non-technical people are rightly skeptical (after all for every good idea there are 10 developers claiming a complete rewrite in XYZ will 2x everything).
How can you really provide hard evidence that an application with 1 database instead of 12 will be easier to develop in? Are you going to have devs write code for both cases, and show how many fewer lines of code it is? Are you going to take a dev survey? You can provide your word that certain production bugs were caused by this, but that's again presuming this individual believes you.
Even if you could really spell it out in detail, it's likely they wouldn't have the patience to listen. A chess grandmaster could probably spend an hour explaining a crucial chess move to me, why couldn't an engineering problem warrant over an hour of explanation?
I find completely irrelevant details (how distressed you are by the problem, your race, your last performance review) often have an outsized bias on how persuaded people are.
I think I mentioned in my post like 3 times that this is a difficult thing to do even for those who are skilled. My point is that you still have to do it if you want a chance to get the outcomes you desire.
// How can you really provide hard evidence that an application with 1 database instead of 12 will be easier to develop in?
Great example. Like I said, the first step is to confirm a shared understanding of the problem. "Easier to develop" is not relevant, but "feature delivery velocity" is. So step 1, I'd ask the people I am trying to persuade whether they perceive a feature delivery velocity issue on your team.
If the answer is no - well that's a whole different conversation.
Assuming the answer is yes, the next question is - would it be impactful to the business if the velocity went up and should we think about how to do that? Again, if the answer is no - that's interesting. Ask why not?
If the answer is yes - then you come back with "as far as I can tell, one of the sources of our low velocity is the complexity. For example, we have 12 databases and on average, every feature requires 6 of them to be changed. From casual observation, each DB takes X days to update so this is how much tax we're paying every feature."
Then you ask - "does this make sense to you? I am not saying this is the only problem but it seems apparent to me as your technology lead that we're paying a high complexity cost for this design. Let me know if you're with me?"
If they say "no" - great - troubleshoot that.
If they say "yes" - "ok great. I have an idea for how we can go down from 12 databases to 3 at a development cost of X. Ballpark we will recoup that cost in Y months. Should we try this?"
In my experience, walking people through it this way patiently (and it may be multiple conversations), I either get a "yes" or learn a good reason why it shouldn't be done, 100% of the time. Notice that in this approach, I neither lead with the answer "12 DBs bad!" nor overload them with technical detail - but I give them just enough to follow my own logic - after all you must have done similar thinking (even if just intuitively) to arrive at your conclusion. Now you're externalizing your intuition in a way that others can follow.
Like I said - very hard to do. Most people don't bother, many other people are horrible at it (but way ahead of those who don't try!) But either way, this is the only way to get shit done so you gotta do it.
If I have to, I will say something like "It seems to me like we're not eye to eye on this important topic, and I want us to be in sync. Would you mind if I ask you a few questions to understand where we are disconnected so I can improve my own thinking here?"
I literally say this stuff, and I've never had anyone say "no, I'd rather not get in sync w you on this." So I contextualize it, we work through it, and usually it takes <5 minutes for me to figure out where the other person's head is different from mine.
Then you figure out what to do about it, which may be another conversation (you may also learn that their reasons are good so you end up being persuaded by them which is also great)
I don’t like the persuasive education angle. You’re going to come off as smarmy.
So not everything is an opportunity. You gotta remember that things are the way they are cus they got that way.
1) solution may seem stupid bad now, but at the time, it was the lesser of two evils
2) the people most responsible are now your coworkers.
It’s not always a good idea to see everything or comment on everything. Pick your battles.
In many organisations most people may not have enough information to really know what is best for the whole organisation, even if they do have good ideas about their part.
And top executives often can't be trusted to act in the best interest of the company (rather than that of the shareholders, the stock market or themselves...). Short term vs longterm is also very imporant, the best way to make a quick buck today is often at odds with what is needed to remain relevant in 5 or 10 years.
People above your pay grade. What is best for the company for your purposes will be made clear to you by your manager or their superiors. Your job is to not question or criticize but to carry out. Be wary of calls for feedback (e.g., eNPS); every Hundred Flowers Campaign can be expected to soon be followed by an Anti-Rightist Campaign, i.e., the feedback solicited will likely be used to identify and eliminate potential troublemakers rather than effect actual change.
Ignoring income - Do you go to work to make the company you work for more wealthy? Or do you go to work to enjoy what you do and make friends? Or do you go to work to learn new skills and better yourself? - In which order do you place the statements? (Yes, it's a false trichotomy.)
Unless you're the company founder or a major shareholder I would really hope making the company more wealthy is not your top priority.
I always say to my co-workers health > family > work. If they're not healthy, they're not happy and they're not able to look after family (or close friends), for family (or close friends) I'm not happy or healthy they're less likely to be a viable support network. You can be passionate, expressive, and absorbed in your work - but doing what is best for the company above all else is not what is best for humanity most of the time.
100% agree.
I would've flipped the thesis of the post in reverse order: yourself, your team, your company.
When things meet in the middle it means you have to take lot of other things into account, too, to make the decision.
These hollow 1-way maps don't ever give good advice.
I probably wouldn't have read the article, because no shit, that would be obvious
Oh right, I live in the USA.
A forest is grown one tree at a time.
A company is formed because someone, the founders, thinking for themselves. They want to create a product, solve a problem, learn an industry, or they just want to get rich. Essentially "do the thing". All of these start from "self".
With any luck, the founder get some funding, sell some products, got enough resources to build up their team. A team with people who thinks about themselves. They are the people who want to build a product, solve their own problem, learn an industry, or get rich. All of these joiner start from "self".
Then the founder found first hand that, after all the interview, vision and mission statements, OKR and all the charade, their objectives isn't quite exactly aligned with the teammates. Instead of "doing the thing", they need motivate their teammates to "do the thing".
One more iteration we are at the company level.
As other comment points out, it is really the executive's duty in making the alignment. IMO, you don't make the alignment by indoctrinating the same message over and over, but by understanding your team, and how your team's motivation contributes to a wider company goal. Similarly, you don't indoctrinate your customer how good your product is, you understand their need and refine your product. It's the same process.
Moreover, a so-called company goal is really just optimizing a beaten path, get more user, get more usage, get more revenue. Kodak's company goal back then I bet was about improving some of the measureable metrics. As a company, you do want to harness some creative power. Let some of your people do what they like some of the time is highly beneficial. It is the same creation force that gives birth to numerous ideas.
If there is a higher goal than the company goal, it is yours. How would you leverage the opportunities and resources offered by your employment to achieve your personal goal? That is the question. And you achieve company's goal by tapping that source of energy from your teammates.
In my personal experience (AWS, VMware), if the company you work for doesn't have a culture which is conducive to this type of behavior, you are going to be frustrated most of the time.
Extra hint: other people from the same company will have different priorities (self, self again, and something else), and if the company allows them to behave like that, you're screwed.
No it is not the correct advice. It is an oversimplification. It might be an easy rule to remember and follow, but like many of those it fails to deal adequately with the subtleties of the real world.
(Good) advice doesn't deal with all of life's subtelties; that's an impossible prescription with no resiliency. It sets you up to figure it out yourself.
Lost me there. People that think they know everything are the easiest to trick.
“People are complex, and they get energy in complex ways. Some managers get energy from writing some software”
No. We get energy from food.
“folks will accomplish more if you let them do some energizing work, even if that work itself isn’t very important.”
Cited himself. No proof of claim.
“ fun project is prototyping a throwaway service in a new programming language, then hmm, maybe that’s fine. But if you put it into production, then your energizing detour is going to be net negative on energy generation after other teams are pulled in to figure out how to support it. Honestly, don’t worry about the other rules, just make sure to follow this one.“
I think you should fix your deploy pipeline. Prototypes don’t belong in production. Now, if that started a prototype and team decided it had to go to prod, then it’s a good decision. They had their reasons
——
I gave up. It’s hard to take it seriously. Obviously the self is always more important.
Anyway, the main issue is you have two midwits purple-prosing past each other.
Circumstances change. Shit happens. There is no such thing as “the right way”. Or correct. You pick the lesser of two evils and do your best.
“still believe it’s the correct advice, and I continue to see managers who fail because they are missing this perspective. However, I’ve also seen some of the best leaders that I’ve worked with burn out by following this advice too loyally.”
Then by definition it’s not “correct” because it can fail and fails spectacularly.
Customer > Company
Company > Team
Team > Self