My experience as a Development Manager for the past ~year (YMMV):
1. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to figure out how to position and leverage individuals.
2. Actually, genuinely, caring about your direct reports goes a very long way towards solving a lot of culture problems but...
3. Dev Managers need to put a lot of effort out into their teams to drive change and it is often (most of the time?) not returned. Your biggest enemy is not active sabotage, it's apathy at all levels of the organization. I started pushing for some specific cultural-ish changes about this time last year and, while I was given passive approval & support and lots of latitude to make change, it has been physically exhausting. If I was in an organization that didn't even give me this much freedom it would have been exhausting and pointless.
4. A Dev Manager can make localized changes when not all teams want or can reciprocate, but I'm not convinced yet that the requisite firewalls you need to erect aren't ultimately harmful in the long run. It is a very delicate balance.
In the end my take-away is you need space and time to make any meaningful change, and even that is limited by the crushing inertia of the organization. For me personally it has been physically consuming and I have 6 month & 1 year goals, plus an overall 3-year plan that I'll either complete in the coming year or look for an new opportunity elsewhere.
If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers.
One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.
If an isolated HR unit controls hiring and freezes the hiring managers and team out of the process, or effectively alienates them, you're wasting a huge amount of energy.
This is part of the methodology I try to weave into my organizations:
- A thoughtful and literate job posting, purged of gratuitous jargon, will accurately describe the job and foreshadow the company culture.
- Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies (see Ch. 21 of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow).
- Final decision will be a collective decision of the hiring team.
- After hiring cycle is complete, hiring team will hold a retrospective.
- We will acknowledge mistakes and work to correct them quickly and humanely.
This reads like a commercial, but I'm not going to downvote it. I read the book and liked it, along with about a hundred other books on culture over the years. There is a similar pattern: a problem, an old way of doing things, a hero, a change, and a beautiful sunset with our hero riding off.
I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book.
Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in 3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't.
For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before.
This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you do so.
I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things.
What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done, and more like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat.
I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.
Culture Code is a fantastic book. I'm almost done reading it. My main takeaway: decent cultures are built by good people doing good things. In some ways, it's really as simple as good leadership. (Kindness, empathy, filling people's cups, listening skills, etc.)
"This makes me wonder whether a good way to make needed change as a leader when there is no obvious crisis is to artificially create one so that people get on board…"
Yes.
You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken.
As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just continue floundering, wasting money and time. You have to wait until it's completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me to take it over?" and not have interference.
I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like agent provocateur stuff.
"Turn the ship around" is one of my favorite books too; most leadership books follow the same formula- everything is broken, the consultant arrives with a magic fix, and voila! Unicorns start flying.
"Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked the approach.
To some extent, I'm no longer curious about "leadership" ideas about organisational culture.
I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale.
Maybe motivation/attitudes can be improved and a naval hierarchy can work better, but this is not the typical issue in corporate culture.
I'm curious about structural answers. A lot of culture comes down to how success and failure work. If a company culture is bad at risk-taking and internal entrepreneurship, a "culture of openness" can't fix it.
To get genuinely failure tolerant and opportunity seeking, organisations need to structure for successes and failures.
How are resources really allocated in the company? How are successes and failures really determined and what are the real ramifications.
So... (a) organisations need some formal/mechanical processes governing the pertinent decisions: resources and goals. Formal processes can be examined more honestly and biased to (or against) risk.
(b) If you really opportunity-seeking, risk taking culture... then you need "money-where-mouth-is" mechanics. It doesn't need to be fully "market-based," but someone needs to be throwing themselves behind opportunities because they think that they'll be successful.
The problem that runs through both Google (eg) and the naval ship is a culture of "do enough, and no more." The solution is usually to raise the "enough" bar somehow... motivation, discipline. That works when what you want from employ/organisations is "enough."
If you want more than enough, I think the structure needs to change.
“Culture can’t be broken, any more than complexity can be the cause of failure”.
Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity…
Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than “X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.)
It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless statement.
All good points, although "rather than just punishing, he spent 8 hours discussing with his team"...? There needs to be less punishment as methodology out there, but an eight-hour discussion IS a form of punishment in my book. And for everyone else, too.
They discussed for 8 hours because they had to figure out how to avoid a repeat in a practical way. The discussion was not with the offender, but among the leadership team.
At NASA, this is called a "Root Cause Analysis" or RCA. A multi-hour meeting all about punishing the guilty via embarrassment or at least making sure you can shed the guilt.
On the other hand, "announce what you are about to do" is likely the best way to solve the problem.
This book has had the single biggest influence on how I motivate and lead engineering teams[1]. It's an easy read, and the main thought on delegating decisions down hold very well for software engineering, and on how to create a culture of high-autonomy, high-performance.
I've worked at all sorts of companies but it's actually been the same company over and over it's the broken top down hierarchy mixed with control dramas and disempowerment where initiative is punishable and the only way to get ahead is to strike a deal with some kind of clique at the expense of the client
It's refreshing to know this book exists and I'll certainly look it up but I have zero hope for so called corporate culture because it's lemmings all the way down and lead follow or get out of the way is blocked by some callous know it all opening their yawning pie hole to dish out googlisms
I think it’s okay to recognise the shorthand and not feel bad about it. The author of this article clearly doesn’t think he’s describing all culture. I didn’t from the link title.
We’re humans, we cut corners. We all understand the intent.
The fact that headline points out that it's not bullshit makes it sound like bullshit.
When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?
Ferengi Rules of Acquisition #239: Never be afraid to mislabel a product.
Also, exquisite irony serving up a "non-bullshit" book with the requisite amount of bullshit to make up for it. After all, the total amount of bullshit in the universe can never be reduced, only increased.
I like books which are sort of lessons within a biography format. Points pulled from real experience. For me, this adds context and makes a book readable. If you don't learn anything, then at least you might get to read a good story.
The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz
The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach)
Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar)
To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull)
Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace the "lineage" to see where the starting points were. The trash today won't be a thing 50 years from now. So, maybe look at books from 50 years ago or more.
Skip the business books and just study the lives of great leaders. Personally I recommend Napoleon, Orson Welles, Kurosawa, Fellini and Hitchcock. Basically anyone that was consistently productive in a group-based endeavor.
I gave “Leaders eat last” a try, but found it unreadable.
It starts with SEALs in Afghanistan, because of course it does, and then the author loosely strings together a bunch of unconvincing anecdotes to support his core idea.
The worst part is his constant reference to various hormones and fight or flight responses in a superficial way that would make even TEDx feel ashamed.
Edit: there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the military can produce outstanding leaders. Humans have been battling for too long as not to have developed specialised training systems.
I rate 'High output management' by Andrew Grove (founder & CEO of Intel). He has clearly lived a lot of the experiences he wrote about and the advice was pretty timeless.
While not exactly a book on leadership, I've picked up quite a few valuable lessons from 'Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed' by Ben R. Rich.
If I may ask for something a bit more radical: workable suggestions on leadership of diverse teams? The military-based ones tend to be a bit too macho for applicability outside that environment.
Even more so for leadership within loose and/or voluntary organisations such as open source projects.
This book explained a lot about a boss of mine. Ex-military, tried to run our department like a battalion, took pride in "battlefield repairs" of code, never let anyone think for themselves or contribute.
Only communicating through superiors...Micromanaging at its best, it was an all-out terrible way of doing things.
as @gexla mentioned down below, I prefer looking for leadership/culture advice on historical / biographical books.
For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.
@ianmiell awesome post. Part of the issue: The word “culture” does not fully describe the intentional “Org OS” choices that need to be made to optimize how people can better work in a knowledge economy. https://drodio.com/creating-an-open-source-culture/
[+] [-] nogabebop23|6 years ago|reply
1. I'm playing chess; senior management is playing checkers. No, not because I'm some sort of genius and they are simpletons, but rather they talk about interchangeable "resource units" and I know these FTE's as "Tom" and "Amy", each with specific strenghts and weaker areas. Big strategic plans cannot differentiate but we front-line managers need to figure out how to position and leverage individuals.
2. Actually, genuinely, caring about your direct reports goes a very long way towards solving a lot of culture problems but...
3. Dev Managers need to put a lot of effort out into their teams to drive change and it is often (most of the time?) not returned. Your biggest enemy is not active sabotage, it's apathy at all levels of the organization. I started pushing for some specific cultural-ish changes about this time last year and, while I was given passive approval & support and lots of latitude to make change, it has been physically exhausting. If I was in an organization that didn't even give me this much freedom it would have been exhausting and pointless.
4. A Dev Manager can make localized changes when not all teams want or can reciprocate, but I'm not convinced yet that the requisite firewalls you need to erect aren't ultimately harmful in the long run. It is a very delicate balance.
In the end my take-away is you need space and time to make any meaningful change, and even that is limited by the crushing inertia of the organization. For me personally it has been physically consuming and I have 6 month & 1 year goals, plus an overall 3-year plan that I'll either complete in the coming year or look for an new opportunity elsewhere.
[+] [-] darkerside|6 years ago|reply
If you want a better analogy that doesn't belittle senior leadership, try Go instead of Checkers.
One of the keys to successful management and leadership is understanding sustainability. Incremental changes over a period of time beat a huge lift followed by burnout and stasis.
[+] [-] klenwell|6 years ago|reply
One additional bullet point I would add: Hiring.
If an isolated HR unit controls hiring and freezes the hiring managers and team out of the process, or effectively alienates them, you're wasting a huge amount of energy.
This is part of the methodology I try to weave into my organizations:
- A thoughtful and literate job posting, purged of gratuitous jargon, will accurately describe the job and foreshadow the company culture.
- Candidates will be evaluated using a simple quantitative assessment of core competencies (see Ch. 21 of Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow).
- Final decision will be a collective decision of the hiring team.
- After hiring cycle is complete, hiring team will hold a retrospective.
- We will acknowledge mistakes and work to correct them quickly and humanely.
https://wiki.klenwell.com/view/Hiring
[+] [-] hinkley|6 years ago|reply
I go so far as to say I think Hanlon needs a new razor. Never attribute to stupidity that which can be adequately explained by apathy.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skittleson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DenisM|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|6 years ago|reply
I think there are really, really good things in these kinds of books, especially if you identify with the problem and hero. At the same time, having gone through a bunch, there's a tendency for them to be like self-help or diet books: lots of great feelings while you're consuming them, energetic talking about the ideas with your friends, then a slow die-off until the next book.
Years ago I started collecting news articles and bits of information on culture. (IT culture). It's a fascinating topic because it intersects hype and measurable reality. Unlike a self-help book that promises "Be a happier you in 3 weeks!", your job is something that either gets better or doesn't.
For what it's worth, my best choice so far is "The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups" I read this book and thought "That son of a bitch! He's stolen all of my research material!" There is a bunch of anecdotes, stories, and research in there. I am still thinking over many of the ideas in the book I hadn't considered before.
This is important stuff. If it's something you're concerned about, don't give up. Read as much as you can. Just step back a bit from the hype cycle as you do so.
[+] [-] auto|6 years ago|reply
I'm curious if you think that it's actually possible for a book (or perhaps more generally, a school of thought) to actually break out of the cycle, or whether it's just the natural order of these sorts of things.
What I mean is, maybe what we get from these sorts of "self-help" pieces of literature/philosophies/whatever is less like a mantra that's one and done, and more like food satisfying a nutritional need, and just as you can't expect to eat a perfect meal and never be hungry for the rest of your life; when you get hungry again, you just need to find the next thing to eat.
I ask because I've gone through a number of these sorts of cycles in my own personal development over the last decade or so, and I'm finding that success tends to lie in seeing things in the latter light.
[+] [-] arxpoetica|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|6 years ago|reply
Yes.
You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken.
As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just continue floundering, wasting money and time. You have to wait until it's completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me to take it over?" and not have interference.
I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like agent provocateur stuff.
[+] [-] thatguy_2016|6 years ago|reply
"Turn the ship around" is unique that it shows the problems with the author's approach- how it failed at first, how he had to work around it, how he tweaked the approach.
A very honest, no BS book. Highly recommended
[+] [-] netcan|6 years ago|reply
I understand that culture counts for a lot, but modern organisational cultures are getting complaints that "leadership" is not going to solve at scale.
Maybe motivation/attitudes can be improved and a naval hierarchy can work better, but this is not the typical issue in corporate culture.
I'm curious about structural answers. A lot of culture comes down to how success and failure work. If a company culture is bad at risk-taking and internal entrepreneurship, a "culture of openness" can't fix it.
To get genuinely failure tolerant and opportunity seeking, organisations need to structure for successes and failures.
How are resources really allocated in the company? How are successes and failures really determined and what are the real ramifications.
So... (a) organisations need some formal/mechanical processes governing the pertinent decisions: resources and goals. Formal processes can be examined more honestly and biased to (or against) risk.
(b) If you really opportunity-seeking, risk taking culture... then you need "money-where-mouth-is" mechanics. It doesn't need to be fully "market-based," but someone needs to be throwing themselves behind opportunities because they think that they'll be successful.
The problem that runs through both Google (eg) and the naval ship is a culture of "do enough, and no more." The solution is usually to raise the "enough" bar somehow... motivation, discipline. That works when what you want from employ/organisations is "enough."
If you want more than enough, I think the structure needs to change.
[+] [-] goblin89|6 years ago|reply
Am I in the minority thinking that “complexity is the cause of failure” may in fact be a useful and actionable statement? Start analyzing where complexity resides, cope with failures caused by inevitable complexity…
Of course, qualifying the sources of unnecessary complexity would be even more helpful, but even merely pointing it out may be more strategically useful than “X and Y caused an error”. (So you’ll fix X and Y; then Z will start causing trouble.)
It’s a tangent, I agree that “culture is broken” does seem like a useless statement.
[+] [-] walterkrankheit|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwischenzug|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcguire|6 years ago|reply
On the other hand, "announce what you are about to do" is likely the best way to solve the problem.
[+] [-] gregdoesit|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/a-team-where-everyone-is-...
[+] [-] artsyca|6 years ago|reply
It's refreshing to know this book exists and I'll certainly look it up but I have zero hope for so called corporate culture because it's lemmings all the way down and lead follow or get out of the way is blocked by some callous know it all opening their yawning pie hole to dish out googlisms
[+] [-] hughpeters|6 years ago|reply
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders, by L. David Marquet
Also here's a great speech given by the David Marquet (with drawings!) on the same topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psAXMqxwol8
[+] [-] padraic7a|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jen729w|6 years ago|reply
We’re humans, we cut corners. We all understand the intent.
[+] [-] akvadrako|6 years ago|reply
Maybe it's just click bait; hard to imagine people think more about company culture than culture in general.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caiocaiocaio|6 years ago|reply
When a pitch answers a question that no one asked, it's a pretty good indication that something's wrong. Like when an employer says they're looking for "team players", it means they have an aggressive workplace with a lot of backstabbing. If a restaurant specifically advertised that it was clean, and had a sign saying "clean food and kitchen" in the window, would you eat there?
[+] [-] icelancer|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itronitron|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] classified|6 years ago|reply
Also, exquisite irony serving up a "non-bullshit" book with the requisite amount of bullshit to make up for it. After all, the total amount of bullshit in the universe can never be reduced, only increased.
[+] [-] Tomte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|6 years ago|reply
The hard thing about hard things, by Ben Horowitz
The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh (49ers Coach)
Creativity, Inc, Ed Catmull (Ran Pixar)
To Pixar and Beyond, Lawrence Levy (CFO of Pixar with interesting different POV than Ed Catmull)
Otherwise for any dumpster fire of a subject I want a book on, I'll try to trace the "lineage" to see where the starting points were. The trash today won't be a thing 50 years from now. So, maybe look at books from 50 years ago or more.
[+] [-] keiferski|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gherkinnn|6 years ago|reply
It starts with SEALs in Afghanistan, because of course it does, and then the author loosely strings together a bunch of unconvincing anecdotes to support his core idea.
The worst part is his constant reference to various hormones and fight or flight responses in a superficial way that would make even TEDx feel ashamed.
Edit: there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the military can produce outstanding leaders. Humans have been battling for too long as not to have developed specialised training systems.
My gripe is with the book alone.
[+] [-] jdsnape|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tnolet|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FeistySkink|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baxtr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
Even more so for leadership within loose and/or voluntary organisations such as open source projects.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] _pmf_|6 years ago|reply
But it's definitely also pop.
[+] [-] kqr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|6 years ago|reply
Any business leadership book is likely to really be a management book.
[+] [-] kitsune_|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|6 years ago|reply
Only communicating through superiors...Micromanaging at its best, it was an all-out terrible way of doing things.
[+] [-] tempsy|6 years ago|reply
I skimmed through a bit of it but find the war analogies to be a little over the top so far...
[+] [-] trwhite|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_Hogg|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lha|6 years ago|reply
https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Half-Story-Followership-Co...
[+] [-] yannis7|6 years ago|reply
For example, "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was recommended to me, for examples of how on earth did the US manage to get a bunch of primadonna scientists to finish a megaproject on time (though this is not the main scope of the book) -- I haven't read it yet, but I would it put forward as a suggestion.
[+] [-] drodio|6 years ago|reply