Kiriakos Krastillis's Blog

The sentence least spoken by managers

He said WU-HAT?!??
-- people

Being a manager (or "leader" as some want to call it nowadays) is a difficult task. It has strange pitfalls that, to ordinary professionals, often aper to work backwards.

For example, it is safer for a manger to be mediocre. If you are actually good, everyone's eye is on you and everybody tries to undermine you. If you are bad you risk being culled. But its not as bad as being good at what you do as you at least get the sympathy vote. Being good also exposes you to the higher strata in your Organization, which means you run the risk of being singled out somehow.

This leads to most managers that survive a long time to have a weid "shape".

  • They don't really say much most of the time
  • They are very good at derailing conversation
  • They know many buzzwords of the management regime du jour
  • They are nice people but in a weird, bereft of content kind of way
  • They also are pretty bad at running a tight ship

A tight ship

Success loves efficiency. Nearly every global megacorp today was at some point an edgy outfit of outcasts and visionaries getting by due to wits, passion and tenacity. This is because only if you are nimble and efficient you have a chance of actually cornering a market or inventing a new one.

There is two ways of reaching personal gain in corporations. Either you try to acchieve something and succeed or you look at personal gain in a way that is unrelated to actual output. If it is the latter I don't have words for you. It might be a valid practice in corporate settings but it is not something I would ever consider a decent thing to do. So it goes without saying that if you really want to achieve something you should be thinking of setting yourself up for success. Which means, running a squeaky clean operation. What do I consider "squeaky clean"?

Somthing in the lines of

  • Just the amount of people necessary, not more no less
  • Minimal noise in the system, incidents get fixed fast
  • Minimal wear attitute, tech debt is adressed on-the fly for the most part and only really big fixes need dedicated attention.
  • Healthy dissent culture. It is important to have as little need for communication as possible as all human teams are comunication limited. But that does not mean that everybody should be a "Yes" always person. It is paramount that everyone can and feels the need to bring in their perspective. It is just as paramount that the team has a way of digesting everyones perspective in a way that
    • Doesn't make grudges
    • Runs in logarithmic time

And to achieve that, you need to take the time and set up your environment in a way where you can address difficult topics and reach a point where a positive sum reaction comes out of the discussion.

Actually having difficult conversations and have them matter

This was your fault
-- some manager (never ever)

This was your fault. A sentence spoken way to seldom by people of responsibility.

But why? Could it be related to that fickle term responsibility?

If you are a manager, it is in your survivalist interest to skew things so that results are never truly Your own responsibility. When it comes to your own responsibilities it is best to have other people on board that also have to share the blame. This way, it is not your decisions, it is the consensus or the idea itself that was the problem. Never You yourself.

The unfortunate part is that, if You live that way (and boy oh boy have corporate leaders lived that way) Your whole organization gets infected with this. And all of a sudden it is important to even individual contributors.

So all of a sudden you have a cultural aspect that has permeated your whole company and all of a sudden, righting a wrong isn't only about identifying the problem and entrusting the person responsible with an instruction to fix it. You first have to

  • unpack the net of responsibilties
  • then collectively navigate some weird game of "we did everything right"
  • then identify capacity (i'm not saying a person) to fix it,
  • then wrap everything up in a "everything is still all right" and then: hope that in the near future, that thing that you thought was off will get fixed.

All because somebody initially was too afraid to face a "That was your fault" situation. Whether this was a css alignment bug, motivation problem or procedure problem, it is a problem you should have fixed and now probably won't.

So, break the circle. Say "I was wrong" and say "You where wrong". Because it is OK to be wrong. Because

The only person that never is wrong is the person that never did anything!

Hi, I'm Kiriakos and you have reached my blog.

If you resonate with the above text or think that I'm totally wrong come talk to me over that contact button!

Also, if you have an issue in your IT organization that is bugging you and you like what you read, lets talk! I love helping leaders and teams find new traction in their environments!