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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 appear to work backwards.
One of my long term pet-itches with corporate leadership culture is a thing that I have trouble putting a name on. YMMV but my observations, limited as they are, suggest that corporate leadership roles might experience a systematic pull towards a very nuanced form of mediocrity. My theory is that very often in larger organizations of people statistics and societal dynamics create a persistent, almost gravitational pull against excellence. It is not only a question of over-performing, under-performing or just-performing, it is as much a question of bold steps, calm words and even risk appetite.
This is not a concrete pattern but it roughly goes like this:
Being passionate about the thing you are supposed to do at work is generally regarded a good sign. Generally, zoomed in, it is hardly ever seen as bad to have motivation. Who would do that, right? Passion, ambition, motivation, engagement, all these growth-y things are awesome at any level of any career ladder. They do all exhibit one unexpected property though. All of them can occasionally make visible the boundaries the workplace has. Eventually you end up in an argument because you stumbled over something that needs to move. It might be company policy, or a person that deems that their part would be "too much work" or "not worth the effort". As responsibilities change and one moves from the IC world into management these stumbles can be quite loud crashes. And if you are not the kind of person that from childhood has been prepped by chineze turtle monks in the mystical art of carefully-appllied-passion, then stuff like that might become a burden to your carreer. Except you really aren't that passionate, then everything is fine.
> Context gap. Huge context gap, HUGE context GAP.
If we take this intuition and factor in survivorship bias, we get a set of skills and character traits that corporate environments seem to boost.
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
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.
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
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
Hi, I'm Kiriakos and you have reached my blog.
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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!
