Company leadership and tactical decisions

post by Dentin · 2022-10-01T21:21:39.269Z · LW · GW · 6 comments

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6 comments

The other day at work, I received an email from our leadership regarding "new principles for our organization", linking out to a web page listing the new principles.  This ended up being partially a culture document, but mostly a direction document - "we want customers to be able to X" "we want to provide industry standard Y", etc.  While the wish list was pretty explicit and fairly detailed, there were no concrete actions.

At the level that our leadership works at, I believe this is largely the correct thing to do.  If you're trying to set direction for a thousand people, you can't really specify technical details, and even trying to promote specific strategies is almost always going to end up with suboptimal results. Plus, if you hire smart, motivated people, they'll find good (or good enough) solutions.

Except in the case of a systemic defect or dysfunction which keeps most or all of your teams trapped in local minima, while there's a better global minimum available.

I believe this happens in a lot of companies, and I believe it's happening in mine.  The new principles document sets goals that implicitly require a lot of stabilization and polishing of our products - we're trying to support customer use cases, but our development so far has been a bleeding edge iterate-as-fast-as-possible mess.

In an ideal world, the smart people in my organization would recognize this, and globally collaborate to focus on the stabilization work that's needed.  However, in the real world, my organization has significant social and financial incentives around creating new features and adding functionality, along with an embedded culture of promoting those things.  There are almost no incentives around stabilization and polishing of products. This results in only new features and functionality being prioritized.  Everything else gets the bare minimum of effort needed to keep our services up, keep things going.

It's a systemic problem across the entire organization, and it's one that can't really be solved at the local level, because of the cultural and financial issues.

This is where our leadership can, and perhaps should step in.  Sometimes, direction and veiled hints just aren't enough.  Sometimes, as a leader, you might want or need to make a hard, concrete tactical decision that actually has consequences if you get it wrong, and use that decision to break a logjam or get to a better global minimum. Elon Musk doing a complete switch from carbon fiber to stainless steel for Starship strikes me as a classic example.

The down side, as a leader, is that it's very easy to get this very wrong.  But if your company is suffering some obvious internal logjam, making a top level tactical decision might be the right thing to do.

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comment by matto · 2022-10-02T17:45:28.449Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I've seen this happen too, along with same end result.

It appears that a common failure mode here is that the middle management layer fails to translate the values into system updates. No one updates performance reviews, no one updates quarterly/half goals, etc. So things just continue as they were before.

Ultimately, it's the responsibility of leadership to fix this. Whether it's by direct intervention or a huddle with middle management, they must do something.

(My experience as an individual contributor that attempted to change how performance reviews are done to better align with a value like "engineering excellence" tells me it's impossible to affect this kind of change as an IC. Unless you're friends with the CEO, which I wasn't).

Replies from: Dagon
↑ comment by Dagon · 2022-10-03T14:44:42.334Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

My experience as a senior IC in very large and in smaller companies is that it's NOT impossible to drive this change as an IC, any more than it is as a manager.  It IS impossible to do alone.  "Friends with the CEO" is useful, but only required if it's shorthand for "talk to everyone and be verbose about your intent, including occasional skip-skip level 1:1s with the SVP/CEO".  My successes at large-scale changes in a company (or division of a very large company) have been when I understand and agree with the strategy (sometimes because I helped develop it), and I can get it reverberating up and down management chains.  It doesn't work if it's only top-down or only bottom-up.  It has to get reinforced from all directions.

My failures or more challenging changes have come when the change is too complicated or too far removed from current expectations for it to resonate among the middle layers of ICs and managers who do the actual work.

Replies from: matto
↑ comment by matto · 2022-10-04T23:48:22.051Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I remember you describing your experience in a little more depth some time ago and it makes me doubt my experience. Perhaps I've been in less healthy orgs. But more likely there are knobs/patterns I can't see, so org change work like this feels out of reach for me. I've got some thinking to do.

Replies from: Dagon
↑ comment by Dagon · 2022-10-05T03:44:52.017Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

It's definitely the case that I've gotten lucky with the orgs I've worked in, because I've found the levers for change more often than I've missed them (well, more often than I've found none; I still miss a lot).  You may have gotten unlucky and the levers just don't exist for you.  But also, it matters a LOT what changes you're looking to make.  It's hard-mode to start with performance reviews or other non-technical topics; only look at those after you've had some success in other areas and built up a lot of credibility.  Be willing to try different domains where you can improve things AND exercise the influence muscles. 

Look for things like code-review practices or deployment/change management behaviors where you can add or improve structure that makes both employee and customer lives a bit better.  These topics are both easier to convince people, AND usually easier for you to know what is important about the changes, and what's OK to bend on as you discuss and convince people.

comment by Dagon · 2022-10-01T22:33:52.459Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

You’re absolutely right that the tactics should generally come from the smart, motivated employees. However, the senior leaders need mechanisms to make the general directions believable and understandable by the lower-level leaders. Sometimes this is built-in to weekly product discussions and a good relationship across levels of the org. Sometimes this is targeted micromanagement or spot-checks of detailed decisions.

For a lot of orgs moving from “move fast and break things” to “move kinda fast and avoid breaking these things”, SVP and CxO participation in post-mortem reviews, launch-readiness reports, and customer-usage investigations are good ways for them to clarify and reinforce the change in tradeoffs they mean with their vision and strategy statements.

comment by M. Y. Zuo · 2022-10-05T00:01:30.121Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

The leadership likely don’t have enough skin in the game to bother. Unless it’s an unusual case like Google or SpaceX where the founding team owns a majority of the company, its almost never worth it to risk potentially burning bridges, if the change fails, over a fraction of a percent of a mid size company.