I’m excited to share that I’m finally launching a podcast, after a few almost successful attempts in the past.
The Align Remotely podcast will focus on leading distributed teams and everything associated with that topic, like leadership and operations to help achieve together, now that nearly everyone works from home.
In addition to the actual recording, the show notes will also include a visual representation of the discussion, a transcript, as well as any other resources mentioned during the discussion. This should help make the contents skimmable and also useful for anyone who prefers a more visual way to consume audio content.
The first episode was recorded with James Newson, who is a technical specialist around remote work. We cover any potential issues and possibilities around hybrid working, for when the coronavirus epidemic is over. And there is a lot more to it than I thought, because usually I was just leaning on company IT to “sort it out”, without having a proper think-through.
The biggest challenge I've had with building alignment as a team leader was the "silo megaphone effect". In the past, I've attended a number of surreal stakeholder meetings attended by:
head of product
head of delivery
a technical person
a head of QA
or possibly other managers.
Each participant makes statements that--on their own--made absolute sense. For example, the QA person argued for keeping a certain standard in terms of quality. The delivery person wanted to bring in the date as much as possible. The product person wanted to throw in as much scope as possible to make it easier to sell the product. I understood what they were saying. I could fully understand why they were saying what they were. They genuinely believed they were arguing for the overall benefit of the company, as a whole.
Nevertheless, if you juxtaposed what one manager was saying against the other, it was less than clear what the overall priority was. And this is exactly what I call the silo megaphone effect.
Each manager spent a lot of time with their respective team. So they had agreement amongst themselves as to the best course of action. But when meeting across department boundaries, the communication broke down. Nassim Taleb noted that firemen with much downtime who talk to each other for too long come to agree on many things that an outside, impartial observer would find ludicrous (they develop political ideas that are very similar). In particular, each manager running a department has a certain set of objectives and assumptions that are reinforced by discussions with people he's managing, resulting in rather surreal coordination efforts.
The silo megaphone effect refers to the tendency for managers to specifically argue what is best for their particular functional area. The inadvertent focus is on local maximization. This happens by default, despite everyone having the best of intentions.
I've fallen into the trap myself, of arguing for a short term benefit that will bring in the schedule at the expense of properly solving a problem at an organizational level. Sometimes the schedule pressure was just immense.
The main way that I dealt with this was to cross-reference statements from different stakeholders, and then ask for further clarification. The aim was to achieve what’s called “referential integrity” in a database. Where every data point is fully linked up to every other data point. Ultimately, in order to delegate effectively, we needed to agree what the ground rules were. This way we could communicate them to the teams, and hold ourselves accountable to them.
No one wakes up in the morning excited to go to work and look ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive. While it's not true of everyone, I think it's fair to say that anyone who gets a job wants to be there and usually wants to do well--for the purpose of self-respect. Look at how elated most people are when they accept a job after getting an offer. It's when they enter into the "systems" at a particular company, that everything usually takes a left turn.
Modern Times (1936) trailer: capturing the essence of managing
In established companies, it's sadly common for employees to be habituated in a context of fear of failure. Especially if there is a lot of pressure from management to perform at a high level. There are ambitious goals, often coupled with a lack of clarity on how they will be achieved. In practice, employees focus on looking busy (however that is defined). They end up fearing failure, of not living up to expectations.
As a manager, there is a fine line to draw here. You don't want to set the bar too low and cause everyone to just slack off. The starting point here is one of psychological safety; according to the research, this is one of the main factors driving high performance in teams. In particular, how you handle errors, failures, or surprises in a way that keeps the team accountable while enabling them to believe that they will be listened to--if they speak up.
Common error types
According to Amy Edmondson in The Fearless Organization, there are 3 different types of errors which happen professionally, and their meaning is largely driven by context:
mechanical errors in a highly repeated process that just need to be minimized in frequency: this is what Modern Times parodied
interaction errors which result from highly complicated relationships, especially in a larger company
thwarted expectations around a goal in the context of experimentation, often a surprising result of an experiment
A large part of the challenge of large companies is that they treat all errors as if they were all #1 by default. This approach may be tied to political gamesmanship. But not everything is just a deviation from a standard (regardless of who actually decides and imposes that standard). Especially in knowledge work like software, where completing something requires you to learn something you don't know up front. Edmondson quips, “For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge!”
In my software experience, most of the problems encountered, especially around people and process, were due to #2. Company systems were wrong, inadequate or just misaligned. Unfortunately, this typically meant that a person or department was singled out and blamed. I tried hard to bring the discussion back into a discussion around how the work was done, and if something could be done to prevent a similar problem from re-occurring.
The last type (#3) is essentially an opportunity to improve the company, the product, or the workflow, packaged as an intellectual surprise. Sometimes, the team would come across a much better way to solve or define a technical problem than they had originally wanted to do otherwise. This was particularly common in the early days of designing a large system. The same can be true on the business side, if the company is open to experimentation on that end. These are so valuable, that most innovation circles try to maximize the number of these errors through structured experimentation and record-keeping, in order to speed up overall progress.
Be open to taking ownership and admitting mistakes
From the perspective of psychological safety, it's critical to start with assuming any error is a #2. This includes assuming that the leader in the system is responsible for the system. More importantly, he is also part of the system. Which means that the manager needs to be open to letting their ego bruised, and be willing to admit mistakes in front of their fellow team members, in the service of improving life for everyone. Once I did this enough times with my team, they realized and eventually believed that I was genuinely interested in optimizing how the team worked.
Essentially the way to solve the misaligned expectations problem (bar too high vs too low) is to view the work as a system. And that way, you depersonalize the work enough, that fears become less of a driver for action. Instead, employees follow their genuine interest in improving their own work life. This allays fears of failure. And gets everyone more involved and excited.
Ultimately, you care about the output your team produces, so focus your management on that, rather than on policing individual effectiveness. Paradoxically it produces better results.
Key Takeaways
Psychological safety lies at the heart of high performing teams
Most commonly errors are assumed to be individual mistakes, rather than the result of complicated interactions gone wrong.
