Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Category: culture

  • Can One Be Too Respectful?

    Some time ago, during our weekly Lean Coffee at Lunar Logic, which is the only all hands meeting at the company, I made a disrespectful comment. It was a topic which I have a strong opinion about. A particular example that was brought to support one argument triggered a visceral reaction on my side. I said more, and more emotionally, than I should have.

    A day after I asked people for feedback to understand better what had happened and how I could avoid crossing the line in future. The recurring theme was that the way I expressed myself, both the words and the form of my remark, was disrespectful to some.

    That triggered another discussion some time later, and in a smaller group. It was about the meaning of being respectful and its implication of our behaviors in all sorts of situations.

    We started with an assumption that being respectful means acting in a way that doesn’t hurt others intentionally. But hey, there’s the whole unintentional spectrum of effects. Luckily, we are pretty good at sharing feedback and being transparent in front of each other. This means that when someone unintentionally crosses the line it is likely that they will hear a comment referring to that behavior being disrespectful.

    Going forward, with such stuff a natural desire is to be on a safe side. In other words, if I have doubts whether saying something would be disrespectful to someone I should not say that. It’s a safe choice.

    And that’s exactly where we started questioning ourselves. Doesn’t our aspiration to be respectful affect how we act in less obvious situations? Doesn’t it mean that we restrain critique, harsh words, or confrontation even when we believe that they would otherwise be justified? Doesn’t we restrain ourselves from being authentic?

    As a matter of fact, there can be two different sources of such a restraint. First, someone may be worried that criticism or confrontation itself would be received as disrespectful. After all, we are subjective; we may have opposite points of view and we can only control how we express our thoughts, not how they are received by the other party. We may do as much as we can to talk and behave in a respectful way but ultimately we can’t control how our attitude and behavior will be interpreted.

    Second, and more importantly, most of us has neither enough skill nor practice to be able to react in such a respectful way contextually. Even if we could succeed given that we prepare, e.g. when sharing difficult feedback, we would fail to act similarly when caught off guard, e.g. in an unexpected discussion about a topic we have a strong opinion about. And I don’t use it as an excuse. I make a simple observation in the spirit of starting with what we have.

    Now, if being respectful is our guiding principle we may choose not to speak up, rather than risk hurting someone. That would mean that we suppress conflict, feedback and idea cross-pollination. That would mean that we suppress our development both as individuals and as an organization.

    The question we were staring at was: can we be too respectful?

    Can we bring respect to the level when it is not justifiable anymore? Can being respectful yield unwanted outcome?

    Intuitively my answer was negative. And yet I couldn’t discard the argument as a whole since I’ve experienced the dilemma myself.

    The thing is that respect is a nuanced thing. The same behavior may be perceived as respectful by one person and as disrespectful by someone else. The same behavior may be perceived either as respectful or as disrespectful by the same person depending on whose behavior we put under scrutiny. The context matters. The group setup matters. The mood matters. And the list goes on and on.

    In a way, we can’t design a set of behavior that would be universally respectful. Well, not unless we are really,really far on the safe side. This, as we already established, would have some unwanted outcomes.

    And yet one of these catchy phrases I picked from Stephen Parry kept my mind working.

    Showing respect for people does not mean you have to like them, agree with their views, or fail to challenge any half-baked reasoning they may have.

    My thoughts were that we might have been using “respect” in overly broad way, like a wall shield rather than a buckler. However, I couldn’t wrap my head around something that would provide some guidance where the line should be. After all, Stephen’s remark focuses on what respect is not and not on what it is.

    Then I came across the following passage from Ray Dalio:

    Make sure people give more consideration to others than they demand for themselves.

    It is more inconsiderate to prevent people from exercising their rights because you are offended by them than it is for them to do whatever it is what offends you. That said, it is inconsiderate not to weigh the impact of one’s actions on others, so we expect people to use sensible judgment and not doing obviously offensive things.

    This principle, in a neat way, connects the dots in both directions and through that it addresses the risk of being “overly respectful” through suppressing oneself. It creates responsibility on each party involved in an interaction.

    A party that is about to do something that may potentially be disrespectful is bound to use sensible judgement and assess whether such a behavior can be commonly perceived as offensive.

    The other party, on the other hand, takes responsibility of using “the respect shield” sparingly, as if it was a buckler protecting the most sensitive areas and not a wall shield covering from literally everything.

    This way we create some sort of a middle ground when it comes to respect. We don’t call out all behaviors that can potentially be perceived as disrespectful. We don’t even call out some that touch us personally, assuming good intentions and acknowledging that people have different standards. What we gain thanks to that is an environment where there is a space for more contributions from everyone.

    There’s another consequence. Such a notion of respect, which accepts more behaviors, means that when someone calls “disrespectful” it is a strong signal that the line has been crossed. After all we may assume that such a call was considerate and took into account that suppressing someone else without a good reason is disrespectful too.

    Of course, maintaining the balance doesn’t come for free. It requires consideration. On one hand there’s a risk of extending that middle ground of consent too far. It would happen when we start accepting behaviors that are hurtful. On the other hand there’s a risk of shrinking that space too much. It would happen when we give less and less slack to others when they act out.

    The principle, however, provides us with a pretty good reference point: give others more consideration that you expect for yourself. That’s how we can avoid being both disrespectful as well as suppressing ourselves in a fear of being overly respectful.

    Should I know this principle I wouldn’t have said as much in the situation that kicked off this whole thinking process. Yet still I would still make my point strongly, even at the risk of other party feeling attacked by the strong statement. And that would probably have been the best possible outcome.

  • Emergent Purpose

    There are those presentations at conferences that stay with us for a long time, even if there seems to be no particular reason for that. And yet they keep coming back for one reason or another. One of such presentations for me was a discussion between Arne Roock and Simon Marcus from Lean Kanban Central Europe years back.

    Even though the topic of the discussion was broader there is one context that keeps coming back to me. Autonomy and alignment. A recurring theme was that we can’t enable autonomy unless we have alignment around a strategy, a goal, or whatever is the thing that orchestrates individual efforts.

    As Peter Senge in his classic The Fifth Discipline puts it:

    To empower people in an unaligned organization can be counterproductive.

    It obviously makes sense. I mean, distributing autonomy is all fine but also creates a risk that everyone would pull an organization toward a different direction. Alignment, which goes through understanding of a common goal, helps up to focus on rowing in the same direction.

    At the same time, watching the session back then, I couldn’t help but thinking that we at Lunar Logic hadn’t been doing that. We’d been continuously distributing more and more autonomy to everyone and at the same time there hadn’t been any official strategic purpose set for the organization for quite some time.

    It the spirit of the discussion between Arne and Simon, who I both respect a lot, that should feel wrong. And yet it didn’t.

    I could even remember my earlier discussions with Jabe Bloom. Jabe was pointing how important were techniques he adopted to help people connect their everyday behaviors with strategic goals.

    Nonetheless, I still felt like imposing a strategy onto Lunar Logic would be a bad move.

    It was months later when I came across the concept of emergent purpose. In its spirit it’s all about understanding organizational culture. It starts with an assumption that everyone at an organization has their individual purpose and it is only natural to pursue that individual purpose. It means that, given no other guidance, everyone would work toward achieving their own personal goals. Some people would have goals similar to others. Some would have very distinct aspirations. Some would have much stronger drive to achieve their own goals than other who would be fine going with the tide.

    If we tried to visualize that as forces pulling an organization in different directions it might have looked like this.

    emergent purpose

    As a matter of fact it would also mean that there is an aggregated force pulling the organization in some direction. And that aggregated force is exactly an emergent purpose.

    emergent purpose

    By its design we don’t set an emergent purpose. It’s simply the outcome of individual purposes. It also means that for some people in an organization the emergent purpose may be the exact opposite of what they individually want. That’s all fine.

    Despite the fact that it’s an emergent property of any organization, we have means to influence the emergent purpose. It happens through hiring. When someone leaves an organization their influence on emergent purpose disappears. At the same the organization hires someone new whose expectations may be better aligned with the emergent purpose.

    emergent purpose

    Through such a change the emergent purpose has been amplified.

    There is interesting dynamics in that process. If my own goals are aligned with the purpose of the organization I’m with, it is less likely that I’d leave the organization than if it was otherwise. And corollary to that, my chance of being hired and wanting to join an organization is higher if there is alignment in place.

    In other words emergent purpose tends to sustain and even amplify itself, even with no conscious effort from leaders of an organization.

    The final, and most important bit about the idea of emergent purpose is that every organization has an emergent purpose. It doesn’t matter whether they have an official strategic purpose or not, or how strong it is, or whether there is alignment between a strategy and an emergent purpose. It’s always there, as the only way to get rid of it would be to make people stop having any ambitions, which is an equivalent of not having any people in an organization, I guess.

    That’s exactly where the fun starts. Given that there always is an emergent purpose, we’d be dumb not to listen to it. Now, I don’t say we necessarily need to pursue it actively, yet understanding it is crucial.

    The reason is that whatever strategy we choose there will likely be a gap between that strategy and the emergent purpose. The bigger the gap the more people would get disengaged and likely eventually leave. From that perspective there is a price to pay for any strategy and, simply put, the better we understand the emergent purpose the better we are suited to achieve our strategic goal. Also, in simple economic terms, there may be strategies that simply are too costly to pursue.

    Ideally, you can do what we did at Lunar Logic. We basically turned our emergent purpose to a company strategy. Instead of imposing a strategy on everyone we listened to each other and figured what’s the most desired path we want to pursue for the time being. That’s how we evolved our aspiration from helping to build products for our customers efficiently to helping the customers to succeed with their products. The latter isn’t focused on the building part nearly as much as the former.

    Interestingly enough, out of the potential strategies that we discussed there was one which would make me leave the company eventually. Luckily for me it didn’t end up being our emergent purpose after all.

    Of course I understand that few companies would go as far as we did. Even though I think it is an awesome idea I don’t encourage organizations to make that bold move. Nevertheless, knowing what the gap between aspirations of leaders of a company and everyone else is crucial if we look for any reasonable level of sustainability.

    Finally, emergent purpose is also one of possible answers for autonomy and alignment issue. As long as we understand what an emergent purpose is we can decide to stick with it or just slightly shape it instead of building alignment externally through officially set strategic goals.

  • Autonomy and Authority

    These days I speak extensively about how we designed Lunar Logic as an organization. After all, going through a transition from a traditional management model to a situation where company has no managers at all is quite an achievement. One of the pillars of managerless organizational design is autonomy.

    After all, decisions won’t just make themselves. Someone has to call the shots. Once we got rid of managers, who would normally make almost all decisions, we need everyone else to embrace decision making. For that to happen, we need to distribute autonomy.

    Interestingly enough, when Don Reinertsen, who I respect a lot, talks about decentralizing control he uses somewhat different wording.

    Decentralizing control requires decentralizing both the authority to make decisions and the information required to make these decisions correctly.

    Don Reinertsen

    Authority refers to a formal power to make a decision. However, I tend to make a clear distinction between authority and autonomy. Ultimately, as a manger, I can give my team authority to make a decision. However, at the same time I can instantiate fear or pressure on decision-makers so before they actually make their call they would ask me what I think about the topic and go with my advice. This mean that even if authority was distributed autonomy is not there.

    Corollary to that, I may not have formal authority but I can feel courageous enough to make a decision. If that is an acceptable part of an organizational culture it means that I may have autonomy without authority. By the way the latter case is interesting as it pictures the attitude I’m very fond of: ask forgiveness rather than get a permission.

    I’m not going to fundamentally disagree with Don Reinertsen, though. As a matter of fact, we are on the same page as he follows up with his train of thought.

    To enable lower organizational levels to make decisions, we need to give them authority, information, and practice. Without practice and the freedom to fail upon occasion, they will not take control of these decisions.

    Don Reinertsen

    In the first quote Don is talking about prerequisites to decentralize control. In the second he focuses on enabling it. He adds a crucial part: people need to practice. This, as a consequence, means that occasionally they will fail, a.k.a. make bad decisions.

    And that’s exactly what autonomy is in its core.

    In vast majority of cases autonomy is derived from authority. It doesn’t work the other way around, though. In fact, situation of having formal authority but no real autonomy to make a decision is fairly common. It is also the worst thing we can do if we want people to feel more accountable for an organization they’re with.

    Not only do they realize that the power they got is virtual but once it happens they’re not even back to square one. It’s worse. They got burned. So they’re not jumping on that autonomy bandwagon again when they are asked to get more involved in decision making.

    That’s, by the way, another case that portraits that cultural change are not safe to fail.

    Long story short, don’t confuse authority with autonomy. If you really care about your organization take care of distributing both, not only the former.

  • Organizational Culture and Hand Cream

    The other day we had a brief discussion at Lunar Logic on an idea that the company should provide hand cream for us. While normally we don’t really discuss such petty expenses, this time quite a few people got involved.

    One could say that the discussion itself cost the company more than a stash of hand cream that would suffice for several years. And they would be right.

    Why was I involved then? And why would I write about it afterwards?

    The thing is we don’t make decisions in isolation. Of course we can look at any decision in individual context. It’s all about hand cream and several dollars, right?

    Not really. Or at least not only. The meta-decision that was being made was about what is the extent to which the company provides its employees with stuff. It was about setting, or rather resetting, what benefits are available.

    Of course, at any company there are things that almost everyone would use, like coffee and tea, paper towels etc. These are no-brainers.

    But then, very quickly we enter the land of less obvious options. Like a hand cream. Ultimately not everyone would be using it. I’m betting around half of people maybe. So we’re making a small nice gesture to some.

    The question is: should we be making such small nice gestures to other groups?

    We have quite a bunch of people who are cooking lunches at the office. Should we buy cooking oil for them? Or spices? These would all be small expenses after all.

    So how about free food available at the office? Well, given that we have a couple vegans, healthy load of vegetarians, some burger lovers, a diabetic, a couple people on gluten-free diet and a couple more trying to lose a few pounds there would always be someone left out. These aren’t obvious decisions anymore.

    These kind of calls are really about deciding about where we set the limits. What is acceptable. It’s not about hand cream. It’s about what rationale would be enough to justify an expense on the account of the company. We are talking about norms.

    Have I just said “norms”? Oh well, it seems we are talking about organizational culture now.

    organizational culture

    the behavior of humans who are part of an organization and the meanings that the people react to their actions

    includes the organization values, visions, norms, working language, systems, symbols, beliefs, and habits

    Wikipedia

    Simply put organizational culture is a sum of behaviors of everyone in an organization. Not only behaviors themselves, though, but also what drives these behaviors: shared values, common principles, rules and norms.

    This is why I got involved in the discussion about hand cream. The trigger was realization that we are just about to change a norm and I’d rather have an explicit discussion about that beforehand. Such a change may affect the common attitude from “we’re not doing such things here” to “yeah, we’ve seen that happening before so it’s OK.”

    What’s more, giving all sorts of benefits away is not something that can be taken back seamlessly. As Daniel Kahneman in his profound book Thinking Fast and Slow points we think differently about something that we gain than about something that we lose.

    In other words getting hand cream is all fine and nice but almost instantly it becomes a new norm that hand cream is there. We’ve just set new expectation level. Once we stop supplying cream we would perceive that as a loss. The cost of removing a benefit would be bigger than a gain we got from introducing it.

    That’s why we can’t label changes that affect organizational culture as safe to fail. Like in: let’s try the hand cream thing and if people don’t care we’ll just stop buying it. When we are touching organizational culture there’s no rollback button. Even when we technically bring the situation back to the square one, culturally it’s different because we have a new experience so we look at things differently.

    That’s why I will get involved occasionally in discussions like the one about hand cream. And that’s why it was worth a blog post.

  • Empathy and Respect: What Makes Teams Great

    I’ve been known to bring up research on collective intelligence in many situations, e.g. here, here, or here. In my personal case, the research findings heavily influenced my perception of how to build teams and design organizations. The crucial lesson was that social perceptiveness and having everyone being heard in discussions were key to achieve high collective intelligence. This, in turn, translates to high effectiveness of a team in pretty much any flavor of knowledge work.

    Since the original work was published, the research has been repeated and findings were confirmed. Nevertheless, in software industry we tend to think we are special (even though we are not) and thus I often hear an argument that trading technical skills for social perceptiveness is not worth it. The reasoning is that technical skills easily translate to better effectiveness in what is our bread and butter—building software. At the same time fuzzy things, like e.g. empathy, do not.

    The research, indeed, was run on people from all walks of life. At the same time every niche has some specific prerequisites that enable any productivity. I don’t deny that there is specific set of technical skills that is required to get someone contributing to work a team tires to accomplish. That’s likely true in an industry and software development is no different.

    As a matter of fact, enough fluency with engineering is something we validate first when we hire at Lunar Logic. The way we define it, though, is “good enough”. We want to make sure that a new team member won’t hamper a team they join. Beyond that, we don’t care too much. It resonates with a simple realization that it is much easier to learn how to code than it is to develop empathy or social perceptiveness in general.

    The whole approach is based on an assumption that findings on collective intelligence hold true in our context. Now, do they?

    Google is known to be on their quest to find what’s the perfect team for years. Some time ago they shared what they learned in a few year-long research that involved 180 Google teams. It seems they confirmed pretty much everything that has been in the original Anita Woolley’s team work.

    It’s not the technical excellence that lands teams in the group of accomplishers. By the way, neither is management style—it was orthogonal to how well teams were doing. The patterns that were vividly seen were caring about other team members and equal access to discussion time.

    What’s more, the teams which did well against one goal seemed to do well against other goals as well. Conversely, teams that were below average seemed to be so in a consistent manner. The secret sauce seemed to work fairly universally against different challenges.

    What a surprise! After all, we are not as special as we tend to think we are.

    I could leave it here, as one of those “You see? I was right all that time!” kind of posts. There is more to learn from the Google story, though. Aspects that are mentioned often in the research are norms, either explicit or implicit. This refers to specific behaviors that are allowed and supported and, as a result, to organizational culture.

    When we are talking about teams, we talk about culture pockets as teams, especially in a big organization, may differ quite a bit one from another.

    It seems that even slight changes, such as attitude in group discussions, can boost collective effectiveness significantly. If we look deeper at what drives such behaviors we’ll find two keywords.

    Empathy and respect.

    Empathy is the enabler of social perceptiveness. It is this magic powder that makes people see and care for others. It pays off because empathic person would likely make everyone around better. Note: I’m using a very broad definition of empathy here, as there is a whole discussion how empathy is defined and decomposed.

    Then, we have respect that results in psychological safety, as people are neither embarrassed nor rejected for sharing their thoughts. This, in turn, means that everyone has equal access to ongoing conversations and they are heard. Simply put, everyone contributes. Interestingly enough, it is often perceived as a nice-to-have trait in organizations but rarely as the core capability, which every team needs to demonstrate.

    Corollary to that is an observation that both respect and care for others are deep down in the iceberg model of organizational culture. It means that we can roughly sense what are capabilities of an organization when it comes to collective intelligence. It’s enough to look at the execs and most senior managers. How much are they caring for others? How respectful are they? Since the organizational culture spreads very much in a top-down manner it is a good organizational climate metric.

    I would risk a bold hypothesis that, statistically speaking, successful organizations have leaders who act in respectful and empathic way. I have no proof to support the claim, and of course there’s anecdotal evidence how disrespectful Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were. That’s why I add “statistically speaking” to this hypothesis. Does anyone have a relevant research on that?

    Finally, there is something that I reluctantly admit since I’m not a believer in “fake it till you make it approach”. It seems that some rules and rituals can actually drive collective intelligence up. There are techniques to take turns in discussions. On one hand it creates equal access to conversation time. On the other if fakes respect in this context. It challenges ego-driven extroverts and, eventually, may trigger emergence of true respect.

    Similarly, we can learn to focus on perception of others so that we see better how they may feel. It fakes empathy but, yet again, it may trigger the right reactions and, eventually, help to develop the actual trait.

    In other words we are not doomed to fail even if so far we paid attention to technical skills only and we ended up with an environment that is far too nerdy.

    However, we’d be so much better off if we built our teams bearing in mind that empathy and respect for others are the most important traits for candidates. Yes, for software developers too.

  • Don’t Mess with Culture

    When I’m writing these words I’m on my way home from Lean Agile Scotland. While summarizing the event Chris McDermott mentioned a few themes, two of them being organizational culture and experimentation.

    Experimentation is definitely my thing. I am into organizational culture too. I should be happy when Chris righteously pointed both as the themes of the event. At the same at that very moment time alarm lights went off in my head.

    We refer a lot to safe to fail experiments. We talk about antifragile or resilient environments. And then we quickly turn into organizational culture.

    The term culture hacking pops up frequently.

    And I’m scared.

    The reason is that in most cases there is no safe to fail experiment when we talk about an organizational culture. The culture is an outcome of everyone’s behaviors. It is ultimately about people. In other words an experiment on the culture, or a culture hack if you will, means changing people behaviors.

    If you mess it up, more often than not, there’s no coming back. We may introduce a new factor that would influence how people behave. However, removing that factor does not bring the old behaviors back. Not only that though. Often there’s no simple way to introduce another factor that would bring back the old status quo.

    There’s a study which showed that introducing a fine for popping up late at a daycare to pick up a child resulted in in more parents being late, as they felt excused for their behavior. This was quite an unexpected outcome of the experiment. However, even more interesting part is that removing the fine did not affect parents’ behaviors at all – they kept popping up late more frequently than before the experiment.

    It’s natural. Our behaviors are outcome of the constraints of the environment and our experience, knowledge and wisdom.

    We will affect behaviors by changing the constraints. The change is not mechanistic though. We can’t exactly predict what’s going to happen. At the same time the change affects our experience, knowledge and wisdom and thus irreversibly changes the bottom line.

    I can give you a simple example. When we decided to go transparent with salaries at Lunar Logic it was a huge cultural experiment. What I knew from the very beginning though was there was no coming back. Ultimately, we can make salaries “non-transparent” again. Would that change what people learned about everyone’s salary? No. Would that change that they do look at each other through the perspective of that knowledge?

    It might have affect the way they look at the company in a negative way, as suddenly some of the authority that they’d had was taken away. In other words, even from that perspective they’d have been better if such an experiment hadn’t been run at all than if it was tried and rolled back.

    I’m all for experimentation. I definitely do prefer safe to fail experiments. I am however aware that there are whole areas where such experiments are impossible most of the time, if not all of the time.

    The culture is one such area. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be experimenting with the culture. It’s just that we should be aware of the stakes. If you’re just flailing around with your culture hacks there will be casualties. Having experimentation mindset is a lousy excuse.

    I guess the part of my pet peeve with understanding the tools and the methods is exactly this. When we introduce a new constraint, and a method or a tool is a constraint, we invariably change the environment and thus influence the culture. Sometimes irreversibly.

    It get even trickier when the direct goal of the experiment is to change the culture. Without understanding what we’re doing it’s highly likely that such a culture hack will backfire. Each time I run an experiment on a culture I like to think that the change will be irreversible and then I ask myself once again: do I really want to run it?

    If not I simply don’t mess with the culture.