Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Category: team management

  • Team Retreat

    I’ve just finished sorting out feedback from today’s team retreat. In my case it was more of a management retreat, as it would be pretty difficult to organize a retreat with all 140 people from my team. Anyway, we ended up having a retreat with all managers from my team, which means we’re down to less than 20 people. Still, kind a crowd, wasn’t it?

    What do I mean by a retreat? In terms of a format it was an all day long meeting which was held off-site. Sort of. I mean we went to another office, the one no one works in. We did that, because it is crucial that no one is tempted to go back to their own desk. As one of my colleagues said it: “when we’re meeting in our office my thoughts are always floating around my desk.” For the sake of this meeting I wanted to break this connection. I wanted to have all of us concentrated and focused on subjects we were discussing.

    Before I move to subjects we covered a quick disclaimer: it’s been first such meeting since I’m working with my current team. I treat it as an experiment. I know retreats should last at least two days, so we have enough time to chew through things we’ve just heard and come back to them tomorrow, once we have more insight on the subject. Hopefully we’ll come to this point, but first, let’s just make them work in a lighter format.

    OK, so this was an experiment and something which was expected to be the first event of the series if people like it. We had a theme – everyone had 20 minutes to prepare a session in a form of their choice on something they’re doing in their team, which is valuable and worth sharing and copying. We ended up discussing stuff from alternatives of meetings (no-meeting culture, anyone?), through engineering practices, to cool coding tools which improve developers’ lives. We had PowerPoint presentations, no-slide sessions and discussions. We had some fun as well.

    We run typical round-the-table to share our opinions on what had just happened, but we also had the feedback door.

    Although it would be an abuse to say that feedback was purely positive, I’d say that, in terms of feedback, supportive messages just outnumbered critical ones. Now, it doesn’t mean we got it perfect the first time. No, we have hell a lot of work to do. However, we definitely are on a right track.

    Why did it work so well then? There are a few reasons.

    First, knowledge exchange. We work in an organization big enough that we have these silos, both formal and informal ones. We know each other, but not necessarily know what each of us is doing at the moment, let alone practices we use. It was a great occasion to share some information on that.

    Second, focus. We do meet (almost) every week. Yeah, that’s true, but it’s always in the middle of something. This time we were isolated from our errands so we were paying attention to whatever was happening around.

    Third, a kick in the butt. When we are in the middle of something important, which means pretty much all the time, it’s easy just to pop up and switch into passive mode. Yup, I will hear anything you have to share, but make it quick. And please, don’t make me do anything – I have important stuff to deal with. This time everyone actually had to prepare something. Not necessarily a big thing – anything between 10 and 20 minutes worked fine.

    Fourth, integration. We spent the whole day with each other. Well, if you hate me, or any other of us, that’s not good news for you. However, if you consider us a team, a bit of integration definitely helps.

    Now, you can easily scale this format up, and you get top management off-site, which in some companies is kinda popular.

    But you can also perfectly scale this idea down to a team-level. Get your team out of their desks and discuss things which are important to them. You won’t be pushing your project further to its success at that very moment but think of it in terms of sharpening the saw. If you don’t let the event slide toward chaotic discussion on pretty much nothing important this investment will pay off pretty quickly.

    Try it. You (probably) won’t regret it.

  • The Worst Management Task Ever

    If you asked me to point a single thing, which I hate most in senior management role, I wouldn’t have any problems with the answer. It would be firing people. On my personal hate scale there’s firing, then huge, huge void and only then other unpleasant things and tasks to do.

    Each time I fire someone I feel like a complete jerk. It doesn’t matter that the decision is well-grounded. It doesn’t even matter when I’m proven, after some time, it was the right choice. It isn’t any easier.

    And the next time you do it doesn’t become any easier either. I mean if executing such decisions is easy for you and you feel comfortable firing people there must be something seriously wrong with you.

    Yet I still think firing people is extremely important part of pretty much any management job. If you’re a senior manager you likely have power and authority to make such decisions. If you’re a team manager dealing just with your team of six or something and you don’t have that much of power, you still can convince your superior to make a tough move. Sometimes the latter is even worse as you have to do all the talking as it is you, who started the whole thing.

    OK, why is it so important then? Because this is one of methods of building great teams. As harsh as it sounds: sometimes you don’t have enough resources (meaning: time, patience, money) to make a person act on acceptable level and the best thing you can do is to split your ways.

    Don’t get me wrong, my advice still is: do everything you reasonably can to fix an underperformer. I know way too many people who started shining when given a second chance to say otherwise. But then remember that it’s a manager who is responsible for building the high-quality team, so if you just accept the underperformer in the team you basically harm the team on many different levels.

    What more, sometimes we’re out of luck and we don’t have all the time and money of the world to try virtually every possible thing one could think of. Sometimes our fixing options would be limited. Sometimes constant resistance of the underperformer will make us lose faith faster. Shit happens. We don’t live in ideal world. And then it’s time…

    Well, for many managers I know then it’s time just to accept the fact someone is underperforming. And you know what? I understand them. I understand them because firing people is so damn hard and so freaking unpleasant that I can think of thousands of reasons why I shouldn’t do that. At all. So yes, I can perfectly understand them.

    But I don’t agree with them. We are paid to do our jobs even when the jobs suck on occasions. When we make our developers write boring documentation which just has to be done it works similarly. The only difference is in level of responsibility. But we still expect our developers would deal with crappy tasks, don’t we?

    Having balls to fire people isn’t something which makes a manager. In fact, with a bit of luck we won’t need to fire anyone for years and will be able play the role of guru manager neatly. However, when time comes you better be ready to deal with the worst management task ever. Otherwise your whole team will be constantly taking big hits on morale and you no longer will be considered a rock star manager.

    If you’ve just lived through such situation for the first time I have two messages for you. First, it’s one of the most valuable experiences as a manager you can possibly have so good for you. Second, yes, I know how crappy you feel now and it’s not going to become easier next time you do this, sorry.

  • On Making Difficult Decisions

    Occasionally I receive some flak because of one of decisions I make. Almost always it is one of those decisions which changes status quo.

    Let’s take an example: an employee has an offer from a competitor. You care about her so you try to keep her offering different things, e.g. transition to a better project, raise, etc. However you keep your offer rather reasonable. Basically you don’t try to do more than you would if there were no offer from the competitor. Unfortunately eventually the employee leaves.

    A question pops up: have you done everything you could to make her stay?

    Well, basically no. You could have paid premium or let her be prima donna or whatever but you decided you want to be fair with everyone in the team and not just make her stay at all cost.

    Now it’s time to receive criticism. Hey, you could have fight for keeping status quo. Forget everyone else, now she will leave and the whole world will stop. Aargh, we’re doomed!

    Um no, not exactly. The sole fact that you can do something doesn’t automatically means you have to, or even should, do it. Making a fair decision, even if it is difficult, usually pays off in the long run. In this case you play fair with the whole team even if it means losing one good employee. On the plus side, you mitigate a risk of frustration among many people in the team. Besides, let’s face it: shit happens, sometimes people leave. Unless you work in damn cool startup, that is.

    Anyway, every time you make such decision think about longer perspective and the whole team and not about tomorrow and a single person. It will help you to make the right choice.

    Chances are good you won’t be understood in the first place. I can almost guarantee you that you won’t be considered a hero. It is way more likely you’ll be dubbed as the one who doesn’t give a damn, even though that you actually do. After all you changed status quo.

    And this is why these decisions are difficult. Otherwise they would be easy and obvious.

  • Challenge your Rules

    This is the old lesson, but the one we need to learn over and over again. As managers we’re all about rules. We work like this and not like that. We do things in such and such way. We expect people to act like this. We forbid other behaviors.

    Nice. We can do it even worse trying to formalize all these rules.

    We need the rules not without a reason. If I want to be fair for more than a hundred people in my team I just can’t make every decision on the fly. Otherwise people would feel they’re treated randomly and the outcome of our discussion depends mainly on my humor or on the weather or whatever. If I want my judgment to be consistent over time I need to develop a set of rules, either formal or informal ones, so I can refer to them each time.

    The problem starts when we set these rules and never question them. Actually every time we trigger any rule-based decision we should take at least a few seconds to ask ourselves whether the rule is still reasonable or it is already good time to adjust it.

    Over past few months I could share a number of examples when I challenged and eventually changed my rules. Either because it appeared the rule didn’t work well or it had unplanned side-effects or there was a lot of resistance.

    And this is exactly how it should work. Our training policy was considered too harsh? Fair enough, we’ve just changed it. Recruitment process was considered sub-optimal? It doesn’t work that way anymore. We had a clash with managers regarding sharing specific information among them? Well, I won’t fight with everyone, so forget about this issue.

    The lesson here is: challenge your rules. Leading people isn’t about setting and following rules. It’s about adjusting to the situation.

  • People Are Not Our Most Valuable Resource

    I hear that one from time to time: “people are our most valuable resource.”

    Well, they are not.

    People aren’t your most valuable resource. People aren’t goddamn resource at all. People are, well, people. Individuals. Folks who somehow like to be treated as real persons and not precious pieces of junk otherwise known as servers and such.

    Every time I hear this cliché about people being most valuable resource I wonder: how the heck can you say people are most valuable when you treat them as resource? As commodity. As something which can be replaced with another identical um… resource. If you say that, you basically deny that people in your organization are important.

    And it doesn’t really matter how hard you try to avoid calling people with that name. If you believe they are (put here “most valuable” or whatever bullshit you like) resources you won’t trick them. They won’t feel respected and they won’t trust you. Why should they after all? Do servers trust project leaders? And no, that won’t make people motivated whatsoever.

    I know, this is a rant. But this makes me crazy. I mean, how could we learn such humiliating behavior? I’m just waiting until I hear “Hi resource” instead of “Hi Jane” when Mr. I’m-So-Damn-Important-Project-Manager meets one of his project team members.

    Then, I’m going to hurt somebody. And I guess it won’t be Jane.

  • Why Money Doesn’t Motivate

    I touched money and motivation subject recently. Since the post generated quite a discussion it seems the subject is important for many. It also seems many people disagree with the opinion that money doesn’t really motivate which is nice since it gives me excuse to beat the dead horse again.

    In short my points were:

    • Money is more a hygiene factor than a motivator.
    • When you pay less than some healthy level expected by people they start looking for a job.
    • As long as you match people’s comfort level they get, or don’t get, motivated by non-monetary factors.

    I received a number of counterarguments in comments, which I’ll try to address here. I’m aware I overstate bit here and there but that (hopefully) doesn’t change validity of arguments.

    Money does motivate people (and go sell your crap somewhere else)

    A nice thing about Dan Pink’s TED Talk is that he’s making a case. He brings arguments – studies made all over the world – to prove the point: money doesn’t seem to make people work better. Now, I haven’t looked very hard to find research studies which prove the opposite, but maybe you can redirect me to them. For now I consider it is 1:0 for Dan’s team.

    I saw teams whose productivity increased significantly just after bonus money was promised. The problem is usually they were just tricking the system. They knew they could do the job in given time but it was better to slack at the beginning waiting for the magic wand of extra money to be used. Then everybody got at full speed to save the project. The only thing which surprises me is where the hell the management was and why nobody did anything about that sick situation?

    I know lots of examples of people working their asses off because project required their extra effort. Usually they got a big bag of money at the end and everyone was happy. Does it mean money motivated them? Well, I think we’re messing the cause with the effect here. They didn’t start discussing with their managers how much they were going to get. They just gave more, because they thought it was a right thing to do (I know I totally oversimplify here, but we won’t discuss everyone’s individual drivers here, will we?) Then the effect usually was they got some extra money, which was of course completely fair.

    And for the end, if money motivates people my question is: why they don’t get more and more motivated as they get more and more money? I gave quite a lot raises and huge piles of extra money in my career and my observation is it makes people happy. Happy, not motivated. They’re engaged as they were. They give a lot, as they did. But somehow they don’t seem to be motivated better.

    Of course sometimes they consider the money they got as an insult and their motivation fall flat in its face but we’re talking about motivating, not de-motivating, here.

    Companies (and villains running them) want to have engaged people but only to exploit them (that’s what villains do after all)

    That’s true for some companies and some villains running them. But if that is your only experience with your employers please accept my humble condolences. There are toxic companies out there. There are normal companies with toxic managers as well which, from employee’s perspective, is no different. The world however isn’t inhabited with villains only. There are superheroes as well. If you’re sick of work among bad guys maybe it’s time to join Rebel Alliance, La Resistance or other good guys of your choice.

    I know it’s easy to generalize basing on your own situation and experience (that’s what I do on the blog virtually all the time), but be sure to check what’s happening out there in other organizations, especially when your experience is limited to one or a couple of teams/companies.

    Because of rapid development of IT industry we face deficit of good, experienced leaders and managers. It’s even truer in countries where the industry is even younger, like in Poland where I live. But still, that’s not a reason to dismiss the existence of healthy companies or decent managers.

    People should earn amount they expect or they get frustrated (which is bad since frustration is such a nasty word)

    Well, yes. Sort of. We come back to the discussion over a healthy level of salary. If I get paid above some expected minimum, which is a very individual thing, I could always use a raise but I don’t get frustrated about money. However if you asked me how much I wanted to earn my answer would be likely something more than I get. That’s how humans work – we always want more than we have.

    And now that you asked me, yes, I do have a pitch to ground why I should earn more. But don’t be stressed, I’m not going anywhere only because my pitch doesn’t convince you. See? I’m not frustrated.

    However I do agree that once we don’t get the amount we expect there’s always a risk that the other company would offer us more and then we’d be really incentivized to make a move. But I guess that’s the risk most of companies tend to accept. After all last time I checked running a business was about earning money and not spending everything just to pay people more.

    Best moment of motivation is when you see the money on your bank account (let’s switch to weekly wages, shall we?)

    OK, I admit, I don’t get this. At all. You mean once you see a bunch of money on your account you’ll be coding like crazy till the night? Would it be a better motivation to earn weekly wages than monthly salaries only because they’re um… more frequent?

    It’s difficult for me to address this argument but I guess we define motivation differently. As industrial bloodsucker I consider motivation as something good not because the word sounds nice but because motivated people tend to produce better results when they work. Call it a better productivity, bigger involvement or whatever.

    I understand people are happy when they see salary on their account but if we can build no connection with their work quality whatsoever let’s not call it motivation, OK? Of course feel free to correct me if I’m missing something here.

    Over time people get more experienced so they should get raises (like levels in RPG games)

    Um… no. Next please!

    Well, actually that’s the tricky one. Once we get more experienced and more knowledgeable it’s a natural thing we tend to want more, thus expected raises. The problem is employment isn’t an RPG game and our contracts aren’t a leveling system.

    Contract and salary represent a result of a kind of compromise. It’s about how much specific employee is worth for specific employer. It means that the same employee would be judged, and paid, differently depending on the hiring company. And yes, it does mean your salary depends on company’s clients, hiring strategy, specific managers you’ve been talking with, shape of the industry, organization’s career paths and a hundred of other factors which are completely independent on you.

    Sometimes getting more experience and/or knowledge doesn’t make you more valuable for the company. So maybe it’s time to learn what makes one a more valuable person for the specific organization instead of waiting for a reward for seniority?

    There are many jobs which can’t be loved which means people do them for money (after all love and money are the only motivators in the world)

    True. There are many jobs which can’t be loved, especially in the corporate world. But that doesn’t mean people do them for money and for money only. If they hated virtually everything about their jobs they would be looking for new ones like crazy. Somehow vast majority of them do not. I assume it’s not that bad then.

    We don’t get frustrated with our jobs in a second or after a single issue. Frustration grows over months, possibly years. Then yes, it is about a single problem or a single situation but it’s just the last straw.

    Our happiness with our jobs is a complex thing. I could count multiple things I’m happy with and multiple of those I’m definitely not happy with. However the overall mark is pretty good so I’m not going anywhere and probably one new ugly thing isn’t changing this attitude.

    I think it works pretty much the same with jobs which are considered as, well, not-so-nice. Corporate world is the one where conditions are usually less humane but then majority of corporations don’t deal with the risk of being extinct in a few months – something which is pretty common among startups. It’s of course only one of examples but the theme is similar in many cases. After all, when the company offers only jobs which are totally hated they’re going out of business soon as CEO won’t deliver all the projects single-handedly.

    Now, I’ve shared my arguments a little less briefly but I’m sure I haven’t convinced everyone (that wasn’t the goal by the way). Let’s get the heated discussion started.

  • Money and Motivation

    A few people have left. Or I should say a few good people have left. Yes, the company has tried to stop them but well, when people decide to go it’s usually way too late.

    The next station is realizing that people are gone. Well, they will still come to the office for a couple of weeks but they are gone. Gone. If you wanted to change their minds you should have worked with them a few months earlier.

    And then there comes the idea that you should at least take care about those who are still here. When people leave, their colleagues start thinking about leaving too. That’s how it works.

    So we come to the point where most of managers use tools they have to keep retention on reasonable level. Quite often they use the only tool they think they have, which is money. “That should keep them motivated for some time. And they won’t leave either.”

    Yes, except it isn’t true.

    As I think more about money and motivation I’m closer and closer to Dan Pink’s approach: pay enough to get the money off the table and then focus on things which really motivate people. By the way if you haven’t seen Dan Pink’s TED talk about the subject you really should do it now.

    OK, so what kind of effects you should see when you throw more money at people? For some of them it would take the money problem off the table. Will it keep them in the company in the long run? I don’t know. You are either able to build creative, motivating work environment or you aren’t and raise won’t change anything in the long run.

    For others money wasn’t the issue in the first place. They will happily accept raise, that’s for sure, but is it going to change their approach? Not so much.

    Now you can point a number of examples when someone you know has changed jobs purely for money. I think they fall into the first group. The only difference is in their cases money was a major problem and not a minor one. Bigger salary doesn’t make them motivated – it just gets the problem off the table. It isn’t guarantee that they won’t eventually leave. If your organization suck they will. You can buy a few months but the outcome is going to be the same – they will be gone soon.

    In short: if you have a big bag of money you can make people stop complaining about their salaries, but you won’t make highly motivated top performers out of them.

    I know people who are leaving with no change in remuneration whatsoever. Heck, if you look for people who changed job and got lower salary in the new place I’m one of examples. And yes, I’d do it again. I’ve never left any organization (or project) for money, even though sometimes it was an issue.

    If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. If the only tool you have is money, every problem seems to be solvable with cash.

    But then you see teams which don’t get any bonus money whatsoever and they’re motivated and those which spend days complaining about lack of bonus money. All in the same organization. They are even paid basically the same. I see two possible explanations: one supports argument above and the other includes words “black magic.”

    If people go, you won’t change that if the only thing you can think of is throwing more money at them. Unless you’re paying peanuts, that is.

  • Being a Leader

    Recently a subject of leadership pops up on Software Project Management pretty often, but usually I look at it from manager’s perspective. After all that’s something I do for living – managing teams. So yes, being a leader is the first and probably the most important role of manager (by the way, the post on role of manager turned into full-blown presentation which causes some buzz every time I deliver it). But leadership isn’t exclusively attached to management.

    We are leaders in our workplaces, but we lead in different communities and informal groups as well. And even if we stick to our professional lives we can lead in technical areas or be typical people leaders. Leadership has many names. This was exactly the theme of my recent presentation on the subject which I delivered as a guest on Toastmasters contest.

    Being a leader

    A very interesting discussion followed the session. I used leadership definition I’ve heard from Mary Poppendieck: “Ability to attract followers is exactly what makes you a leader.” The definition neatly covers all sorts of tech leads – if I believe you’re knowledgeable and experienced person in a specific area I will come to pester you every time I need help with that matter. In other words I will follow you, which according to definition makes you a leader.

    The argument against that approach is that we call it authority and not leadership and leadership is/should be discussed from a perspective of leading teams/groups. I can’t say I agree with this point of view as we’d have to cross out many leaders who build their follower base thanks to extraordinary knowledge and technical skills. What do you think?

    By the way, after criticism I faced on my slides from AgileEE I built this slide deck differently. Happy now?

  • So You Promoted Wrong People to Management, What Now?

    It seems recently I’m telling you a lot stuff about people management and managers in general. If describing the role of manager wasn’t enough you could also read a rant about screwed promotions which we see so often. This all stuff is good (yes, such a shameless self-promotion), but it assumes one optimistic thing: you can still make decisions who will be promoted to management.

    However sometimes we don’t choose who is promoted to managerial positions. These decisions have already been made and they’ve been made wrong. If your task is to deal with that you’ll need to follow a three-step scenario.

    1. Coach

    OK, great engineer doesn’t make a candidate for a great manager. But it doesn’t make you can’t make a good manager out of great engineer. The trick is to raise awareness that someone doesn’t perform well as a manager and coach them to improve their people skills. Help them to change their focus from engineering to people management. However this effort can’t be unlimited. If someone isn’t willing to change you won’t force them. Then it’s time to move to the point number 2.

    2. Find a better place

    If someone excelled as an engineer and you can’t make a good manager out of them you might try to move them back to some engineering-related role. Maybe design, maybe architecture, maybe even project management would be a good place. It all depends on an individual case. Of course it is tricky – what you basically do is you move someone back from management to engineering, so you better have pretty prestigious engineering roles. And do it if, and only if, you believe the person would perform well in a new role. If you can’t find such role or leaving management isn’t really an option all you’re left with is a solution number 3.

    3. Let them go

    If you can deal with an issue other way you should let wrong people go. And yes, this means you’re losing a great engineer, who unfortunately became poor manager and is unwilling to switch back to the role which he performed well at. What you’re left with at that point is either to keep someone who do crappy job, which also affects their team, or to let them go and find possibly a better candidate. Well, if we discuss someone who failed at points 1 and 2 of the plan I’d let him go. As harsh as it sounds it is a good decision for both of you and for the discussed team.

    Keeping poor managers is much worse than admitting you’ve made wrong decision promoting them in the first place.

    And if you want to see more stuff about being a good manager you will appreciate my recent presentation titled Good Manager, True Leader, which I delivered at our internal company conference.

    Good Manager, True Leader

  • One Measure to Appraise Them All

    Once your organization start talking about performance reviews you usually hear about some formal system with the same structure for everyone involved. That doesn’t really sound like a good idea, right? Why companies are using this approach then?

    If you have like a couple hundred people on board C-level exec can’t really say anything reasonable about vast majority of people in the organization. However leaders have to make some decisions basing on employees value, like firing rotten apples or promoting best candidates for managers.

    This is the point where management is tempted to build an appraisal system which makes it possible to compare people easily, so all these decision can be made basing on hard data. The system ends up as stiff and structured checklist which produces grades in the same categories for each employer.

    And this is utterly wrong.

    Actually I believe you can hardly do worse. This approach not only makes an illusion of producing comparable results but also harms relations between managers and their subordinates since performance reviews following this pattern just suck.

    Do a simple exercise: take a description of a few requirements and send them out to a bunch of managers working in software development teams. Now ask them to judge each feature in a few categories in a scale from 1 to 5. Let them judge difficulty, work consumption, innovativeness and business value. Grab these numbers from managers and compare them.

    You will see that someone hit average of 3,5 and another barely 2,5. You will see how differently people look as specific categories. You will see how vague one-word category definitions are. Basically, you will learn what subjectivity means.

    Now, I have a message for you: people are hell lot more complex than software requirements.

    If you used the same system for people what you would get is a set of top marks for a handful of organization’s gurus, handful of worst grades for a bunch of incompetent slackers and like 90% of random results for the rest of people.

    In uniform appraisal system this is taken as reasonable data which decides on a number of things, starting with promotions and money and ending with general respect. These numbers make or break careers. And yes, I’ve just called this data random.

    But that’s not the worst thing which is introduced by uniform appraisal system. Yes, it can be worse.

    Formalized, homogenous appraisal system degrades performance review to simple mark trade instead of making it an occasion to exchange feedback.

    You get what you measure. If you measure few criteria, and these criteria are uniformed among the organization, you create incentive to fight about better marks, so people would get more money, have better chances for promotion and would be able to boast in front of their colleagues how cool their marks were on the last review.

    There is a side-effect too. This approach creates an incentive for managers to run crappy reviews. Instead of focusing on two-way communication, learning what motivates their people, they just go through a simple script: programming three, communicativeness two, quality four, team work two, creativity five, next please. Hey, this is what the system expects from us, doesn’t it?

    Running performance reviews is pretty damn hard job. I always feel stressed when I’m going to talk about one’s performance, no matter how official or unofficial it is. Yes, it is easier to just go through a number of marks and call it a day, but that’s not the option which works for reviewed people. Unfortunately not everyone understands that, so we should build systems which create incentives for positive behaviors, not the negative ones.

    So while I don’t agree that performance reviews are evil in general, we can hardly think about worse approach in this area than a formalized, homogenous appraisal system which unifies measures among all employees. That’s just not going to work.