Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Category: team management

  • We Achieved This but I Screwed That

    I was a part of an interesting dialogue:

    – Pawel, tell me about your last success.

    – The last launch went flawlessly which means the way we chose to organize the project proved itself as pretty damn good.

    – OK, and what about your last failure?

    – I feel I can’t get through with ideas on improving the organization.

    Now the good part isn’t really me answering these two simple questions, even though I think it is a great idea to ask your people from time to time about their successes and failures. The good part is something I caught myself at after a while.

    It was our success and my failure.

    And the better part – it is not just about words. It is about the way of thinking. I might have said I had chosen our methodology and probably no one would have noticed. But what you say isn’t as important as what you believe.

    If you just switch words to the right ones you will achieve something important – recognition in front of execs is quite a token of motivation after all. But if you really believe in what you say you’ll achieve much more. You’ll always act as the success was an effect of collective effort, not only when you are in front of senior management. Besides, it was an effect of collective effort, wasn’t it?

    So tell me, what your last success was. And how about your last failure?

  • You Need (More) Team Buy-In

    I discussed recently changing the process in one of teams in the organization. In theory everything is totally easy. We need to assess current situation, find out what should be changed to improve the way the team works, apply new ideas and support them over some time to make them persistent and then go for a couple of beers and congratulate each other a stunning success.

    In this specific situation we have already a couple of ideas which should help. And yes, they include K-word. Yet still the plan is to start as we didn’t know much about the team. We try to act as the hammer wasn’t the only tool in our toolbox, even though we do have a hammer too.

    Once we know what is wrong we can apply a cure. And that’s where the hard part begins. If you look at typical pattern of change implementation you will see that the first period after inviting change sucks. People don’t know yet how to work with the new tool, process, rule, you-name-it. Outcomes are likely to be worse than with the old approach. After all, no one said changes are easy.

    Now, here is the trick: if you’re trying to implement change you not only strive to overcome typical issues but also have a reluctant team, which doesn’t want any change at all, you’re going to fail.

    People will get enough arguments to abandon change and if all they want is to get back to the good old way of doing things they will use this chance. What do you need to do then?

    Get more team buy-in.

    Actually this is what you should start with. When you assess current situation you talk with team members. If you don’t talk with people your assessment stinks anyway and I don’t want to touch it even with a stick. Use this opportunity to get people buy-in. You will need every single supporter you can have when issues start popping out.

    Don’t implement change unless you’re able to convince people it is a reasonable idea which would help them and you really don’t try to make their lives more miserable. Even if you personally are convinced that you have a silver bullet which would change your crappy software house into another Google, only better, you won’t win against people who have to follow your process, execute your idea and deal with all of side effects of a new situation.

    When I read discussions about some approach, which appears to be working rather poorly, the first thing which comes to my mind is lack of buy-in among people who are affected by the change. In terms of implementing agile we often forget that problems seen within development team are often triggered outside, likely by management. That’s why, for the purpose of this article, I use term “team” to name everyone whose work will be significantly affected by the change.

    Anyway the pattern remains the same. You just need more buy-in. You may need to work on this with development team but you may need to work with management too. Whichever case is true in your situation, go fix it before you start implementing change. That is, unless you find it pleasant to fail.

  • The Role of Manager

    I took part in a very interesting discussion today. We were talking about criteria we should use to appraise leaders and managers in the organization. The most surprising part, at least for me, was discussion about notion of line manager among disputants.

    It came out that we considered average functional manager as anything between pure-manager to person who does 90% of engineering work mixed with 10% of managerial tasks. That’s a variety of options, isn’t it? As you may guess I supported rather the former than the latter.

    Well, if I’m such an opponent of letting people do what they used to do before they were promoted to management, likely coding if we talk about software teams, what I think they should do all day long? In other words what is, or should be, the role of manager.

    Leader

    This vague term describes first and most important trait most managers should have and only few have. If I’m a team member I expect my manager will show leadership and charisma. I want to be ignited to follow his ideas. I need to be sure he knows why and where we are heading. I have to see him around when problems arise. I eager to be managed by someone I’d like to follow even if no one told me so. A good manager is also a good leader but these two are not the same. What a pity it isn’t common mixture.

    Coach

    Help newcomers with learning the organization. Help inexperienced with gaining experience. Help everyone with growing. Help those with problems with fixing them. Easy? No, not at all. First, you need to know who needs what. Then, you need to know how to reach people so your helping hand won’t be rejected. Finally, you need to work carefully and patiently sharing your knowledge in experience in a way which doesn’t frustrate or dishearten people. Repeat when finished.

    Shield

    As a line manager you have some senior management over your head. This is a bad news. Actually there’s usually a lot of crap flying over there and, because of the gravity, it’s going to land down on heads of your team. There will be blame games. There will be pointing fingers. It is your time. Be a shield. Take enough bullets on your chest for the team. You’ll earn respect. You’ll earn a bunch of loyal followers. And that’s how you earn your spurs.

    Advocate

    As a manager you’re also an advocate. Devil’s advocate to be precise. You have to present and defend different decisions made up there, in the place where only C-level execs are allowed. Sometimes these decisions you won’t like. But for your people you’re still the face of the company so don’t play the angry boy and act like a man. We don’t always do what we want. After all, they pay you for this, remember?

    Motivator

    Sometimes everyone needs a kick in the butt to get back to work at full speed. It would be quite a pleasant task but unfortunately kicking butts is used as a metaphor here. It’s all about motivation. And I have a bad news here, there’s no easy answer for a question what motivates people. You have to learn each of your people individually. Oh, forgot to mention, it takes quite a lot of time to learn what drives all these people.

    Adviser

    Yes, an adviser. Not a decision-maker. At least not unless you really have to make a decision by yourself. People will come to you asking different things. Well, they will if they think your opinion may add some value and you’re capable to understand what the hell they are talking about. Of course you can guess or shoot or use magic 8 ball but you better learn (oh no! more learning) what the problem really is and help your team to solve it. Note: it is different than solving it for them, even if you know the answer. If an association which comes to your mind is delegation I must praise your reasoning.

    Now if you are done with those and still have enough time to keep up your outstanding engineering skills, please do Mr. Anderson. Unfortunately chances are good it is enough to fill more than a full working day so you’d have to choose between focusing on your management or technical skills.

    And if you happen to spend two third of your day coding, well, I dare to say you aren’t a manager I’d like to work for. Your people would say the same, but you don’t talk with them so you don’t even know. After all there’s no time to chit chat, you have to code, right?

  • Performance Reviews Are Dead, Long Live Performance Reviews

    Recent NPR story about (lack of) value in performance reviews caused a stir. Esther Derby reminded her long-time hate relationship with performance appraisals pointing that not only employees but also a lot of managers hate them. What more reviews are tied to merit pay which is also evil.

    Well, I think it is oversimplification. We think performance review and we see corporate environment with multiple levels of management, constant fight for budgets, tough negotiations about rises and likely yearly appraisals which are so outdated that hardly bear any value for employers. If we discuss this kind of reviews, then agreed, they suck. They should be banned and people enforcing them should be forbidden to manage teams for at least 5 years.

    Now, tell me I’m lucky but I had probably just a couple of these crappy appraisals. And hopefully I have performed none of those by myself. By the way if I did it to you, feel free to kick my butt if spot me somewhere.

    Actually I tend to agree more with Scott Berkun who says that it is better not to do performance reviews at all if, and only if, they are done badly. It basically means most of the time we shouldn’t run performance appraisals but I boldly state I can to do better.

    So this is the time I should answer simple question: “How the hell do you do this damned thing?”

    Don’t make it all about money

    To some point I agree with Esther. If performance appraisal is reduced to a discussion about merit bonus or raise it is fruitless at best. Money-related negotiations always suck and this isn’t an exception. If you follow some formalized process you likely have to talk about money too, but then make it as short as possible. It is no fun for both of you so make it quick and move on to more pleasant parts of the ceremony.

    It is your goddamn duty to listen

    I am a chatty guy so this one I should tattoo this on my forehead to remind it to myself every morning when I look into the mirror. Performance review is one of the best occasions to listen what your team mate has to say. Let me guess, you, as a manager, don’t have a lot of one-on-ones with folks from your team. And even if you have, there are people down there who are always omitted. By accident of course. When you run performance reviews you suddenly have to meet every single one of them, so don’t miss this chance. Learn what they want to tell you. Let them talk. Listen. Not everyone will be open but at least give them opportunity to talk.

    Make it more a chit chat than a formal meeting

    One thing I learned during my early years as a manager is that when people are stressed they won’t tell you much. Yeah, that’s an epiphany, isn’t it? The most valuable things I learned about people, about teams and about me as a leader I heard during informal chit chat which I often turn my performance appraisals into. When we have the hard part (money-related) done we can talk more openly. Actually we may discuss your last holidays for an hour if you like. If nothing else I will know that you love hiking next time we meet in the kitchen. But we may also discuss situations when I screwed up as a boss or new technologies you’d like to learn.

    Let them set the rules

    You have different people in the team. There are those who don’t really care. Performance review is something you both have to get through but they don’t give a damn. The money doesn’t matter. Your opinion doesn’t matter. A discussion doesn’t matter either. What then? Don’t waste time of both of you. Say what you have to say and get back to work. But there are also people who want to talk. Let them talk. Listen. Learn. There are people who need a discussion about different things. Be a partner in this discussion. There are people who look for information. Share it. Besides the small part you have to go through, it’s not you who should write the agenda.

    Be open, be transparent

    If you are about to say a bit more than on weekly team meeting would there be a better chance than during one-on-one? If you are about to show your human face would there a better time? If you are about to discuss your motives standing behind tough decisions would you wait for another occasion? Yes, we managers are scared to shit when we share our secrets (or things we think are our secrets). But believe me; we should do it more often. As one of the best game strategies of all time says, if you play fair you will get the same in return. Be honest, be open and you will get exactly the same from your team. Isn’t that a fair deal?

    With these few simple rules I believe I’m able to run performance reviews which people don’t hate. Actually the last performance appraisal I’ve run I’ve started saying “As you already know no bonus money this time, so we can skip the formal part. Now, let’s talk.”

    I think it was pretty good appraisal. And yes, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot despite I know the guy pretty long time already.

  • Why I Prefer to Hire Women

    I have a news for you: IT industry is dominated by men.

    – Pawel, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know?

    There should be more women in the industry.

    Which part of “something we don’t know” you haven’t understood?

    Fine, you get the message. I just wonder why you don’t hire more women.

    I confess in my current team there is round number of women. Zero. I worked with a few teams like this. And every time one of my goals was to bring a few women to the team. Why? There are a few reasons. I will generalize here and I’m going to do it on purpose. After an hour or so of interview you can’t really say what kind of personality you deal with, so you have to go with your biases and prejudices anyway.

    • Women bring different soft skills to team talent pool. They’re usually more open and emotional than men. Do a simple test and recall your last retrospective or check the record from it. Can you see how different arguments were pointed by women than by men?
    • Women bring more culture. Pure-men groups tend to change into something like herd of hogs. Bringing a woman on board magically improves everyone’s manners and language. I mean hogs are nice but I wouldn’t like to work with them.
    • Women are more responsible. This may be one of my prejudices but I find women more responsible than men. I can hardly recall any woman who came to work having heavy hangover while I have no problems to name a long list on men who did.
    • Women are more accountable. It is connected with the previous point. Women tend to treat their duties very seriously. Even when it is something they didn’t personally commit to but rather something their boss expects from them their commitment is usually stronger. And I think here about these unrealistic expectations many poor managers set against their teams too.
    • After all, there aren’t many women in the industry so don’t make it even worse.

    Having said that, I’m not going to hire woman over man just because of sex. If there’s a significant difference between two candidates I will always choose a better one, however I understand “better” at the time. But at the same time every woman entering an interview with me has a small plus for free at the beginning. I guess I could put it as one of recruitment tips but changing your sex isn’t a great tip, is it?

    On the other hand I’ve seen enough prejudices working against women to throw my two cents. And I have a question for you: having two similar candidates which one would you choose?

  • Don’t Promote Best Engineers to Management Positions

    I remember one of first post ideas for this blog back then, 4 years ago. It was about choosing people to promote them to management roles. I’ve never published the post and I’m glad about that. A few years ago I didn’t know about hiring and promoting managers more than typical decision maker in IT companies now.

    I knew nothing.

    During these few years I’ve met a number of managers who should never be promoted to any position which touches leading people whatsoever. I mean they were great engineers once. But engineering, and software development isn’t an exception, and management are two different things. They don’t even rhyme with each other. So why the hell do we keep promoting our best engineers to management positions?

    Vast majority of best developers I’ve met were crappy candidates for managers. They were thinking in terms of code, not in terms of people. And a manager isn’t the go-to-guy when you have a technical problem. (The guy is called Google by the way.) A manager should work with people, not with code, architecture or build server. Yes, the transition is possible. Hey, if someone is willing to pay me real money for managing people it is some kind of proof. But the switch is painful and time consuming. And unfortunately most of the time it just doesn’t happen.

    We end up with a lot of people around who are still good-to-great engineers but crappy managers. And we let them lead. Then, when we need to promote someone even higher we have basically no good choice. And we end up with a bunch of managers-by-accident all over the organization. As a side effect you lose your best brains when it comes to engineering.

    Skills required to be technical leader and people manager are so different it is highly unlikely that your best engineer is also your best candidate for a manager. You can safely assume your engineers aren’t different. Why should they?

    If you want to offer your best engineer management position, rethink it. Twice. Is it possible you do it because it is exactly how things were done around for years? Is it possible you’re going to lose great developer and gain crappy manager instead? Is it possible to find a better candidate within the team or outside?

    If the answer is triple yes, and surprisingly often it is so, you’re doing wrong thing. I would even say that sometimes it’s better to let your great engineer go than to make him a manager. Of course if he is a crappy candidate for management position.

  • You Can Manage Your Boss

    I often hear this excuse: “I don’t have power to change this.” Hell, I use it by myself way too often. It is a convenient excuse. Since you aren’t in position to do something the easy way you take a step back and do nothing.

    And this is wrong.

    Let’s take a typical situation: your boss sucks. If I got 10 bucks every time I heard that someone’s boss sucks I would be crazy rich. But let’s face it, I have poor opinion about managers in general and I think most managers suck anyway so I’m going to agree willingly.

    So what do you do when your manager sucks? Wait, let me guess… You do nothing. Hey, you don’t have the power, do you? You just can’t change the situation so it’s better just to accept it, right?

    Wrong.

    People are simple beasts. We all have our goals, private agendas, drivers and motivators. We also have tools which helps us to achieve these goals. Some of us have power. (And yes, I’m lucky enough I have power long enough to get used to it.) Some of us have skills. And some of us have instinct or cleverness.

    It’s not always the guy with power who wins. Actually if that was so, most of companies would work perfectly well, since every reasonable rule would be enforced and widely accepted. But somehow we see organizations which are completely sick and filled with frustration even though their leaders have mouths full of wise advices.

    It’s just they’re losing the battle with those who don’t have power but are more knowledgeable and smart.

    The trick is, to some point, you can manage everyone around. It doesn’t matter if he is your subordinate, your colleague or your boss. You can. Yes, you can. Yes, you… If I know what is important for you, what drives you and how you act in different situations I can trick you or I can build incentives for you to act like I want. Even if I’m your subordinate.

    A couple of examples. Megan had a boss who was pretty much frustrated with surrounding situation. Things were going bad. But he, as a manager, was supposed to play devils’ advocate. Megan, who knew the boss for quite a long time, felt that frustration hidden behind the mask of official optimism and decided to break it talking with the boss privately. She could do nothing, since she had no power to change boss’ attitude and then a new cool business wouldn’t emerge when they both left the company to start it.

    John had a manager who loved bells and whistles. He knew most of project decisions were made basing on what the manager personally likes, not on reasonable business analysis. When recession came and every team looked for projects John brought a bunch of cool, but basically useless, ideas to the manager. John expected the manager would personally like a couple of them and he was right. The team got the budget for these projects. Business-wise projects were useless but John played his agenda and got what he wanted.

    We all base on a lot of assumptions. Especially managers. We just can’t know every fact so we do what our gut feelings say. And finally we are biased. This means we make our decisions basing on a set of arguments which is far from being complete or even reasonable. That’s why it is not the power which is the most important since almost every power bearer can be blinded easily.

    So don’t give me excuses you just can’t change anything since you have no power. At least try. Then try again. Unless you fail a couple of times I don’t believe you can’t do it.

  • We Know Nothing about Our Teams

    I am a chatty guy. Catch me while I’m not overworked and I will gladly jump into discussion. If you happen to be my colleague, it may be a discussion about our company. That’s perfectly fine for me.

    I believe in transparency so I won’t keep all information as they were top secret. This means I’m likely to tell you more than your manager. Not because I don’t know how to keep a secret but because vast majority of managers talk with their teams way too little.

    With this approach I usually know a lot of gossips told in companies I work for. Since I also happen to fulfill rather senior roles I have another perspective too. I know what is discussed on top management meetings.

    This is sort of schizophrenic experience for me because almost always I have two different pictures of the same thing. I see senior managers praising people who are disrespected by their teams. I see folks who get credited for the work they didn’t do. I see line workers being completely frustrated while their managers are saying these guys are highly motivated. I see managers completely surprised when people suddenly leave while almost everyone saw that coming for past half a year.

    I see it and I don’t get it. All these managers do very little, if anything, to learn a bit about their people but they claim they know everything. I may be wrong but I believe I do much more to learn about my team, yet I still consider I know nothing.

    If one of you guys is reading that, yes, I’m stressed that you might leave. I’m stressed when you get out of the room to pick the phone since definitely it is a headhunter who’s calling. I can’t sleep when you take a single day off since, and I know it for sure, you have an interview. OK, I might have exaggerated a bit. Anyway in terms of my knowledge about my team I know that I know nothing.

    And you know what? If you are a manager you are no better. Because generally speaking we know nothing about our teams. Even if we are friends with our subordinates our professional relationship is much of unknown. With strangers we usually work with it is much, much harder.

    Stop expecting you know oh so much about your people and at least try to talk with them. If you’re lucky you may find a couple of folks who actually are willing to talk with you. Remember though, if you ignore them once or twice they aren’t coming back to you.

    It looks like I have a pretty poor opinion about quality of people management in general. Well, I must admit I do. I would be a hypocrite if I deny it regarding my recent posts on subject:

  • What Motivates People

    Today I attended a training session where we were learning about motivation. I’ve heard pretty poor opinions about the session before, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t check by myself. And if you need to know these opinions were crap – training was pretty good.

    Anyway, we had a very small and very open group which was cool. I think I should thank here those who didn’t show up, since the session was planned for a bigger audience. The best thing about the group was each of us works in different team and we are on different levels in organizational structure. This means our perception of the organization itself and tools we have to motivate ourselves and our people differ vastly.

    This is kind of cool because otherwise we would barely have a chance to confront our points of view. And it appeared every single one of us pointed different things as our main motivators. This is basically the lesson I want to share with you. If you want to know what motivates people working for you, move your fat ass from your damn throne and learn what drives every individual in your team, instead of asking for universal recipes.

    Yes, you will hear all sorts of answers from “more money” up to “my cellar is cool actually; just don’t interrupt me when I’m in THE flow.” On a side note, money isn’t a tool you can use to motivate people.

    Motivation is a very individual thing. I remember sharing a really fat bonus with one of my former PMs after she completed one those hard core projects. Since we were getting on well I asked if that motivated her for further effort. The answer was “no, not at all.” I can’t say I was surprised much, since I’d moved my fat ass from my throne to learn what had driven my team. If you asked me why the fat bonus then, well, she’d still earned that money.

    Don’t expect simple answer for a question about motivating people. The subject is just too complex. And if you still believe there is a simple and universal solution for the problem you may want to reconsider predisposition to be a manager.

    In case you were curious my biggest motivators are learning opportunities and having things under control.

    You may also like other posts on motivation:

    http://blog.brodzinski.com/2007/10/money-as-motivator.html

  • People Are Lazy

    The other day I was asked to write an article for our company’s intranet portal. The first thing which came to my mind was “no one would read it.” Well, probably few people would but not many more.

    You might say I have a sad view of humanity, and you’d probably be right, but I kind of lost enthusiasm to systemic attempts to spread knowledge within organizations. And I mean here all things like intranet news sites, internal corporate blogs, knowledge bases, company magazines etc.

    In theory, as long as you have at least a few dozens of people on board, these things are great. They have no weak points. There are a couple of leaders who organize site/blog/magazine/you name it, then there is a group of producers who work on content and then there is a vast majority who consumes all the stuff.

    That’s the theory. In practice first two groups (leaders and producers) are rarely a problem. The problem is people don’t give a shit about your news site, blog, knowledge base and magazine. They couldn’t care less whether they might learn something from there. People just don’t want to learn.

    Scott Berkun recently shared his thought why the world is a mess in general (read not only the post, but comments too). His conclusions are that people don’t listen and don’t read either. This actually supports the theory I offer above – even if you take the effort to create a gem or two and drop it into your intranet portal no one would read, no one would notice.

    Actually not willing to learn, listen and read are just symptoms. And yes, there’s a single disease behind them all. People are lazy. They don’t learn because it’s easier to leave things as they are. They don’t read because skimming takes less effort. They don’t listen because trying to genuinely understand what other are saying is hard, much harder than just waiting for your turn to speak.

    Note, I don’t say I’m not lazy. If I have problems with motivating myself while working at home that’s exactly because I am. If I tend to procrastinate most of housekeeping tasks, like fixing the lamp or securing a shelf to a wall, the reason is the same. Scott may be no different by the way.

    Now, before you tell me that I’m over-generalizing, I know that. The same as you know that most people fit the picture above. When I look at statistics for recent articles on the intranet site I see that less than 10% of people in the organization read them. So when asked whether I would write an article on Kanban to be published there I wanted to answer with something like “I write about goddamn Kanban at least one every two weeks on my goddamn blog which you may find typing my goddamn name into goddamn Google. I did two goddamn presentations recently and sent goddamn links to two thirds of folks within the goddamn company. Shouldn’t that be enough for pretty much anyone here to find a goddamn article on goddamn Kanban?”

    But now when you ask, I will write the (goddamn) article. It is worth helping people even if just 10% of them care. And it might make me look less lazy too. You know, I just aspire to be in to 10% of population.