Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: team management

  • 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.

  • Should You Encourage People to Learn?

    A very interesting discussion followed one of my recent posts about people not willing to learn. There were a few different threads there but the one brought by David Moran is definitely worth its own post.

    David pointed it is manager’s responsibility to create learning opportunities and incentives for people to exploit them.

    At the first thought I wanted to agree with that. But after a while I started going through different teams and people I worked with. I recalled multiple situations when opportunities were just waiting but somehow barely anyone was willing to exploit them. The rest preferred to do nothing.

    I believe most of the time it is not the lack of opportunities which is a problem but lack of will. Now the question is: whether a manager or a leader should create incentives for people around? If so what kind of incentives should it be?

    First of all, I don’t believe in all kinds of extrinsic incentives which are aimed to encourage people to learn. If you set a certification or exam passed as a prerequisite for someone to be promoted people would get certification just to get promotion. They won’t treat it as a chance to learn but as one of tasks on ‘getting promoted’ checklist. You get what you measure. If you measure a number of certificates you will get a lot of these.

    The results are even worse when you create a negative incentive, i.e. you don’t get bonus money (you’d earned) unless you submit your monthly article to knowledge base (seen that). What you get there in majority of cases is just a load of crap which looks a bit like knowledge base article. After all no one will read it anyway so why bother?

    What options do you have then? Well, you can simply talk with people encouraging them to learn. “You may find this conference interesting.” “Taking language course would be a great for you.” “I’d appreciate that certification.” Unfortunately it usually works with people who are self-learners in the first place and don’t really need an incentive – the opportunity is enough (and they probably find opportunities by themselves anyway). The rest will most likely agree with you but will still do nothing.

    You may of course promote self-learners over the rest and most of us probably do it since people who feel an urge to learn are generally considered as great professionals. Unfortunately this mechanism isn’t completely obvious and is pretty hard to measure (how would you measure self-learning attitude?) so its educational value is close to zero.

    Coming back to the point, I don’t think that it is manager’s responsibility to build incentives for people to learn. I think the role of a leader ends somewhere between supporting everyone’s efforts to learn and creating opportunities. Besides if learning is enforced it won’t build any significant value.

    And yes, it is manager’s role to have a knowledgeable and ever-learning team but forcing people to learn is neither the only nor the best available approach.

  • Managers Are Clueless

    So you’re a manager. You even think you’re pretty damn good manager. Fine for me. Do you remember Pointy-Haired Boss? Yes, that clueless manager from Dilbert cartoon. You have this guy sitting in your head. So do I, by the way.

    Is that supposed to be insult? Well, not exactly. I really think every manager has this clueless version of himself in the back of his head which is used more often than we’d like to admit. You still don’t believe me. Do a simple exercise. Think about your team. Arrange members from the best to the worst. Easy?

    It wasn’t supposed to be easy. The trick is how you decided that one ‘average’ person is after all better than another ‘average’ person. Some guessing I guess. Why exactly you have chosen the best one? And what a couple of worst people have done to earn their place? Is it possible that you justify their position with some past event (success or failure) which was spectacular enough they earn the place in your mind? Is it possible you didn’t take into consideration recent history because you already are strongly biased?

    And now the best part, think how many things you haven’t taken into consideration. You haven’t thought about tons of important things and you were still able to say who is better and who is worse from others. And no, I don’t believe none of them are important. Isn’t that clueless?

    A Confession

    I worked with bunches of underpaid and overpaid folks. I saw work which was underrated or overrated just because of person who authored it or the person who judged or both. Many of decisions standing behind these situations were mine. I’m not proud of it.

    What I can say is I didn’t do it on purpose. I just lacked knowledge. Sometimes I wasn’t even conscious my knowledge was insufficient to make a right call. Sometimes I should try harder or think more. I was, and I am, a clueless manager. I try to fight it but that’s an uphill battle. I have my prejudices and preferences and I don’t claim I’m able to fully ignore them.

    The Bad News

    I’m not the only one. I’m tempted to say that every manager is so because the only ones who would be different must be heartless robots which aren’t great candidates for managers anyway.

    This means you as a manager, and your manager too and her manager and so on, are clueless to some point. Usually more than you’d like to admit. This mean there’s a chance your judgments aren’t fair or your work may be misjudged. And finally this means your subordinates can trick you along with your cluelessness to make you think better about them.

    Managers were, are and will be clueless. We may fight with it but we’re likely to fail. Most of us don’t even try anyway.

  • No Meeting Culture

    Meetings are boring. Most meetings are irrelevant. There are too many meetings we have to attend.

    A confession: during past half of year I organized exactly two meetings with engineers in my team. Both were mostly about organizational issues regarding whole company, not just my team.

    How did I do that?

    Let’s start with why meetings are organized. Most of the time meetings happen to enable communication between people. Why don’t people just go to meet each other at their desks? Well, because they sit in different places, have different things to do and, often, have little free slots in their calendars. Sometimes they need to prepare themselves to say something reasonable and invitation to the meeting gives them time for that.

    Basically all these reasons become non-existent when whole team sits in one place.

    You don’t have to busily gather people from different places because, surprise, surprise, everyone is there.

    You don’t have to wander what people do at the moment since, well, you just see it in a glimpse. You can make your call whether it’s a good time to interrupt them at the moment or you should wait for a quarter.

    You don’t feel urge to finish in planned time slot even when the discussion is great and you’re solving problems like crazy. Neither do you feel this funny feeling when everything was said but no one hurries back to work and you just spend your time on chit chat because a meeting room is reserved for another half an hour.

    You can even allow starting talking with folks on subjects they aren’t prepared to. You can because whenever they need to prepare they’ll tell it and a discussion will be restarted later. This is like instantly starting a meeting instead of sending invitations. Odds are everyone is ready and you don’t waste time. If they are not it works similarly to invitation with agenda but better since you start meeting as soon as everyone’s ready.

    You should still think how improve transparency and communication flow but, believe me, once you start talking about almost everything in front of your team, even though you’re talking with a person next desk, people will know way more than they would otherwise. It would work that way even if you reported all your workweek on 4-hour long weekly summary with your team, which would be a candidate for the top dumb management practice of a year by the way.

    And the best thing. With this approach you magically clear everyone’s calendar. Finding slot when everyone is free becomes the easiest thing under the sun because everyone basically stopped attending meetings.

    A cherry on the cake: finding free conference room doesn’t bother you anymore.

    Downsides?

    It won’t work for 50 people. As far as teams aren’t bigger than 10 people it should do well. Vast majority of teams fall in to this category. Sometimes you need to focus and you don’t care about architecture discussion happening over your desk. You can take a break or try to isolate yourself with headphones. Either way it is a cost, but on average it’s significantly lower than it would be if you switched for old-school meeting approach.

    This applies only to team-related meetings. If your people have a lot of cross-team meetings and spend long hours on company-wide roundups filled with jabber this doesn’t have to be huge improvement. But then you’re doomed anyway. One of my engineers attended a few meetings on coding standards beyond these two I organized.

    The approach works best for engineers. Project managers and business people will meet other people more often that once per quarter but it should be still an order of magnitude meetings less than it used to be.

    I wouldn’t get this kind of crazy idea but it happened so my whole team is collocated and it’s the best organizational thing which could happen. If you think it’s drastic, you’re wrong. Meetingless environment comes naturally. Maybe it so because this way you possibly are all time at the meeting, but at the same time you “meet” people only when it’s really needed.

    Try it. And tell me what happens.

  • Co-location Rules!

    A lot of interesting discussions today. During one of them we went through co-location and its influence of team productivity.

    I’m lucky enough to work with all my team in one room. I’m aware of all disadvantages of grouping people doing different things in one place but I’m still saying I’m lucky.

    • I know development requires focus. I know that grouping a bunch of people in one place generates some chit-chat which distracts people trying to focus on their tasks. I know occasional phone calls do the same. I accept the fact. Hey, have I just said I accept lower productivity of our developers? Bad, bad manager.

    • I know most people would consider a private office as a huge improvement from open-space. I wouldn’t offer that to my people even if I had a chance to make them this kind of offer. Ops, I’ve just admitted I wouldn’t make my people happier even if I could. How come?

    It just about trade-offs. While putting people together invites costly context switching because of distractions it also brings huge values in terms of team work.

    • Instant problem solving. It’s enough one person to ask another one about some issue to see insightful discussion emerging virtually instantly. You don’t need to think whether PM should join since he’s here and he joins as soon as subject appears interesting for him. Solving problems as you go is much more efficient.

    • Communication improvement. Communication issues are probably number one issue when it comes to visiting dead-ends, doing the same job twice or banging the wall hard with your head. When I think how much effort is wasted just because a couple of people didn’t talk with each other I believe every method which improves communication is worth considering and most of them are worth implementing. Co-locating people is one the most efficient choices here.

    • Reducing number of meetings. Many meetings aren’t even needed. However they’re scheduled because they’re considered as the easiest way of communication between more than two people from different rooms. Remove walls and you’ll automatically remove many meetings. People will have more time to do the real work.

    • Atmosphere building. Try to cheer up person who sit next to you. Tell a joke or something. Succeeded? Great. Now do the same with the person sitting on other floor. It takes walking and other tiring physical activities. It’s harder. You won’t do it so often.

    • Getting to know people. You’ll know better a person after sitting with her in one room for a month than after working in different locations for a year.

    And yes, I believe these compensate reduced productivity and happiness. Actually not only compensate but add more too. Net value is positive. That’s why co-location rules.