Except the point around forgetting some of the long term improvement projects the rest are true anytime.
How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
171–180 of 214 posts
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#172I think the main issue is consolidation in many industries. Companies get big and keep getting richer and bigger. They gobble up smaller companies to grow and often competitors too. They milk the industries dry and stiffle innovation. You get these poor run and bloated organizations as a result.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#173This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…
This is painfully accurate. I'm not sure how companies fall prey to these problems, but they seem to be incredibly hierarchical. What I means specifically is that the lower level employees and mid-level managers seem almost rabid to praise, cater to, and and be swept up by the useless whims of nearly anyone in the executive suite. It's sickening, and not because of the impacts on work. Why do so many grown adults act…
Why do so many grown adults act so pathetically servile to someone who is in a higher rung in a company?
- Because the alpha apes on the top of the pyramid got all the bananas and they will share it only with the ones they like. And it goes all the way down. Too bad tha apes have not come up with a better system because the apes have prioritized bananas over everything else. Peace.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#174This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…
Also, war-time leaders usually make terrible peace time leaders and vice versa.
If your company finds itself in battle mode and the senior leadership doesn't move aside for a hired gun, be very worried and polish up that resume.
Once peace time arrives, same thing in reverse.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#175This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…
Agency cosplay sounds like the right phrase. Everyone wants to believe they have the power and resources to achieve their potential. Even in dying & desperate departments warring with themselves. If a professional doesn't believe their actions get good outcomes, they quit or quiet-quit.
For the manager trapped between their hopes and reality, this blogpost is basically therapy. It comforts with a classic remedy: level up your game and you can win the game. Replace negativity with a "bias heavily toward action". Tell yourself and your reports: "perfection is the enemy of done", have "ruthless prioritization", be "laser-focused on shipping what matters most“. Believe in this all until you get a new position (with real agency), then you can discard this illusion along with your reports.
An older phrase for this phenomena, absent the management aspect, could be "hustle porn." If you ignore ethics, and work crazy hard and crazy smart, you'll win https://www.inc.com/serhat-pala/alexis-ohanian-says-hustle-p... . Though in my experience, you'll just end up crazy.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#176It all feels like theatre. Been working in many companies in “war mode” and they all think that in order to become profitable (none of them were) you need to push the most “important” features out of the door asap, otherwise your competitors will eat you alive. It’s a lie. Executives and VPs and all those folks that earn 5x what a normal engineer earns, don’t really care about the company they work for. All they care…
I really don't understand the hate for Agile, so let's make it concrete: which things to you not like about the Agile manifesto? 1. Value individuals and interactions over processes and tools 2. Value working software over comprehensive documentation 3. Value customer collaboration over contract negotiation 4. Value responding to change over following a plan And then there are the 12 principles: 1. Customer satisfact…
#6
Face to face communication as opposed to asynchronous communication brings less objectivity to the topic at hand.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#177This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…
The other issue with this piece is that the vast majority of problems companies have in a more cash constrained environment are ultimately accounting problems.
No amount of "existential threat" pressure on teams to perform will replace leadership going through the balance sheet and figuring out where profits/growth/etc is getting it's highest return on investment and where it's not. Then planning for how to change that.
I was at a newly IPO'd company a few years back and it was almost laughable the gap between leadership's fantasies about profitability and the raw data in the earnings statement. Not a single decision planned or statement made addressed the mathematical reality of the balance sheet.
A simple "We need to get X% more out of this, and reduce the cost of that by Y% and we'll be good, here's our plan..." would have been endlessly more productive then feel good speeches and pressure on teams to improve performance in unspecified areas.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you work that you get to avoid agile, scrum, and war mode? I'm jealous. Then again I've always just been stuck working for startups my entire career. I have a family and desperately need something more stable.
Are BigCos any more stable in the US? At least in a startup they probably actually need you because you already know their system. Overseas BigCo means permanent contracts and being very hard to let go, but that doesn’t seem to be the case in the US (e.g. Elon Musk Twitter).
BigCo is less likely to give a sense of desperation in day-to-day work, but a layoff or forced stack-ranking can still fall out of the clear blue sky due to executive machinations.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
Literally anywhere that isn't a startup.
nah, I work at a Fortune 100 company right now that is in "War Mode"
yea things are crazy now. We're in war mode but nobody knows why. We've been reliably profitable for a decade. And yet we're doing super high risk cost reduction projects that have significant risk of burning down the entire business and have already destroyed what used to be a very skilled and mature engineering team. I get the impression that's a fairly typical story now.
Re: How to Lead Your Team When the House Is on Fire
#180This entire blog post assumes agency that you, the EM or Team lead, rarely have in an organisation that is on a "wartime" footing. It's cosplay. Real wartime footing: 1. Direction and technical decisions are driven by priorities of board-level members and often arrive in email form late on Friday evening. The entire organisation is expected to pivot immediately. A new senior leadership team member starts scheduling d…
I told you to stop talking to my wife! She has 35 years engineering, now a quality manager, and the new boss has been hair on fire all weekend, cosplaying that a top down intense low bid culture can adapt, and uh, oracle is in the mix. This is not what we signed up for.
How does low-bid mash with Oracle?