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> Leadership is the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation to accomplish the mission and improve the organization.
taken from -
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> the pill to swallow is that most employees including managers are grist to the mill Businesses exist to make money. If you want a commune instead, join one!
For many workers, working towards the goal of making the company profitable would be an improvement. Many workers primarily work towards helping the boss grow their head count, or helping the middle-manager with their emotional state.
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Only to the extent that a happy team delivers something of value. Teams can be happy doing things that will drive the company bankrupt. there is only so much unhappiness they can stand
If value can only be delivered by making a group of people miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.
I worry a lot about fads in engineering management. Any time you proscribe process over outcomes you create performative behavior and bad incentives in any discipline. In my observation, this tends to happen in engineering because senior leaders have no idea how to evaluate EMs in a non-performative way or as a knee-jerk to some broader cultural behavior. I think this is why you see many successful, seasoned EMs beco…
I do. It’s often done by people that become tyrants over their little fiefdom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only to the extent that a happy team delivers something of value. Teams can be happy doing things that will drive the company bankrupt. there is only so much unhappiness they can stand
If value can only be delivered by making a group of people miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.
So no, I don't really buy the idea that a team which is "forced" to work on boring, but profitable tasks for a business instead of getting to rewrite core infrastructure in Rust as a fun and interesting intellectual exercise is equivalent to slavery.
Is this everyone's experience nowadays? Personally I haven't experienced such a big shift at all.
Our C-suite is irrationally pushing AI-everything and eng culture is suffering a bit from not fully figuring out how to integrate new tooling safely, but nothing as fundamental as the mentioned changes are taking place so far.
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If value can only be delivered by making a group of people miserable then maybe the definition of "value" is fundamentally wrong, like it was/is in the case of slavery.
Even outside the context of capitalism, society only functions when people perform unpleasant tasks which provide value. Nobody has fun collecting garbage, but it has to be done. Nobody finds happiness in digging graves, but it has to be done. Nobody is overjoyed at the prospect of telling a person they have a terminal illness, but it has to be done. So no, I don't really buy the idea that a team which is "forced" to…
but we find ways to make the jobs of people who perform these tasks less horrific. We makes trucks that reduce the physical toll and increase the cleanliness of garbage pickup, we combine the digging of graves with the maintenance and beautification once they have been buried, sometimes you have to tell someone they have a terminal illness, but the majority of the time you are helping someone get their condition into remission.
I think the critical balance that management has to achieve between "having a happy team" and "having a productive team" is finding ways to keep morale up so that employees don't lose their minds and quit or reduce performance doing the miserable stuff.