Software runs my life

Category: HR Page 1 of 2

Helping up the building blocks of culture

Taking culture personally leads to a fight against the world

Many years ago I had a direct report who had been very successful in a similar role at a previous company. They were rightly very confident in their technical ability. They knew what they were doing. 

But when they moved companies, they unexpectedly recognised that they were not hitting clear and mutually agreed targets. Something was wrong. The issue couldn’t possibly be anything professional, because their skillset had been proven in a previous role. The issue couldn’t be personal, because as a person they hadn’t changed. So what’s left? It must be a cultural fit issue.

This is where it gets tricky. Culture in an organisation permeates everywhere, but ultimately it comes from the top. It’s very confronting and complex to determine how the role you know and love is perhaps wildly different in this new culture. You need to question your own strengths and weaknesses and decide whether you can or even want to adapt.

Instead it’s far easier to pin the cultural conflict on one or all leaders within the company and put it down to a personality conflict. “I’m doing the role right, it’s the company that needs to change”. This may in fact be true and even in the best interests of the company, but you’ve effectively decided it’s you vs the company. That never ends well.

My advice then is to join a new employer based on it’s culture above anything else. Even most new CEOs fail to change the culture, so find somewhere that fits your values.

Real men pay salaries

“Real men don’t earn salaries, they pay salaries”. This quote from “A Sparrow Falls”, the Wilbur Smith book that I am currently reading, really struck me like a slap in the face. Why was it so painful? How do I get to the stage where I am paying the salaries?

Lately I have been trying to build my management and leadership skills. Amongst other things, this involved taking a Leadership training course at Google. It emphasised a number of pretty deep concepts, things like being an authentic person and this importance of bringing this authenticity to work with you (which is a fairly intimidating concept). There were of course articles from the Harvard Business Review to cover, including the four steps in the art of persuasion. These being:

  1. Establish Credibility – demonstrate you know your stuff
  2. Frame for Common Ground – find the stuff you both agree on
  3. Provide Evidence – demonstrate something new that builds on your common ground
  4. Connect Emotionally – expand the current ground with them at your side

Next steps? Find mentors. I loved watching an interview of Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and now Squareup. He isn’t an amazing presenter, however I feel that I present in a similar way and have a similar view on the world. Reading his Vanity Fair interview and numerous Venture Beat articles, it paints an inspirational picture of a guy who throws every part of him into his goals and passions. Is this authentic leadership? He built everything himself form scratch, based on his passion and getting his hands dirty. The noble story of the engineer, putting the product first and that product now paying the salaries.

Or what about someone like Greg Ellis, the current CEO of REA? I watched his CEO Hub interview today on Business Spectator. He built his career like a pyramid. Rather than rising to the top with a single skillbase and being forced to add to it while riding product growth, he worked the other way around. Build marketing, sales, HR, legal and other skills at the best companies you can find, and then find or make one of your own. Is this any more or less a noble to be paying the salaries?

Or maybe it’s like Alan Noble explained this week. It’s not about mentors, it’s about surrounding yourself with great people and taking the opportunities when you see them. Meanwhile, where is that copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People

The Goal – Book Review

The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt was brought to my attention when my director came out to discuss our operations team and ask where the bottlenecks in our organisation lay. When he referred to Herbie, I had to know what he meant.

The first thing to note about this book is that it is a story, not your normal dry textbook style business book. I guess teaching through narratives worked for the Bible, so why not a business book? It is a tricky balance though, and I feel at some points the author gets a little distracted by the back story. To make up for this he then compresses a number of key points into one paragraph of wise dialogue. It all flows reasonably well overall, it just means you can’t start skimming what appears to be light reading or you might miss key insights.

So what are the morals? The story starts with plenty of despair and common frustrations, but I love that it also starts with a reasonable company making reasonable decisions – yet everyone is burned out and under resourced. In my experience this is an incredibly common situation and probably where the “work smarter, not harder” phrase comes from. Even though the book sets its story in a manufacturing plant I found it really easy to adapt to my experience, especially working with an Agile software development team.

The solutions expressed in the book are all about a back to basics approach to finding and optimising within your constraints. Every process has a bottleneck, the trick is identifying what it is and then applying techniques to make the best of what you have. For example, if your developers are constantly overworked then test the requirements documents before they start work and offload some of their tasks to other roles who are not bottlenecks. Sounds simple right? To justify these changes to your accountant you can note that if your developer works 50 hours a week and your total operating expenses for a week are $50,000 then the cost of them wasting an hour is $50,000 divided by 50 – $1,000. This is because it adds downtime and inventory jams across the rest of your process and is the limiting factor of overall output. Puts things in perspective right?

The book doesn’t stop there however – it talks about synchronising bottlenecks and non-bottlenecks, the importance of minimising inventory, how to focus on market demand across your organisation, why data is misleading and no substitute for getting out on the floor, problems with modern efficiency accounting practices and even how organising a regular “date night” with your partner is a good idea! Overall I really loved this book, it was very easy to read and relate to. Although it doesn’t mention this, I think it is a great read for fast growing companies that face resource constraints every day and can get easily distracted by their purpose as a company.

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