Joakim’s Reflections CW2327 - Does your organization need a purpose?
Overheard by the coffee machine:
“Our purpose as a team is to do the tickets.”
“Yes, with high quality and as fast as possible. They need to be done on time.”
“To make the applications feature-complete.”
“And we have great teamwork because we have distributed the responsibility of all our applications to different individuals with no overlap.”
In pursuit of purpose
Before we make any judgements and claim this indicates a group of people who don’t know what they are talking about we need to consider the environment as well as the context. In the eyes of the organization, they must be considered a strong team, otherwise they would not have evolved to this point. Individual behaviour will align itself and optimize according to the incentive structures that exist in said organization. Given enough time, and freedom to evolve, you will end up with an optimum organization designed (consciously or not) to do exactly what it is doing.
There is no inherent value in judging whether this is good or bad, we simply want to point out that the organization is designed to get the outcomes that we can currently see. If we want other outcomes, we must map and understand the underlying incentive structures to enable conscious evolution.
One recurring scenario I experience is an organization that says it wants high-performing and strong teams that take responsibility for, not only their own work, but for the general performance of the business. Despite saying this, the people who are being rewarded and recognized are the firefighters who emerge during a crisis, in contrast to the existing high performers during “normal” times. A recent example I experienced was also during a time when employee performance appraisals were being done and salary adjustments negotiated. There was no money for salary adjustments but suddenly there was plenty to go around for the firefighters to receive an extraordinary bonus. There is no cause for concern if this is a one-off occurrence, but when this systematically is the action of choice, the claim to want high-performing teams cause cognitive dissonance, i.e., you say you want one thing, but your actions take you in the opposite direction. This further incentivizes poor product quality to increase the likelihood for chances to be a saviour. Not that individuals will knowingly sabotage the products and services, but all aspects of the organization will slowly but steadily find a more optimized way to do the things that get rewarded and recognized. When dealing with complexity, a much more effective strategy is to reward the absence of crises to incentivize productivity and value creation.
Goal-setting – where the search must begin.
I just heard a metaphor of doing everything in ones power to get on the train and saying – “we can always change the direction once we are on the train”. You cannot. That is not how the infrastructure of any railway system is built. If we realize the train is going to a destination to which we do not want to travel, we will have to get off the train. A much more effective way of travel is to know where we want to go before we get on the train. A train might not even be the best means of transportation. Start with the goal in mind. This will enable the people that must travel to make the necessary changes as the path reveals itself to them.
What can it look like?
An organization I worked with many years ago had the to win in their industry, reaching 1 billion active users and allowing content creators to live off the revenue from that content, eliminating the need for middle hands. At this point in time the active user count was close to 100 million, thus the company was working under the assumption that all aspects of the organization needed to grow 10 times (employee count, revenue, data, …). The department I was working with had the independent mission to “Enable the company to scale 10X while operating effortlessly”. The basis for the 10X is explained above and the operation aspect was referring to internal HR- as well as financial systems, more specifically the closing of the financial books on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis. The nature of the business and how the company had grown and evolved made accounting somewhat complex and time-consuming. One of the teams owned a couple of applications in the accounting chain and one morning one of the engineers posed the question – “If our mission is to enable us to scale 10X, do we know where our current breaking points are in our applications?”. The conversation that followed concluded that they had no idea. They then turned to the Product Owner and asked if they would be “allowed” a little bit of time during the next two weeks to figure that out. This meant saying no to a couple of other requests for development. To wrap this story up, they took the time to investigate, found that one application would fail in the next 6 months given the current growth rate. They requested 3 months of focus to avoid that disaster, presented a solution roughly 2.5 months later that would handle the projected growth for the next 5 years to come with an easy way to scale further. This all started with an engineer that realized the part they played in the success of the mission at hand, which enabled the team to take ownership of the problem, solution, quality, delivery and received the well-deserved recognition for it.
Rarely have I seen a team be so inspired and motivated at work as during these 3 months.
This did not happen overnight though. The groundwork took closer to 6 months of coaching the leadership team to anchor and align the company vision with the department’s mission and further down to the 10-12 engineering teams alongside our internal stakeholder groups.
Why is it needed?
So far it has only been implied that we need to have it and as always it will depend. Let me just state shortly that if your company is in the business of solving complex problems, such as software development, intrinsic motivation is key for individuals as well as close collaboration to maximize the creativity and innovation needed. A team is a group of people with a shared purpose and intrinsic motivation stems from attaching purpose and meaning to what you do.