Morality and Software Development Leadership
Power, dominance, and responsibility are hot button issues which hover over and around every action leaders take like ghosts. And those who ignore them — who wield power without thought, who see only the ends, and ignore the means — put their projects at risk.
I think it’s a truism that there is no single barrier to IT project success more powerful than bad management. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of ways in which bad management directly and indirectly decreases productivity, and undermines even the the possibility of success.
Foucault, is the twentieth century master of uncovering hidden power relationships, and anybody who’s read his masterwork Discipline and Punish will learn a variety of tools to uncover hidden power relationships, and these tools can be immensely valuable in unpacking what’s really going on when a situation “just feels wrong.”
It’s hard to quantify, but knowing this stuff can definitely help you avoid political landmines, and create a safer work environment. But, I still haven’t figured out how to make Foucault palatable and understandable to the average IT manager. ;)
But Naked aggression is easy to spot
On the other hand, you don’t need a sophisticated set of tools for unpacking power relationships to see what’s wrong with some teams. For example, I once worked for a manager who held daily motivational meetings, in which he enumerated every small mistake that any of us could make that might make him look bad, and let each of us know in no uncertain terms that we would be “terminated” if we were seen to have made even the smallest mistake. If we didn’t answer the phone with the right phrase, or try to convince customers that they wanted more expensive products than they needed, or failed to live up to any of thirty different (and sometimes contradictory) arbitrary rules, we were told we would be fired instantly.
Doing the wrong thing may pay off now, but it almost always hurts you later.
I left after less than 6 months, by the time a year was up, only 2 of 20 of the original people on the team were left. But, the manager received a commendation for “running a tight ship.” Things were looking good. Then again, a year later he was fired, because his team just couldn’t keep up, and everyone on the team was so busy not screwing up that the had no time or energy left for the important things they were hired to do.
Dominance games, and pure aggressive pressure helped him meet his daily and weekly goals, but killed him in the long run.
Project managers need to learn to wield power with a light touch.
It’s inevitable that there are power-relationships involved in the context of an important project. If you’re doing things right people are passionate about the project, people want to do the right thing, and people don’t always agree about what the right thing is.
It can be tempting to jump into these disagreements and make decisions — and it can speed up progress in the short term. But be careful, just like the manager who made his short term goals, but lost in the long run, you may end up killing people’s passion, and cutting off discussion before critical information is revealed.
Sure, there are times when a strong good push can help people avoid prolonged and useless discussions, but it’s too easy to take advantage power relationships to avoid difficult but important discussions.
There’s lots more to be said on the subject of power relationships in software development, but I think one of the key things we have to understand is that computer nerds participate in power struggles too, they just do it naively and instinctively. And that leaves us easy prey for those who do it with knowledge, talent, and finesse. And those people are out there and in places where 2 years is a long time, they can get away with it for a surprisingly long time.
P.S. I wrote this post in 2007, almost published it in 2008, and am just now getting around to publishing it. So, please don’t think this is about anything happening to me personally right now, but it is something I keep seeing “around town” and something I think we need to understand better if we are going to stop falling prey to those who understand power politics better than we do and wield them more aggressively, and end up ruining many good projects.