April 30th, 2008 by Mark Ramm
If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed.
–Jason Fried
Just the other day a project manager I know asked me how she can “instill a sense of urgency” in her team. She wants to get more done, and get it done faster. Increasing developer productivity is a laudable goal. And she is being asked by internal and external customers for more and more stuff.
But I think there’s something wrong with the question. Urgency and “time pressure” are viewed as tools which can increase productivity. And I think this is wrong. But, it does work — in the short term.
In the long term motivation, tools, skills, and processes along with things like good unit test coverage, and good “architecture” determine productivity. Constant urgency, looming deadlines (particularly if they are artificial), and constant pressure actually hurt motivation, remove the slack required for building tools, discourage process improvements, and create all kinds of technical debt. This debt can be measured in terms of decreased test coverage, and “short-cut” coding techneques which undermine good architectural choices.
To put it more bluntly, urgency often produces short term results at the expense of long-term productivity.
If you push the question a little bit, as I did with my friend, you will usually find that the problem is not a lack of urgency, it’s a lack of motivation. Motivating people is hard, and if they have been burned out by too much “urgency” it just gets harder.
I’ve done it too. But now-days when I hear people pushing a “sense of urgency” I take it as an opportunity to start looking for deeper motivation issues.
June 4th, 2007 by Mark Ramm
It’s hard to change your corporate culture, because it requires changing the way people think, feel, and act. And smart people can do really stupid things when they try to change other people.
Once, long ago, I worked with a company that was struggling to attract top notch people in a very small field. The were constrained by the number of people they had, and the were loosing good people, who were hard to replace. So, they wisely decided that they needed to to change their corporate culture, and to make themselves a more attractive place to work.
Their primary tactic in achieving this strategy was to publish a new “company values” statement, and adding “cool” to the list of criteria by which employees were judged at review time. Figuring that if their employees became cooler, people would be more attracted to working with the company. At the same time they also hosted “mandatory fun” activities outside of work hours, on top of the mandatory overtime, and near-constant travel, which was the norm for many of their employees. 
At the same time the manager, who was the force behind this, continued to speak condescendingly towards others he perceived as “less valuable” in the organization and was well know for his political games, and his “me first” attitude. This lead to widespread fear that the subjectivity of the “cool” rating was just an attempt to provide material for weeding out the “undesirable” employees.
Needless to say, their attempts did not earn them a worldwide reputation as “one of the most fun places to work.” And many people who felt their contributions weren’t valued left, and they told stories which made it even harder to find people in their small field.
If you want to change your corporate culture, you have to change the way people think, the way they feel, and the way they behave.
Changing people is hard. Rearranging words on paper is easy. Smart companies don’t confuse the two.
If you want to effect real change in an organization:
- Start with changing yourself. You are part of the culture, and if you are a leader people are watching what you do more closely than what you say.
- Be honest with yourself and with everybody involved about the problem. Take responsibility for your part what’s gone wrong.
- Ask people to join you in the hard work of making things better.
- Continually look for the reasons behind people’s resistance. Perhaps there’s a lack of trust, perhaps the your words are saying one things, and your actions are saying another.
Honesty, openness, and ability to communicate a vision of how things could be better will get you a long way. But you also need to be prepared for resistance, and you need to learn from that resistance. As Jerry Weinberg says:
“Overcoming” is not what you want to do with so-called resistance. What you’re calling “resistance” is what it looks like to you when [people] don’t feel safe following your suggestions. So, what you want to do is learn from it–it’s a gold mine of information, as long as you don’t push to “overcome” it.
Another thing you might want to consider in that most negative corporate cultures trickle down from the top. Contempt is the sulfuric acid of organizational change, it creates defensiveness, super-charges resistance, and corrodes working relationships.
So, if your managerial team shows any traces of contempt, you might want to do is buy a couple copies of Bob Sutton’s new book “The No Asshole Rule” and slip them on a few key people’s desks.