Iâve been waiting to share some antipatterns to the type of leadership we talk about on these pages. Bingo! Got one today.
Imagine the writer of todayâs Wall Street Journal feature: The Covid Crisis Taught David Farr the Power and Limits of Leadership. In his presence? A prideful ass. This is a portrait worthy of an M.C. Escher illustration, splendidly serving the articleâs two very different intended audiences. Itâs a masterpiece â you must read it, really â but be prepared to need an Alka Seltzer by the time you get to the end.
Mr. Farr keeps five baseball bats in his office, including one signed by St. Louis Cardinals greats Stan Musial and Albert Pujols. He likes to swing the bats while he thinks. During earnings calls, he is known to poke people with a bat if he thinks they arenât doing a good job of talking to investors.
Here are a few pearls of wisdom from the man himself:
âWe have a company to run.â
âWe have customers to serve and we canât frickinâ do it if nobody is here!â
âWhy did we miss it?â
âI might be wrong, but we get paid to make decisions and make calls.â
âI would never jump off a cliff without knowing a bit about what is at the bottom. But I know you have to take jumps.â
âI got into a lot of heated battles around here in St. Louis because I had the opinion that you can live with this virus.â
âIâm not going to die.â
âIâm too busy to die.â
âIâm not dead, though people have tried to kill me. Iâm still quite strongly in charge. And as long as Iâm here, our dividend will not be cut.â
âWeâve gone that route, rather than where everyone wears a mask.â
âIf thereâs more of us around, you got to be doing the right things, youâve got to be following your own rules.â
âLook. I make sâ, and you canât tell me how Iâm making sâ when youâre sitting in your goddamn living room.â
âGet your aâ out to my factories, look at my people on the line, and tell me if theyâre telling me the truth or lying. Thatâs what youâre supposed to do. Thatâs why I pay you $25 million a year.â
âIt was very energizing to be on the plane.â
âItâs all going back to trying to make people feel like weâre back in business, itâs back to normal, itâs safe, Iâm here to talk.â
âPeople are getting tired of and stuff like that.â
âI canât believe this thing. Itâs July 7th.â
âI got to see some of them for the first time in several months. It was pretty exciting, and I drank too much.â
âPeople were a little closer than 6 feet.â
âWeâre going to have to bring in automation.â
âWeâre going to have to take labor out.â
âAs soon as you hear someone say âthe new normal,â plug your ears, and say, âbullsââ.â
Most of all, do read the comments. Hook, line, sinker, check.
When you identify a leader, how do you invest in his or her growth?
My father was an electrical engineer of the highest order. A master bridge player and a director of electrical engineering at Hazeltine Corporation â one of the most significant electrical engineering companies in American history â he was a smart man who worked in the smartest of company. Dadâs colleagues over the years included not just Professor Alan Hazeltine himself, but Harold Wheeler of Wheeler Laboratories; Page Burr, co-founder of Burr-Brown, and who was my fatherâs classmate at Cornell; Bernie Loughlin, who co-invented color television; and Henry Bachman, who served as IEEE President and became an IEEE fellow. There were many others. I donât usually do this, but I encourage you to view the links to these individuals before you proceed, as they will paint a vivid picture of the fortunate magnificence of my fatherâs cohort.
What follows is not a hackneyed story about how my father was a great leader (although he was). It is a story about how the engineers of my fatherâs generation invented the idea of software, carving out the path to a new form of leadership. It is also the story of how he catapulted me along for the ride â with a swift kick in the pants.
Dad spent nearly 50 years at Hazeltine. My brothers and I all worked there at some point in our lives as well. My eldest brother Paul notably worked there for over 30 years in manufacturing, including time spent as part of the team that created the worldâs very first multi-layered PC boards. Hazeltine was a major force in the formative years of the electrical engineering industry.
I grew up in a fairly traditional household, where we shared stories over supper, every day. The children would discuss their schooldays, Mom would talk about what happened around the house and the news of the day, and Dad would share the latest goings on at Hazeltine. These would often include (generalized) stories about how the military changed requirements for the projects his teams were working on, how frustrating those changes were, and how this all threatened the due dates that they faced.
Above all else, these were stories about human beings and their struggles with change. I wish that I could recall many of them in great detail so that I could share them; I cannot. But they had a huge impact on our familyâs understanding of the world Dad worked within.
Less than a year and a half before he died at age 93, I was lucky enough to record Dad (during a car ride) recounting the following funny and fascinating story about the search for an aneroid barometer that was suited to solve a voltage issue his engineering team had at high altitudes within an Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) system for a Northrop aircraft.
Dad told these sorts of stories every night when we were growing up. Without really appreciating it at the time, I was deeply conditioned by the lessons and experiences of my father and his distinguished colleagues as related through these suppertime stories, right alongside their journeys to define the modern disciplines of their craft. It is all hard to believe in retrospect, but I had a first-hand seat to this era of engineering history, which became, no doubt, a significant component of my own education, outside of any classroom.
One of these old stories is easy for me to vividly recollect, no doubt because it was the seed that grew into my lifeâs professional focus. During one summer evening in the late 1970s, Dad introduced our family to the word âsoftware.â While I canât recall all of the details, one thing I do recall is him sharing how it allowed his engineers to make changes to things they made without having to redesign hardware. The fact that the very idea of software came about to mitigate the issues that electrical engineers of Dadâs generation faced is a lost story, yet it is critical to remember if we wish to understand the opportunities it represents. Electrical engineers designed hardware that could be programmed, elegantly enabling them to honor the human need for change while reducing their natural, personal frustrations when faced with that need.
The world would do well to remember that software is all about encouraging â rather than resisting â change. Many people wish to treat software as something to finish. Havenât we all heard people ask, âWhen will we be done with this software so we can move on?â How do you feel when you hear that? I enjoy tossing back this pithy response, which was borne of my suppertime story experiences:
If we want something that doesnât change, we should just build hardware.
Yours truly, on some hot summer night in the early 1980s. How about those socks?
When I was a young teenager in the early 1980s, I spent countless â undoubtedly thousands â of hours programming the 8-bit computers of the era, starting with the Commodore VIC-20 and moving on to the Commodore 64. One might describe me as addicted to programming, to the extent that Dad occasionally switched off the circuit breaker to my room so that I would better attend to my assigned chores and homework. During high school, I told him that I was eager to study computer science in college (software engineering degrees were more than a decade away at the time, and the term itself was probably not in common use, either.) His response to this was not what I expected.
âYou donât need a computer science degree to be a computer programmer,â he shared, with a brusque certainty. Dad was typically more demanding than I â or any young teenager â could bear. He would quickly and easily find the flaws in any system, argument, or idea that I might have. He went on:
âI will be paying for your education, and will not pay for you to do that. What you need in order to program computers is a background in liberal arts, because that experience will best equip you how to learn on your own on an ongoing basis, as computer languages, and the problems they are used for, change.â
That hit me like a ton of bricks, in the sense that I had no choice, unless I could find the money to pay for college myself. But it was also fair and gentle, in the sense that it was broad, with no specific direction other than to study liberal arts. I happened to be interested in studying journalism and publishing, and I was good in English class, so this all wasnât as horrible as it could have been. But it was certainly not what my other teenage programming friends were doing, and at the time it was hard to believe he was right.
You might recall this quote:
âWhen I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.â
âNot Mark Twain
I followed Dadâs orders.
The undergraduate program that I joined in 1986 at SUNY-Binghamton was focused on rhetorical theory, which, if you have read many of these pages before, you will understand as the ancient and philosophical study of persuasion and communication. Lucky for me, Dad didnât mind if I took a computer science program or two, which I did to my personal delight, serving to fulfill some of my science obligations. (We learned Pascal back then.) But rhetorical theory became my academic passion. It was the driving force behind my appreciation and understanding of empathy and trust. If you want to know more, I recommend you read Aristotleâs Rhetoric.
When I graduated from college, I landed a job as a software developer for a publishing company, oddly satisfying my broad desire to work for a publishing company while simultaneously satisfying my desire to program all day.
I never left the software industry after that.
In my careerâs first 15 years, software development projects were universally managed using traditional, deadline-driven waterfall methodologies, just like the very projects my dad managed in his career. In the mid 2000s, however, Scrum entered into my life â and the lives of many others. What occurred to me in the process of learning Scrum was that managing software development with Gannt charts and up-front planning was completely at odds with what software was supposed be. It felt remarkably more compatible with what Dad had shared at the dinner table over thirty years prior. With Scrum, we could finally develop software in a manner that embraced the sort of change that only software could deftly provide.
Softwareâs very nature doesnât merely involve uncertainty. It invites it. It is its raison d’ĂȘtre. Software is utterly pointless when there is certainty (I will repeat: otherwise, we should just build hardware.) What are we really achieving when we practice Scrum? We are offering a framework for human beings to help them manage the invited change and uncertainty, by taking one step at a time.
And, as the saying goes, herein lies the crux of the matter.
The Normal State, where we seek comfort and predictability (when we wake up and wish for a day without drama or surprises, and a pleasant evening to follow). We stick to the reactive, and not the proactive. As Quinn puts it: âTo remain in the normal state, refusing to change while the universe changes around us, is ultimately to choose slow death.â
The Fundamental State of Leadership, where we face the need to change with the world around us, eschewing our natural desire for the comfort of the normal state. To quote Quinn once more, âIn the fundamental state of leadership, we become less comfort-centered and more purpose-centered. We stop asking, What do I want? Since what we want is to be comfortable, this question keeps us in the reactive state. Instead we ask, What result do I want to create?â
The difference between supervision, management, and leadership might best be described as follows:
Supervision is the practice of overseeing people to ensure theyâre doing their assigned tasks.
Management is the practice of nurturing someoneâs career so that they can achieve what they aim to.
Leadership is the practice of taking people on a journey to an unknown place while managing their natural anxieties about this journey.
This is why good executives are fond of pointing out that everybody in an organization is capable of being a leader, no matter where they fall in the corporate hierarchy. Leaders drive change, and bring tools to the table to facilitate that change.
By definition, software engineers bring tools to the table to facilitate change â whether employing Scrum or not. Scrum just happens to make the journey easier for everyone involved. Donât leaders worthy of the label seek to do these things at every turn? When software engineers use frameworks like Scrum to assist them in their efforts to drive change, they are living the very highest form of leadership.
What are the consequences of this assertion?
For starters, we should make every attempt to recognize that software engineers are key leaders for the organizations they serve. To be clear: they are not future leaders; they are current leaders.
As a consequence of that, I believe that software engineers are worthy of being provided the very finest we can give them in leadership skills and trainingâŠthe very same skills we afford our best executives. We should do everything we can to groom their skills in:
Interpersonal communication
Group dynamics
Conflict resolution techniques
Emotional intelligence (EQ)
Yet, I canât think of too many organizations today that see how these are essential offerings for their software engineers, except perhaps as remedial activities once in a while. That approach is a mistake. Everyone worthy of being called leader needs regular nourishment in these skills, software engineers in particular.
In that sense, a good software engineering curriculum places significant emphasis on requirements elicitation, communication, human factors, and group dynamics. Over my decades managing software engineers, it has become apparent to me that the connection to the human condition doesnât end with the education provided by the software engineering degree. The degree itself is the foundation of a long arc of a leadership journey. Corporations who employ these engineers play a key role in this journey.
Dadâs opinion about the computer science programs of the 1980s was prescient. I think he would have liked Mike Lutz.
I would be remiss if I didnât offer that the generalized practice of IT is also, at its most vital human points, a form of leadership in the very same vein. While generalized IT folks donât generally develop custom software, they certainly select and configure off-the-shelf software solutions that enable change. These IT professionals â including the business analysts and project managers who serve both IT teams and software engineers â should be afforded the same sort of nourishing training that software engineers deserve.
At this point, you might wonder: what about those ISTJ and INTJ stereotypes? The propellerheads? Can they really be leaders in the way we traditionally envision that label? My answer? Itâs too late! You have no choice; they are already leaders. As my own coach, Dr. Jim Kestenbaum, has taught me, there is good news here. While we are born with our personalities and our IQs â and there is little we can do to change them â we have the ability to increase our skills in the four areas I listed above, EQ included. The investment will be worth it, if you choose to make it. But the first step is to realize that if you have software engineers in your organization, you have leaders â vital ones â who require care and feeding. To miss this is to shoot your proverbial corporate self in the foot.
Before embarking on the journey of reading this unusually long post, please take a moment to reflect on your organizationâs technology team.
Are the people friendly? Are they excellent listeners? Do they take the time to empathize with the people they are serving?
Do they work hard to fully unearth and understand peopleâs problems, designing and collaborating on solutions that reflect where your organization needs to go?
Do they help people feel comfortable with the rapid change that they face in business every day?
Do they exercise servant leadership at every opportunity? Do they exercise transformational leadership when called upon?
Does your company believe that, when you invest in software, you are investing in something that requires care and feeding and additional investment, in order to live up to its purpose, which is to reflect change in your ever-changing business?
Does your senior leadership understand that the answer to all of these questions needs to be yes?
Most importantly: Do you have an approach to address the ânoâ answers you have for any of the above?
In response to âSoftware Engineering Is a Form of Leadership,â a colleague shared that, âI once had the opportunity to have a conversation with Bill Gates. I asked him, âAmong your software engineers, how much of the job is technical versus nontechnical?â He responded that for leaders of software groups, the job was 80% nontechnical, and for his most technical people, the job was 50% nontechnical. Of course, you understand that very well! You have done a good job of identifying the leadership skills that are so important.â
Thatâs both a great story and a nice compliment, but one of my greatest challenges on The Progressive CIO is to engage folks who are not so lucky as I have been. To date, I have been preaching to the choir: my LinkedIn profile is filled with people who are a lucky and like-minded bunch. Very little of The Progressive CIO is news to them. âSoftware Engineering Is a Form of Leadershipâ was written to challenge conventional wisdom. But while I was writing, and even during my subsequent edits, I had a sense its message might not land in the right audience. This turned out to be largely true. Sure, I got a good handful of likes, atta-boys, and agreement from all of the usual suspects. But my network is filled with people who work in functional, healthy, and progressive organizations who already work within the sort of framework we talk about on these pages. I was preaching to the choir.
In my own industry (foodservice distribution), I can say with certainty that many organizations donât have great answers to all of the above. Those that do â and I like to consider the organizations that I work for among them â do well in no small part because we treat technology as a key investment in the human condition. We believe that all of our employees, including technology folks, have to bring gobs of emotional intelligence, empathy, humility, and compassion to the table in order to drive our organizations forward.
But why are we a (relatively) rare breed? Well, foodservice distribution is a pennies business. Many organizations try to spend as little as possible on technology as they possibly can. After they put in an ERP system, they want to be done paying for it, so that they can get back to doing what they do best: buying and selling food. What they too often fail to see is that they canât buy or sell food as competitively and strategically as possible if they put blinders on to the way the world around them has changed in the past 25 years.
Your business may be in a similar situation.
If your organization is one of those who would answer ânoâ to any or all of the lead-in questions above, you are the target audience for these pages, and this post is here for you. Read onâŠ.
Lucky for me â and for you! â âSoftware Engineering Is a Form of Leadershipâ elicited the sort of insightful dialog Iâve been hungry for since my earliest writing on these pages.
An adept, articulate, and perhaps even a little angry critical response came to me from one of my closest and longstanding friends. This response is more of a must-read than anything I have written to date on these pages. What pleases me most is that my friend is a fellow rhetorical theorist, as well as an excellent writer and author. That criticism is the focus here today. It sheds light on the very real â and very wide â gap that exists between what some might call my fantasy and so many other peopleâs realities.
Reality
There are literally thousands of companies â both big and small â that operate with, and even promote, behaviors that are self-defeating for their information customers, and that are at odds with the professions of software engineering and IT as they are currently being taught in schools and practiced in the most successful organizations.
It would be all too easy to say that these organizations work out of a sense of ignorance, or of austerity. Even though there might be some truth to that, it would be an unsympathetic assertion. I think itâs more appropriate to say that these organizations work this way out of a sense of experience, exposure, and habit. Engineers and IT people still generally have an awful reputation as propellerheads, and most people are conditioned to view us through the lens of that stereotype. There are still millions upon millions of people in the workplace who have never been exposed to well-trained and human-focused IT or software professionals, because most of the best technology professionals tend to work in a relatively small number of organizations. Universities are trying to change this, but it will take a very long time before that change is complete. Even then, just like in every profession, there will be bad apples who will perpetuate the stereotype.
Given the unfortunate wealth of this sort of experience, exposure, and habit, the questions we need to address are: 1) how do people help their organizations discover and explore alternative habits; and 2) who is responsible for initiating these alternative habits given the chicken-and-egg nature of the problem?
To begin the journey, letâs explore my friendâs experience with their companyâs experience, exposure, and habits.
So, at the end of it all, I guess my overall thought is WOW, we have had such different experiences.
Your post starts off with highlighting how great your Dad was, which was nice to know. What an amazing career he had. I loved that you called it âsuppertimeâ because that was what it was. I was amazed that your father expressed his disdain for a computer science degree, that really surprised me. (Just recently I have been reflecting on how important a quality liberal arts education can be.)
But where you start losing me is âSoftwareâs very nature doesnât merely involve uncertainty. It invites it. It is its raison dâĂȘtre.â Software doesnât have a nature. It is a bunch of code designed to get things done. It is a created response to the current perceived problem. Sure, software has to keep changing because the external parameters are changing (I am hesitant to say evolving). The software and the hardware fit together so that people can be more productive.
âSoftware doesnât have a nature.â I needed that. My friend is right. Only my choir would see it that wayâŠand every one of us would do well to think of this quite differently. Of course, a software engineering academic would want to assert that the code isnât the important part of the dynamic here. The code merely a single step in the broader context of evaluating and solving a human problem.
But the meta problem here is that the experience, exposure, and habits of many companies cause them to perceive that code is what the software engineer brings to the table. In that sense, then, my friend is completely correct: software itself certainly doesnât have a nature.
As a response, I offer a something vastly clearer: the situation that leads to software has a nature.
This leads me to something I have wanted to write about for a very long time. In 1968, Lloyd Bitzer, a rhetorical theorist at The University of Wisconsin – Madison, wrote a piece entitled âThe Rhetorical Situationâ that has become essential reading for anyone engaged in the modern study of rhetoric. Those of you visiting the Progressive CIO for the first time here might not know that my personal style in managing software engineering and IT is driven by a human-first approach that has its foundations in applied rhetorical theory. I believe that the problems in our profession are most effectively addressed through a comprehensive study and understanding of an audience and its attendant needs, calling for supreme skills in Aristotleâs rhetorical triad of logos, pathos, and ethos.
In âThe Rhetorical Situation,â Bitzer attempts to describe the sorts of situations that drive the need for rhetorical discourse. What exactly is that, you ask? Itâs something that is probably best defined as language that is employed to move or influence an audience, to bring about change. Traditionally, rhetorical discourse is the label applied to speeches and other overtly persuasive pieces of language. Modern rhetorical theory, however, acknowledges that a vast percentage of human communication can be considered rhetorical discourseâŠeven the simplest âSTOPâ sign.
Lloyd Bitzer, rhetorician. What in the world does he have to offer to the field of software engineering? Quite a bit.
Here are two key paragraphs, presented without ellipsis, from the midsection of Bitzerâs âThe Rhetorical Situationâ:
Hence, to say that rhetoric is situational means: (1) rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to situation, in the same sense that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem; (2) a speech is given rhetorical significance by the situation, just as a unit of discourse is given significance as answer or as solution by the question or problem; (3) a rhetorical situation must exist as a necessary condition of rhetorical discourse, just as a question must exist as a necessary condition of an answer; (4) many questions go unanswered and many problems remain unsolved; similarly, many rhetorical situations mature and decay without giving birth to rhetorical utterance; (5) a situation is rhetorical insofar as it needs and invites discourse capable of participating with situation and thereby altering its reality; (6) discourse is rhetorical insofar as it functions (or seeks to function) as a fitting response to a situation which needs and invites it. (7) Finally, the situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. Not the rhetor and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of rhetorical activity â and, I should add, of rhetorical criticism.
Let us now amplify the nature of situation by providing a formal definition and examining constituents. Rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence. Prior to the creation and presentation of discourse, there are three constituents of any rhetorical situation: the first is the exigence; the second and third are elements of the complex, namely the audience to be constrained in decision and action, and the constraints which influence the rhetor and can be brought to bear upon the audience.
Lloyd Bitzer, The Rhetorical Situation, 1968
Letâs see how that reads after a bit of search-and-replace:
Hence, to say that SOFTWARE is situational means: (1) SOFTWARE comes into existence as a response to situation, in the same sense that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem; (2) SOFTWARE is given ⊠significance by the situation, just as a unit of discourse is given significance as answer or as solution by the question or problem; (3) a SOFTWARE situation must exist as a necessary condition of SOFTWARE, just as a question must exist as a necessary condition of an answer; (4) many questions go unanswered and many problems remain unsolved; similarly, many SOFTWARE situations mature and decay without giving birth to SOFTWARE; (5) a situation is SOFTWARE insofar as it needs and invites SOFTWARE capable of participating with situation and thereby altering its reality; (6) discourse is SOFTWARE insofar as it functions (or seeks to function) as a fitting response to a situation which needs and invites it. (7) Finally, the situation controls the SOFTWARE response in the same sense that the question controls the answer and the problem controls the solution. Not the SOFTWARE ENGINEER and not persuasive intent, but the situation is the source and ground of SOFTWARE activity â and, I should add, of SOFTWARE criticism.
Let us now amplify the nature of situation by providing a formal definition and examining constituents. SOFTWARE situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if SOFTWARE, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence. Prior to the creation and presentation of SOFTWARE, there are three constituents of any SOFTWARE situation: the first is the exigence; the second and third are elements of the complex, namely the audience to be constrained in decision and action, and the constraints which influence the SOFTWARE ENGINEER and can be brought to bear upon the audience.
The remarkable thing about Bitzerâs essay is how effortlessly interchangeable the ideas of rhetorical discourse and software are. The piece does not sound completely ridiculous with these simple substitutions. I believe that this is because software is itself a form of rhetorical discourse, in that it is language that is employed to move or influence an audience, to bring about change. I suppose you could argue this over several beers in any college town in the world, but I would still tell you that software is a form of discourse. In another way of looking at it, software is an expression of thought, and it is a dialogue. It is written for humans, by humans, to express ideas and thoughts, and it is changed in response to the needs of its interlocutors.
Unfortunately for me, a Google search for âis software a form of discourseâ (in quotes) as of this writing returns one of those sad âNo results foundâ messages. There are, however, three or four references to âsoftware is a form of discourse,â one of which seems truly interesting. I think weâre onto something. Letâs check back in a few years. I digressâŠ
In rhetoric, the person responding to the exigency and who creates the rhetorical discourse is known as the rhetor. The rhetorâs counterpart in our world is the software engineer. The most challenging work for both of these individuals is in the mise en place:
Listening
Empathy
Audience analysis
Situational understanding
Both rhetoric and software seek to drive movement and change. The rhetorâs ultimate product is the speech; the software engineerâs ultimate product is the program. The wordsmithing of these two products is significant, no doubt, but the magic is all in the mise en place. If that is done poorly, the end product will be irrelevant. Nobody will be moved, and nothing will be changed. In software engineering, there is a maxim: the requirements and the documentation are more important than the code. If you lose the code but still have the requirements documented, you can create new code to address the requirements. But if you lose the requirements and have the code, all you have is a solution to a problem that nobody understands anymore.
This is why the academic practice of software engineering pays special attention to the practices of requirements elicitation, group dynamics, and human factors. This is where the key elements of Aristotleâs Rhetoric â logos, pathos, ethos â come into play, every day, all day, for software engineers. In order to be successful, software engineers have to not only look at things from a logical perspective, but they also have to empathize (deeply) and develop a sense of trust in their approaches and their responses to the situation at hand. They will not be able to create the sort of durable and lasting relationships with the people they serve if they fail in these skills. And because software is always an ongoing journey (it is designed to change, constantly, relentlessly), if you do not maintain healthy relationships between those serving and those being served, you will wind up with what, in our industry, we would call a âlegacy softwareâ situation.
My friendâs cogent response continues:
Then you say Scrum is great because it allows us to âmanage the invited change and uncertainty, by taking one step at a time.â Well, not all change is invited, and it would really be nice if we could look ahead a little farther and anticipate what Hell this change is going to create when we are three steps down the line.
Side note: Several years ago, we had a âlunch and learnâ at our company at which the director of the IT department explained Scrum to all of us with PowerPoint slides and everything! Basically, it was their justification for why they worked on which projects/problems. At the time, there were eight people in the IT department, and they would meet every morning to discuss their priorities for the day. If an urgent problem or issue arose, they would have to evaluate what they could set aside so that they could refocus their attention. Multitaskers they were not.
Prior to them worshiping at the altar of Scrum, they had a spreadsheet list approach. All issues and problems from all departments were catalogued (it was a Jira system). As each department became more and more frustrated that progress was never being made, the IT department decided to call a monthly meeting with the people who had entered the Jiras. We were all supposed to review the list as a company team so that we could understand their overwhelming burden and conflicting priorities. What actually happened was they lost ALL control because the individual departments started organizing their work for them, and those groups were setting the priority ordering. We never had another meeting, and they found Scrum.
Friends, we need to listen to this; these are profoundly important points that illustrate key anti-patterns that our industry faces. For certain, not all change is invited. When we select to use software to address our problems, however, we are making a decision to employ something that was designed to be changed. Back to my fatherâs point, we use software because changing (electronic) hardware is just too difficult, and in all too many circumstances, we need to allow for change, because change is the natural state of things.
So letâs get down to some experience, exposure, and habits regarding Scrum. Scrum is one of the most abused, misused, and misunderstood ideas of the modern workplace. Iâm not a betting man, but I would bet that, in 80% of all implementations, Scrum is FUBAR. Is Scrum bad because itâs so easy to get wrong? Perhaps. But that would be like saying nobody should perform ballet because itâs so easy to get it wrong. Ballet is ridiculously hard to do well. But, holy cow, when itâs done well, itâs breathtaking.
The interesting thing to observe in the experience, exposure, and habits of my friendâs company is that they misunderstand who should be practicing Scrum. Itâs not the IT team! And the IT team is not the one to set the priorities for what they work on! Businesspeople are the ones who are supposed to set the priorities for the organization; businesspeople decide what must stop if something else must take priority; businesspeople decide how to invest in staffing the IT teams with the quantity and quality of people who can help them achieve what they require. If you ever find an IT team with this sort of control, it means that the businesspeople, all the way up to the top, have simply abdicated their responsibilities. In Scrum, the Product Owner for an initiative is not on the IT team. This is all a behavioral anti-pattern.
It is because of this that I very much appreciate that my friendâs IT team âlost ALL control becauseâ the operating departments âstarted organizing their work for them.â Good for those departments! Take control of what you are supposed to control! Unfortunately, from afar, the radio broadcast here seems to indicate that the IT team found a way to use Scrum to regain apparent control. I have no idea how this happened, but it certainly sounds like a horrible human mess. Thatâs not Scrum. At all.
Back to the post, now we are talking about the definitions of leadership. âSupervision is the practice of overseeing people to ensure theyâre doing their assigned tasks.â Okay, I can agree to that.
âManagement is the practice of nurturing someoneâs career so that they can achieve what they aim to.â That may be what it is supposed to be, but that certainly isnât my experience (and I really donât think I am alone here). In my experience, management is about the managers relying on other people to get work done and then taking all of the credit for themselves. Support, encouragement, and/or appreciation is not offered because âyou might think too much of yourself.â Management is concerned with protecting their position and their salary.
Also, the idea that management is interested in my goals is foreign to me. They are interested in their goals (see above: protecting their position and their salary). If I can help with that, then I will be included without being a truly engaged partner in the process because all information is on a need to know basis.
Iâm as guilty of throwing idealistic definitions of supervision, management, and leadership around as the next guy. Iâm lucky to not only believe in these definitions, but to work with others who do as well. But take a moment to absorb the above. Despite all of our best wishes, this is what happens at many organizations. Need proof? Why does Dilbert exist?
Dilbert is not just a comic: it is daily illustration of anti-patterns. If you prefer reality over cartoons, then refer to the above. Itâs real.
So, if your management behaves this way, what can you do? One passive-aggressive thing to do might be to print this article and post it somewhere. But stupid people donât read, so thatâs not going to work for you.
What can you do when you feel like a mere peon but are interested in making your organization better (ahem, being a true leader)? Letâs use an example from my friend:
Last month, we had an all-staff meeting. Our new Presidentâs big news was that our Board passed the budget. He thanked Percy, our new CFO, for what a great job he did putting the budget together, and what a great job he did presenting it to the Board. It was just so wonderful, and he did such a great job. What a testament to him that the budget was unanimously passed.
Hmmmm, interesting that it is his success. All of the managers worked on their department budgets (fussing about costs and ways to save), entering and revising all of the numbers in the budgeting software when they decided to cut all travel and training for 2021. The individuals in accounting also provided us with all kinds of reports and help.
But letâs be grateful to Percy, who, by the way, could/should have said, âI couldnât have done it without my teamâ or anything that acknowledged that it was a group effort.
Nope, nothing — no surprise there.
The best guidance I can offer you from the limits of this page is this: employ the power of the question to make your leaders think. Find an opportunity to ask a question like this: âDo you have any thoughts on why our department managersâ morale is so low?â Even though you are smarter than your organizationâs management, ask the question as if you donât know the answer. Then see how it goes. If you do this enough, over a period of time, the lazy people you are talking to just might want to know if you have any ideas. And itâs always your option to say, âI have no idea, I just wanted to explore.â If you do this enough, you will be able to get a more detailed picture of who feels what, and you will be able to do a lot with that information. Remember that human beings love to be given an opportunity to share their thoughts, and little bits of unexpectedly useful information will always come your way if you are skilled enough to shut up, sit back, and take it all in without offering anything in return. They call it âthe power of the questionâ for a reason: collecting all of that perspective gives you the power and time to figure out how to put it to good use.
Of course, this is only one option. Another completely valid option is to find a better job. You deserve it! But please do take an opportunity to experiment with the power of the question no matter where you work, because your ability to do this will help in so many situations, even in the very best organizations, under much better circumstances.
Back to my friend:
âLeadership is the practice of taking people on a journey to an unknown place while managing their natural anxieties about this journey.â Hmmmm, that hasnât been my experience either.
Friends, leadership is one of the most debated terms in all of business. I am going to tell you, unequivocally, that the very nicest organizations to work for all agree that leadership is the idea of moving a novel (and typically uncomfortable) idea forward, regardless of where you sit in your organization.
But remember my friendâs perspective. There are a lot of organizations that arenât the very nicest. These definitions donât mean much to them.
Back to software:
But next comes the real stunner: âWhen software engineers use frameworks like Scrum to assist them in their efforts to drive change, they are living the very highest form of leadership.â Wow, I read that I thought, are you kidding me? Because they code software, because they use Scrum, they are leaders. What? They arenât thinking outside the box, looking at the future, creating a path forward for the organization. They are solving the computer problem in front of them which has been tagged as a priority. You soften it a bit by saying âEveryone worthy of being called leader needs regular nourishment in these skills, software engineers in particular.â But still, WOW.
Maybe it is the person who comes to the software developer and says, this is what I am envisioning (beyond a reaction to an issue), this is what would make things better, this is what would move us forward, maybe that is the person who should be heralded.
Once again, my friend nails it. For many organizations, the programmers solve âthe computer problem in front of them which has been tagged as a priority.â
Is that what your organizationâs programmers do?
Software engineers are there to help with human, business problems. Not computer problems. In fact, well-trained and thoughtful software engineers will discourage the use of software when they think itâs the right thing to do, just as civil engineers will discourage the use of concrete barriers when visibility is more important than sturdiness. In many process workflows, human input is more important than automation. Software engineers who are members of ACM or IEEE have a code of ethics that underscores their responsibilities in this regard.
Software engineers are there specifically to collaborate with others to think outside the box, look at the future, and create a path forward for their organization.
To the very point of âSoftware Engineering Is a Form of Leadership,â software engineers are leaders in this context in the very basic sense that software, as a journey, has no known end (remember: if there were a known end, we would just create hardware). This journey is filled with uncertainty and anxiety, if nothing else. If this werenât the case, then ERP implementations would not cause nightmares and waste billions of dollars, year after year after year.
All of this brings us to Scrum.
Scrum â as difficult to get right as ballet â is a key tool to helping manage this anxiety. Scrum says: letâs take our uncertain journey one step at a time. Letâs be transparent with one another about our feelings and anxieties, and letâs commit to inspecting each step of our journey, and letâs commit to adapting based upon what we find after each step.
The three pillars of Scrum â transparency, inspection, adaptation â are Leadership 101. Weâre going to try something new. We donât know exactly whatâs going to happen, but thatâs OK. We will talk often, review whatâs going on and how we feel about it, we will make decisions about whatâs next, and there will be a person to encourage us along the way.
To be fair, Scrum isnât only practiced by technologists. Itâs practiced by everyone involved in a key initiative. But technologists are the ones who have such a colorful palette of solutions to the problems discovered through Scrum. As a bonus, they (today) learn Scrum in a university setting, and are practiced not just in employing it, but in teaching it.
All too often, however, these points are lost on so many organizations who hire these technologistsâŠall because of their experience, exposure, and habits.
What can you do about this?
Back to the power of the question: âAre we taking the time to learn the ins and outs of Scrum to our advantage? I hear itâs really difficult to do well, like ballet. What could we do to learn more?â Or perhaps, âDo we think that we are effectively confronting and addressing the problems we face today? What are our anxieties about what lies ahead, and what are we willing to do about those anxieties?â Or something like that. Youâre smart. Take it from there.
Finally:
So, what you describe is your experience; it certainly is not mine. Maybe I really donât understand what a Real software engineer is and how hidden beneath his exterior is a true leader waiting to be acknowledged — if only given the chance and âproper care and feeding.â So much for the rest of us saps, who toil at our tasks and arenât offered the six-figure salaries of those in the IT department. Did you consider that maybe these software engineers arenât interested in a leadership position? I just donât understand why they and using Scrum makes them so much more worthy than the rest of us.
But, like I said when I started this, we have just had such different experiences.
The best software engineers â excuse me, leaders â are trusted guides who we look forward to being with, because we know that they will get us where we need to go, and we return to them routinely to seek their guidance and help. If you have software engineers who do not appreciate this opportunity, then you have what we would call code monkeys. Code monkeys are fine. But they are not worthy of being called engineers, let alone leaders. The âprogrammersâ of 30 or 40 years ago who never kept up with the times would be considered the code monkeys of today.
If your organization uses code monkeys and not software engineers, do you care? If you do care, what can you do about it?
I hope you agree that my friendâs willingness to share their organizationâs experience, exposure, and habits was a real gift to our dialogue. I am sure, too, that when we have friends like this, that we do everything possible to help them either move their organizations forward, or move on to greener pastures. Sometimes, the problem is that you are the smartest person in the room, and the best option is to leave the room.
I posed a question earlier in this post that I havenât forgotten about:
Who is responsible for initiating these alternative habits given the chicken-and-egg nature of the problem?
You are! Yes, you. Itâs not a chicken-and-egg thing at all. While it might appear that nothing can happen unless your management takes the first move, there is always a chance that your management needs you to make the first move. Sure, if you are wrong, then you will need to move on. But: you already care enough to read about these things. You are smart. You can employ the power of the question to lead from wherever you are today. And if you never try, then you never lead.
As Iâve mentioned before, Iâm not an avid reader of business nonfiction bestsellers. Books that have been foundational to my thinking have been at least somewhat academic (and unfortunately esoteric) in nature, like Aristotleâs Rhetoric and Kenneth Burkeâs Language as Symbolic Action. If youâve been following me on these pages, though, you know that I delight in citing twobooks that are straightforward yet uncommonly seen in offices around the world. There is, however, a third approachable book that I am fond of, which you might have read before, since it is comparatively well-known. That book, nearing its 20th birthday, is Patrick Lencioniâs The Five Dysfunctions of a Team.
As with all things popular, critiques of Five Dysfunctions are in no short supply. The bookâs Wikipedia entry does its job on this, citing some thoughtful summary criticism, noting that the âbook is explicitly a work of fiction; it is not based on research and its practical recommendations lack empirical support.â There is truth to that, but if you have been following me on these pages, you will remember that I have a firm belief that truth is best derived from considering multiple perspectives over time. The many sorts of responses to Five Dysfunctions that have been penned over the years have brought helpful real-world framing to the bookâs core concepts, adding value through a globally-shared dialog.
Here is yet another response, albeit one that I hope you find to be new and refreshing.
Like seemingly everything else from Five Dysfunctions, the âFirst Teamâ concept has been through the point-counterpoint wringer over the past two decades. If the âFirst Teamâ concept is unfamiliar to you, then letâs listen to Patrick Lencioni himself introduce it:
Iâd like to suggest that, rather than eschewing ideas (such as this one!) that might not be strictly empirical, we consider them, at the very least, to be valuable thought exercises.
I am fond of the âFirst Teamâ thought exercise. Why? Well, I have been part of no fewer than five senior management teams in my career, and each one of those teams was at its weakest when we were not attendant to one another, and when we spent the majority of our time in our vertical silos. We were not as strategic, and our teams were not as tightly focused on the companyâs mission, when we were more attendant to our departments than to senior teams. Anecdotal? Perhaps. But at the very least, I have developed an opinion that the âFirst Teamâ is worth talking about from time to time, wherever you may work.
A âFirst Teamâ Thought Exercise Extension, in Two Parts
Part The First
Whether we like it or not, our jobs are at least somewhat framed by our titles, whose primary purpose is, more or less, to denote our roles. These titles, apart from âPresidentâ and âCEO,â always connote some form of swim lane that we work within.
New-age management philosophies like Teal and Holacracy aim to reduce the significance of titles in an effort to encourage an organizationâs members to better appreciate (and contribute to solving) the many challenges that exist across its functions. However, these management styles present their own challenges. First off, they are wholly unfamiliar to the majority of the working population. More notably, however, in accordance with the valiant mission to decentralize power and decision making, they sometimes confuse people who feel uncomfortable making certain types of decisions, and who would better serve an organization when given at least some amount of explicit direction. Human beings are animals (which we too often forget), and animals are conditioned to exist within a power structure, whether we like that or not.
This is not to say that Holacracy or Teal are unworthy of further work and refinement; they most certainly are. Whatâs more effective to say is: work is not what we want to do in comparison to the better parts of life (if it were, we wouldnât get paid for it), and doing what we can to help it be less of a drag will vastly increase the likelihood that our employees will stay with us to solve the problems we are paid to solve. One thing that seems to resonate with all workers is when power structures are absent enough to allow people to breathe and bring their own values to the table, yet present enough to provide clear direction when needed.
All of this is to suggest that there is a desirable balance between power presence and power absence, and that power absence is something that needs focus, since it is not as natural as power presence. The âFirst Teamâ thought exercise is most useful, in my opinion, in helping organizations find that better balance. Thatâs because, when we encourage a First Team mentality, we have to work hard ensure that the teams of people who report into the First Team have healthy team dynamics of their own. More on that in a bit.
I think teams struggle to identify when itâs time to engage further with the âFirst Teamâ thought exercise, to calibrate their work toward its prescribed dynamic. Here are six questions that will help you know:
Are the team members aware of each otherâs professional issues, and are they willing to spend the time to contribute to each otherâs success in overcoming those issues?
Are the team members aware of each otherâs personal issues, to the extent necessary to help others empathize with their challenges meeting professional expectations?
In the spirit of invisibleism, are all team members paying attention not only to what they see, but what they do not see?
Do the team members have a rapport that allows for vulnerability on a routine basis, wherein a team member can openly share a personal deficiency or fear without reprisal, and with compassion?
Does any member of the team feel that itâs a âdragâ to spend time with their âFirst Teamâ when compared to spending time with the team who reports into them, or with their customers/stakeholders?
Are there âfactionsâ within the team that draw a subset of the team together more powerfully than the entire team is drawn to itself?
If you can answer yes to any of these six questions, itâs time to recalibrate your First Team dynamic.
Itâs entirely possible for the First Team concept to go too far. That is easier to identify through these two anti-patterns:
When the team too often feels like an âescapeâ from the difficult work any of its members have to do, and First Team members abandon their responsibilities to their Second Teams.
When (you are lucky enough to hear grumblings that) the team is a âcliqueâ who merely likes to enjoy lunching and drinking together, and is inaccessible to outsiders.
Remember, this is all about balance.
Part The Second
Sometimes the best way to see where you are is through triangulation.
In this case, letâs consider what all of the above means to the team of people who report into you, who students of Lencioni might call your âSecond Team.â
As a leader for your Second Team, you would do well to encourage them to be a First Team unto themselves (and I do mean that they, without you, comprise this First Team).Despite all that has been written about Patrick Lencioni and his work over the years, this is not a conclusion that most people seem to draw, yet I suggest that this is, in fact, your most important responsibility as your Second Teamâs leader.
In other words, donât limit the âFirst Teamâ thought exercise to your executive team. Understand that it is fractal in nature, and you would do well to encourage it wherever you find leadership groups in your organization. Wherever a First Team exists, the Second Team will need to be able to better self-manage when their leader needs to tend to his or her First Team needs, and the First Team thought exercise will be especially valuable to prepare that Second Team for those moments.
Are you creating an environment where your Second Team can answer âyesâ to the six questions above, while avoiding the two anti-patterns?
If so, then congratulations.
If both your First Team and Second Team are exhibiting the optimum balance, then hats off to you: itâs time for a well-deserved, relaxing vacation.
But we are imperfect creatures, living in an imperfect world. Most of the time, we will find ourselves working on maintaining the right balance between nurturing our First Team while helping our Second Team nurture its own First Team dynamic.
Remember: what we are looking to achieve, in the end, is an appropriate balance at any given moment between power presence and power absence for the people who are looking to us for leadership. If your Second Team is able to be its own First Team, then step away and work on your First Team. If your First Team and Second Team are both having problems, do not focus on your Second Team at the expense of your First Team, but donât walk away from them, either. Seek to help your Second Team regain its balance while you remind them that your First Team needs balancing, too. Make the balance part of the conversations you have with both of your teams.
But keep a close eye on anti-pattern #1. None of the above is to suggest that your Second Team should ever feel like they have been abandoned by you. They deserve your leadership. Power abhors a vacuum, and our animalistic conditioning for leadership structures will ensure that your unofficial replacement is eventually found. That would be a tragedy for your team.
The âFirst Teamâ is a handy tool. It is a fulcrum for introspection, and it can help you achieve the some of the best elements of Teal and Holacracy without completely reinventing your organization. Keep it in a front pocket, use it often, and donât neglect your duty to pay it forward to the teams you lead. Itâs good for them today, and should you depart â whether through attrition, retirement, or otherwise â it will condition your organization for smoother succession tomorrow.
Thereâs nothing quite like a car accident to help you identify your values.
Thirty years ago, Hyrum Smith became well-known for his âProductivity Pyramidâ and popularized the practice of value-setting in his Franklin Planner system:
How can you identify things to do if you havenât identified your goals?
How can you identify goals if you havenât taken the time to identify your values?
While I was trained in the Franklin Planner, and appreciated the fact that what I do each day should have its roots in goals and values, Hyrum Smithâs approach always felt a little bit soulless. Why should values focus on productivity? Life is not all about productivity. Itâs about floating through space on an earth-sized boat with trillions of other creatures, supporting one another while we try to make sense of what we are doing here together. While I had developed some values that underpinned what I did back then, all I can recall about them is that they were unremarkable and unmemorable.
I donât think Iâm alone. Most people I know â leaders included â have not taken the time to write out and articulate their personal values in a way that brings them personal clarity and vision. Itâs a worthwhile exercise, as I hope you come to see.
In my first winter in Rochester, NY, my daily commute to Webster, NY involved driving over the infamous Irondequoit Bay Bridge. Traveling eastbound in the highly-cambered left lane one chilly January morning at 55 miles per hour, my car slid on black ice into the central barrier, ricocheting across all three lanes of traffic, straight toward the water side of the bridge.
In that moment, I closed my eyes.
I was sure that I was going to fly right off the bridge and into the cold bay below. Itâs hard to describe what the human brain can conjure in the course of one or two seconds, but I can tell you that this is what came into mine:
âI am going to die. But at least Iâve settled every issue and shared my key life lessons with others, with no lasting regrets.â
Crash.
Then, I bounced from barrier on the water side of the bridge, ricocheting back into the middle lane of the highway, where my car came to rest. No other cars hit me. I opened my eyes, yet I was fairly confident that I was dead. Airbag smoke filled the cabin, my glasses were blown off my face, and I could not see very well. I took a minute to think about whether or not I was dead, and thought, âWell, if I am alive, I should at least be able to get out of this car.â
Getting out of a car on a busy highway is a bad idea, but adrenaline and cortisol have a way of making you do dumb things. I wound up being perfectly OK, with only a seat-belt bruise across my chest (which I didnât discover until taking my shirt off later that evening.) My car was totaled, but I walked away with the greatest epiphany of my life:
âWhenever I confront my mortality the next time, I want to have the very same feeling that I did this morning.â
My values didnât change in that moment; they merely became clear. Over the following years, as I went back to articulate my values, they developed into this:
To love my partner Charles all day, every day. To be with him as often as I can, and to help him with whatever he needs. To learn from him, to listen to him, to make my life better. To do the same for him as he does for me.
To be ready to pass away at any time, and to get others to understand why this is a valuable way of going about life. This involves sharing â never hoarding â my experiences and everything I know, ensuring that others are able to use what I share. This requires persistent teaching skills, and a dedication to knowing that this is an utmost priority.
To do something rather than nothing. To take small steps toward an uncertain future. A partially complete plan with a spirit of commitment toward that uncertain future is more likely to survive the loss of a key person than a plan that never took root at all.
I would never wish you a car accident, but moments like this have a way of bringing all sorts of clarity.
Can I help you articulate your own core values without such a scare? Allow me to try.
Start by trying to identify your top three values:
The first should not involve your work, because work is not an end; it is only a means to an end, and it is far from the most important part of life. It should involve your devotion to a person, or being, or people who are closest to you. It might help you to amplify the earthly actions that drive your relationship with this person, or being, or people.
The second should not involve your work, because work is not an end; it is only a means to an end, and it is far from the most important part of life. It might involve things that inform your daily behaviors and that ensure a sense of assuredness when you pass away.
The third should not involve your work, because work is not an end; it is only a means to an end, and it is far from the most important part of life. It might involve the approach you take to do the things associated with your second value.
The values I value â and that are of value to us all â are the values that involve our soul, and not our work. I hope you can sense, as I do, that well-articulated values can have a huge impact on how you carry about your work. If your find that your work is at odds with your values, howeverâŠwhat you have, dear reader, is a bad job.
If the culture of your workplace allows it â and I hope that it does â I recommend that you and your leadership peers work on your individual values, and share them with one another. It can be especially valuable to do if your team is working on defining your companyâs values; itâs almost impossible to do this well if the group of people doing it donât have an appreciation for each otherâs personal values. Although it requires a great deal of vulnerability, when done thoughtfully, thoroughly, and openly, this sort of exercise will enhance team understanding better than any Meyers Briggs test series can.
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