Train-thoughts #8
Paradoxic intentions
As I am going through some notes I find this thought from when I was doing one of my strangest projects as a conslutant. It was with a founder-led SME with about 100-150 people. The founders were engineers and the company was therefore engineering-heavy/-led in their approach. No judgement intended, I am an engineer myself, the comment is only intended for context.
My mission was to critically evaluate one of the roles they had in the Engineering department. A role they were unsure whether they were getting the most out of in their current organizational setup. They wanted it done in two weeks due to budget constraints. I believe I ended up spending 13-14 full working days in the end.
The role in question was a line management position for individual software engineers. The engineers were sometimes all in one team, and sometimes not. Additionally the role was supposed to act as a team coach and process improver. However, it was not an Engineering Manager. The role had no formal delivery accountability for what the teams delivered, only how individuals performed according to their yearly individual performance targets. The people who held this role come from a wide range of experiences. Agile coaches, certified systemic coaches, psychologists, therapists, one had an academic philosophical background. What I did not find in the group, however, were engineers or HR-professionals. It was a group of people with a focus on the humanistic side of software engineering. Which, to be honest, was quite refreshing. Something I had never encountered before.
In the end, my conclusion was that their organizational structure, roles, responsibilities and processes were all focusing on the ‘individual contributor’. Seemingly to maximize intrinsic motivation, career growth and professional mastery of skills. Paradoxically, they built the product in teams… I.e. business success didn’t stem from strong individual contributors. It stemmed from high-performing teams with the freedom to act on emergent outcomes.
The significance of this realization was profound, at least to me and one of the VPs. It indicated the need for a fundamental shift of the underlying tenet to what the organization was doing and why it was doing those things.
The project, however, was only three weeks long in the end and the expectation on what I was supposed to find did likely not include me challenging their whole belief system.
In retrospect this was a very clear case of paradoxic intentions. An organization that had outgrown the governing organizational paradigm. And done so successfully. Founded by engineers with a strong focus on technical mastery straight out of the University. Found a perfect product-market fit, successfully scaled and got to a point where they couldn’t see how to evolve further. Still on the path of maximizing the individual engineering contributor at the cost of all other organizational capabilities.
The time would have been right to shift the governing paradigm to focus on product lifecycle management and build strong teams.
