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This touches on one of the most demotivating facets of modern work: the obsession with collaboration. If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sens

This touches on one of the most demotivating facets of modern work: the obsession with collaboration. If you never have any autonomy or space to develop a sense of ownership, outside of being yoked like an ox in a team or mired in the tyranous mediocrity of committees, it's extremely difficult to care about what you are doing.

WJW 5y ago
My word, so much this. It is astounding how companies manage to kill initiative at every level as they grow. Individual team members can't change anything because they are at the bottom of the ladder and have to conform to the wishes of "the team" and low/middle managers somehow have even less autonomy because they can't go against their own managers but also have to navigate the peculiarities of their reports and various committees. You'd think that high level managers get more autonomy, but the demands of office politics (one serious mistake and you lose the shot at the C-suite you worked your whole career for) combined with their distance to people who can actually implement any changes they'd wish to make ensures that high level managers also have very little actual autonomy. It does not help that the word "ownership" has become a euphemism for "you must now care about this thing and fix it when it breaks at 2am, but economic benefits of any improvements to it will still flow to the shareholders". You get the drawbacks of ownership but not the benefits.
0xFACEFEED 5y ago
I don't think the problem is an obsession with collaboration. I've observed that it's mostly a defensive measure. The amount of damage that (sorry for putting it this way)... stupid people... can do is unbounded. The potential blast radius of bad decisions grows with the size of the company. Recovering from bad decisions is also very costly. The flip side of autonomy and empowerment is just that. When it's in the hands of a person that has a sense of pride in their work, a high bar for quality, determination to get the job done, loves the customer/user, etc then it's a recipe for productivity and happiness. When it's in the hands of a person who constantly ships broken code, has no work ethic, blames or doesn't care about the user, is jumping on every newest fad, etc then it can kill a whole company or a department. The only solution I've seen is hiring VERY defensively ("one bad apple..."), keep the team small, and keep the scope/focus very narrow. That's just not possible in the enterprise space though.

WJW 5y ago

My word, so much this. It is astounding how companies manage to kill initiative at every level as they grow. Individual team members can't change anything because they are at the bottom of the ladder and have to conform to the wishes of "the team" and low/middle managers somehow have even less autonomy because they can't go against their own managers but also have to navigate the peculiarities of their reports and various committees. You'd think that high level managers get more autonomy, but the demands of office politics (one serious mistake and you lose the shot at the C-suite you worked your whole career for) combined with their distance to people who can actually implement any changes they'd wish to make ensures that high level managers also have very little actual autonomy. It does not help that the word "ownership" has become a euphemism for "you must now care about this thing and fix it when it breaks at 2am, but economic benefits of any improvements to it will still flow to the shareholders". You get the drawbacks of ownership but not the benefits.

0xFACEFEED 5y ago

I don't think the problem is an obsession with collaboration. I've observed that it's mostly a defensive measure. The amount of damage that (sorry for putting it this way)... stupid people... can do is unbounded. The potential blast radius of bad decisions grows with the size of the company. Recovering from bad decisions is also very costly. The flip side of autonomy and empowerment is just that. When it's in the hands of a person that has a sense of pride in their work, a high bar for quality, determination to get the job done, loves the customer/user, etc then it's a recipe for productivity and happiness. When it's in the hands of a person who constantly ships broken code, has no work ethic, blames or doesn't care about the user, is jumping on every newest fad, etc then it can kill a whole company or a department. The only solution I've seen is hiring VERY defensively ("one bad apple..."), keep the team small, and keep the scope/focus very narrow. That's just not possible in the enterprise space though.