4 ms·

I think this article lays out something I knew through observation, but hadn’t cognitively thought through before. I’ve definitely seen what he calls “corporat

I think this article lays out something I knew through observation, but hadn’t cognitively thought through before. I’ve definitely seen what he calls “corporate managers” struggle in smaller companies, just as much as I’ve seen what he calls “lean middle managers” fight themselves to death in corporate scenarios.

bl4ckm0r3 5y ago
-Author here- thanks! And yeah that is exactly the point... it's a mismatch in expectations and a misplacement of the person. It's very similar to being an IC in a sales oriented company vs a product company. The big issue is that most companies look for the "lean" type and then expects them to be the corporate type and this creates a lot of unhappiness in both sides!!
- chris_j 5y ago
  Thanks very much for writing this article and for describing very eloquently something that I to have observed but hadn't been able to articulate. The really scary thing, from my perspective at least, is that I have, in a few different places, seen a drift over time from the lean style to the corporate style. A start-up grows into a larger company. A layer of middle management is hired. The HR department becomes more than one person. Now there are processes that need to be followed... The lean management style that used to work doesn't work any more. The sort of feedback that used to be welcomed is now seen as negative. I've witnessed quite a few people get burned out and have to leave companies that they used to be successful in. I guess knowing is half the battle so thank you for writing this great piece.
  - bl4ckm0r3 5y ago
    Thank you for the comment! Absolutely agree, that is a natural (even though I believe not mandatory) phase of the evolution of a startup/lean company into a scaled organisation. I am not against processes, people need a certain guide over how to handle situations, and I absolutely understand why people would leave, and they should! Because if they don't want to work in a certain way, simply the company is not providing a good environment for them to grow. The negativity part is intrinsic to the idea that you become 1) a motivator for your team 2) the operational arm of leadership. Your are not supposed to say "we should not do this" because this is creating an issue to the org that is in hyper growth and cannot be focused in changing processes or following everyone's opinion, but should be focused in growth and whatever strategic objective they want to achieve. Another issue is that normally, in those hyper growth phases, companies hire people that had similar previous experience and normally they all see this type of control as necessary to grow. They start looking for predictability (so you start seeing year long roadmaps, change request processes, waterfall processes, precise long term estimations etc) and uniformity, because if your company is growing by the hundreds they don't know how to control that without normalising and unifying the way people work. Normally this type of leadership does not work in a fail safe environment, are not used to give space for people to try and do experiments and is very focused in making things look good to upper management. As an example, one of my directors once told us managers that every team had to have the same shape and the same distribution of seniority, completely ignoring the different services each team owned and seniority required by those services. I still don't know what problem he was trying to fix, or if this would have fixed any problem at all. We gave feedback, and still had to do the job and explain to the team members why this was good for the tribe.

bl4ckm0r3 5y ago

-Author here- thanks! And yeah that is exactly the point... it's a mismatch in expectations and a misplacement of the person. It's very similar to being an IC in a sales oriented company vs a product company. The big issue is that most companies look for the "lean" type and then expects them to be the corporate type and this creates a lot of unhappiness in both sides!!

chris_j 5y ago
Thanks very much for writing this article and for describing very eloquently something that I to have observed but hadn't been able to articulate. The really scary thing, from my perspective at least, is that I have, in a few different places, seen a drift over time from the lean style to the corporate style. A start-up grows into a larger company. A layer of middle management is hired. The HR department becomes more than one person. Now there are processes that need to be followed... The lean management style that used to work doesn't work any more. The sort of feedback that used to be welcomed is now seen as negative. I've witnessed quite a few people get burned out and have to leave companies that they used to be successful in. I guess knowing is half the battle so thank you for writing this great piece.
- bl4ckm0r3 5y ago
  Thank you for the comment! Absolutely agree, that is a natural (even though I believe not mandatory) phase of the evolution of a startup/lean company into a scaled organisation. I am not against processes, people need a certain guide over how to handle situations, and I absolutely understand why people would leave, and they should! Because if they don't want to work in a certain way, simply the company is not providing a good environment for them to grow. The negativity part is intrinsic to the idea that you become 1) a motivator for your team 2) the operational arm of leadership. Your are not supposed to say "we should not do this" because this is creating an issue to the org that is in hyper growth and cannot be focused in changing processes or following everyone's opinion, but should be focused in growth and whatever strategic objective they want to achieve. Another issue is that normally, in those hyper growth phases, companies hire people that had similar previous experience and normally they all see this type of control as necessary to grow. They start looking for predictability (so you start seeing year long roadmaps, change request processes, waterfall processes, precise long term estimations etc) and uniformity, because if your company is growing by the hundreds they don't know how to control that without normalising and unifying the way people work. Normally this type of leadership does not work in a fail safe environment, are not used to give space for people to try and do experiments and is very focused in making things look good to upper management. As an example, one of my directors once told us managers that every team had to have the same shape and the same distribution of seniority, completely ignoring the different services each team owned and seniority required by those services. I still don't know what problem he was trying to fix, or if this would have fixed any problem at all. We gave feedback, and still had to do the job and explain to the team members why this was good for the tribe.