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>> It's great if there's actually stuff you can turn down, but more often than not there really are business objectives that won't be met if you don't do the wo

>> It's great if there's actually stuff you can turn down, but more often than not there really are business objectives that won't be met if you don't do the work. Make it about resource planning. Two stories: One of my old managers was really good at getting himself in meetings where new business was being discussed. Even if he wasn't invited because people didn't think our team would need to be involved in a project. He could either convince them that we didn't have resources, we needed additional resources, or we could make due (maybe shuffle a bit) with what we had. Our team was almost never blindsided. I was running a small software team doing multiple embedded projects. We had more projects than people, but I made a chart breaking software for each project into common high level components (some were N/A of course, some were largely reusable) and showing percent complete on each one. In one meeting I simply showed that one of the smaller projects had zero percent completes across most components, and said it was going to stay that way for the foreseeable future due to all the other partial completes on higher priority products. That one got cancelled within days. I've come to appreciate an important part of management is to prevent these interruptions from reaching the people doing actual work, or to... you know "manage" the workload on behalf of the team.

noobker 4y ago
Engineers never want to admit that it amounts to politics. No amount of process will shield you from politics. It has to play out; priorities have to be decided. You can try to alienate yourself from it and watch it play out like the weather -- leaving yourself to prepare for the seasons. Or, you can suck it up, learn that humans are a critical (THE critical) component of the system. You have to learn how they work too.
hinkley 4y ago
In addition to this, GP is wrestling with an open feedback cycle. As long as the executives are allowed to behave this way with no consequences, they become habituated to doing it. They need back pressure, in order to train themselves to look a little farther down the road (a month is not too much to ask) instead of constantly sabotaging the team every time a new thing they just thought of enters their heads.
- kcexn 4y ago
  Executives typically do face consequences for making poor decisions. But the nature of their work means the outcome horizons are often way off in the future. C-suite leaders who perform poorly are eventually removed by the board and shareholders. In some organisations there is so much fear of making poor decisions, that leading never really happens. And instead of thriving in a competitive environment, the company slowly dies. A good middle manager is supposed to be able to mediate the strategic needs of the organisation as dictated by senior leadership, and the feelings of their team in a way that makes everybody happy. This is a very difficult skill.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    Not finding out for years if at all is an open feedback cycle. In a world where we are doing fast feedback iterations, that’s two to three orders of magnitude off from the rest of the organization.

noobker 4y ago

Engineers never want to admit that it amounts to politics. No amount of process will shield you from politics. It has to play out; priorities have to be decided. You can try to alienate yourself from it and watch it play out like the weather -- leaving yourself to prepare for the seasons. Or, you can suck it up, learn that humans are a critical (THE critical) component of the system. You have to learn how they work too.

hinkley 4y ago

In addition to this, GP is wrestling with an open feedback cycle. As long as the executives are allowed to behave this way with no consequences, they become habituated to doing it. They need back pressure, in order to train themselves to look a little farther down the road (a month is not too much to ask) instead of constantly sabotaging the team every time a new thing they just thought of enters their heads.

kcexn 4y ago
Executives typically do face consequences for making poor decisions. But the nature of their work means the outcome horizons are often way off in the future. C-suite leaders who perform poorly are eventually removed by the board and shareholders. In some organisations there is so much fear of making poor decisions, that leading never really happens. And instead of thriving in a competitive environment, the company slowly dies. A good middle manager is supposed to be able to mediate the strategic needs of the organisation as dictated by senior leadership, and the feelings of their team in a way that makes everybody happy. This is a very difficult skill.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Not finding out for years if at all is an open feedback cycle. In a world where we are doing fast feedback iterations, that’s two to three orders of magnitude off from the rest of the organization.