6 ms·

People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. It's not a problem specifically with OKRs, it's a problem with th

People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. It's not a problem specifically with OKRs, it's a problem with the whole concept that if HR can just put in this one simple system then doing so will be magically motivational and the whole company will go to ludicrous speed. There is no replacement for good people. Not in leadership positions, and not in IC positions. Recruit for strengths, hire for culture, train for gaps. No process, least of which OKRs, can make up for recruiting weak people, people who don't fit your culture, or people not interested in personal growth (i.e. filling gaps).

dheera 3y ago
Yep, this. Also, every time some new-manager-on-the-block decides that we have to implement "agile" everything just goes downhill from there. I don't even know what "agile" means anyway, what about "nimble" or "dextrous" instead, as long as people are not understanding each other, they all mean "let's fuck shit up every 2 weeks"
- moi2388 3y ago
  To me agile brings up a picture of Jean-Claude van Damme doing the splits. Because that’s what it feels like trying to manage expectations from management va stakeholders whilst also having daily meetings to discuss our effort and how we can remain lean and agile all the while building up tech debt
- justinclift 3y ago
  Yeah. Instead of spending money on improving AGI, most places should spend it on improving WIS. ;)
Arisaka1 3y ago
The first time my company decided to implement OKR's I told my manager that I'm already motivated by my own standards, and using OKR's as a carrot on a stick that I know it's deliberately and exclusively out of range is absurd. He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.
- sanitycheck 3y ago
  Oh, that strikes a chord with me! My struggle at work is usually _reducing_ my standards for quality, performance and customer satisfaction to match those of management & colleagues, because caring more than everybody else is a recipe for burnout.
  - mlrtime 3y ago
    I've worked with people that say the same thing, and they are usually very smart and high functioning. These type of people really need to work on their own startup where they can dictate the quality of work vs selling the product. It's the only way they will understand how to make the compromise between high standards and other long term product decision consequences.
- paholg 3y ago
  I worked at a company where every year we'd decide we were going to do OKRs or something similar, and we "were going to do it right this time". We'd spend weeks in meetings coming up goals and things we could measure, and end up with something like, "increase foo from X% to Y%". Here, "foo" is a placeholder for something or other, but the X and Y are not. We would literally leave them as variables, under the impression we'd fill them in eventually. A year later, we'd look at them again and see that we never filled in the numbers. Then repeat. It was pretty wild.
  - berniedurfee 3y ago
    Yep, I was on a team that tried to do OKRs only to waste months debating about how to correctly define OKRs. The fad wore off before we agreed on how to write OKRs and we never spoke of it again.
- al_borland 3y ago
  I find the out of range goals to be very demotivating. During the quarter they will hold our collective noses to the grindstone telling us to get this stuff done and hit certain dates and numbers. Then maybe once a year they will say they don’t expect us to hit any numbers that are set, in typical OKR fashion. If a game is setting me up to fail, I don’t want to play that game. My productivity has gone in the toilet ever since our management started pushing their brand of OKRs.
locallost 3y ago
Couldn't agree more. It's a fantasy that there is a magic wand or a system that can make anything and anyone efficient and productive at everything. I agree with the author, some process is needed to have a group of people on the same page, but it's not the driver of good results. In my experience, these ideas - broadly detailed processes, not just OKRs - are pushed very strongly by ambitious people who don't want to actually work or get good at something. So they push the idea that we should have processes everywhere that solve problems on their own.
Lionga 3y ago
Same thing with SCRUM or all the other bullshit that people who can not actually bring anything to the table use to justify their payroll, while only making things worse for anyone else involved.
- mythhabit 3y ago
  SCRUM is a great starting point for a team with dependable and medium to high performing members. It's important to remember that it is not a rigid framework, it is a starting point and a process to iterative improve the process. At some point you transcend SCRUM as we know it, and completely own the process. But there is not consultants salaries or SAFe in that, nor is management often completely on board with it, which means it is doomed from from the start, or at the very least crippled - earning the nickname "SCRUM-but"
  - Lionga 3y ago
    The SCRUM Guide literally says the if you change ANYTHING you are not doing SCRUM. It is the most rigid Bullshit ever.
    - mythhabit 3y ago
      If you view SCRUM as a rigid framework, you've already surrendered and completely missed the point of agile in general. Just because something was formulated once, does not mean it's not evolving and not improving with learning and new findings. It's nearly 30 years old at this point. The SCRUM guide is vague, and only provides basic roles, event, and definitions. The SCRUM alliance explicitly state that SCRUM is a starting point, and following the Shu Ha Ri principle a good team will eventually transcend the starting point. But you need to be disciplined when starting and learn it as it is defined. In my experience the main issue with SCRUM is actually with the team members. Either they're not dependable or too low performing to be give the freedom and self-management it requires to succeed, and management is not willing to foster the necessary environment and/or get the right people.
    - al_borland 3y ago
highwaylights 3y ago
I think this is mostly the case except that it’s not about weak people, personal growth or even mostly about culture. If people aren’t willing to go the extra mile for you, that’s on you honestly. If you’re incentivising and looking after your people they’ll feel like they have a stake and be personally invested. I don’t think anyone would argue that investment banks have great culture from the outside or be motivating their people by the virtues of their higher purpose etc. but the incentives are there, and they work very effectively to get people’s commitment.
Lutger 3y ago
I see this type of backlash against process a lot here. But I don't think 'just good people' is the answer. A lone hero can do a lot, maybe a band of them kick real ass, but it doesn't really scale beyond that nor does it last. Furthermore, even the best make silly mistakes, you need to have a lot of mechanisms to both prevent and mitigate against the consequences of failure if that is important to your business. Just imagine operating a hospital on the maxim that you 'only' need good people and process is evil. I know this is a bit of a straw man, I just want to make it clear that eradicating all process in favor of 'good people' isn't the answer. So what is? A good process can really help a lot in working together. I've worked with a mix of medium to good people, who continuously adapted the process to make it work and it helped, a lot. Medium people can do good work. And good people don't have as many obstacles. It is essential that the people who are responsible for executing also have the mandate of adopting or at least adapting a process to their context. A good process can save a lot of brain cycles and prevent all kinds of organizational waste. Its like automating away a lot of the overhead of working together and achieving goals collectively. But if the script doesn't work for a use case or with certain parameters, you better change it or just not run it to a fault.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  I think everything just has to be a large arbitrary tree of branches, with tasks going into subtasks until they are small bites enough to be divided amongst teams. Then you measure how these tasks are going and if required you change the tasks or branches. Everyone can move around the tree to see which team is responsible for which task and how any task on the whole is progressing.
  - Lutger 3y ago
    Well, that is quite top-down and organized. If it works, then great. But I wouldn't push everything into such a plan. On the other hand, I've worked in such a disconnected 'bottom-up' org that after about 8 years, finally the CEO told us he didn't like the business model we had been developing and specializing in. The end result was like 90% of senior devs resigned. We were clueless. Maybe a little goal setting would have helped?
RandomLensman 3y ago
People can for sure be motivated be simply, standardized processes, such as a % of revenues as commission. However, not everyone gets motivated that way and organizations could use different processes in places or also just say: we only want people motivated by X.
ozim 3y ago
You can pull up some employees to be better with processes. You cannot hire only best people because that is not possible. There are too many companies competing. Only thing manager can really do is to fire toxic and highly underperforming employees asap - this is basically only thing I expect from a manager.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
> People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. As much as anything else, standardization & bureaucratization & Taylorism are most generally forces of stability & predictability & control. A well.managed company does not go extra miles. It goes exactly as many miles as the company said it would. If everything is working well. In bad times and in desperation, extra miles are what keep things together, what plugs leaks and patches tares. I believe so strongly in extra miles, in going overboard, and pouring in extra. In making things better than they had to be. But these extra miles are, in my view, owned & done by individuals. Extra miles are what competent happy craftspeople do when they are enjoying their craft; embellishing & exceeding. The extra mile is almost always a person's own thing. It is almost never something management or the org can pursue. The org can set conditions: create space & permission & happiness. And when these positives align, then we see real extra miles. > There is no replacement for good people. And giving them time and space to put in some extra miles.

dheera 3y ago

Yep, this. Also, every time some new-manager-on-the-block decides that we have to implement "agile" everything just goes downhill from there. I don't even know what "agile" means anyway, what about "nimble" or "dextrous" instead, as long as people are not understanding each other, they all mean "let's fuck shit up every 2 weeks"

moi2388 3y ago
To me agile brings up a picture of Jean-Claude van Damme doing the splits. Because that’s what it feels like trying to manage expectations from management va stakeholders whilst also having daily meetings to discuss our effort and how we can remain lean and agile all the while building up tech debt
justinclift 3y ago
Yeah. Instead of spending money on improving AGI, most places should spend it on improving WIS. ;)

Arisaka1 3y ago

The first time my company decided to implement OKR's I told my manager that I'm already motivated by my own standards, and using OKR's as a carrot on a stick that I know it's deliberately and exclusively out of range is absurd. He was staring at me as if they invented penicillin and I was too dumb to appreciate it.

sanitycheck 3y ago
Oh, that strikes a chord with me! My struggle at work is usually _reducing_ my standards for quality, performance and customer satisfaction to match those of management & colleagues, because caring more than everybody else is a recipe for burnout.
- mlrtime 3y ago
  I've worked with people that say the same thing, and they are usually very smart and high functioning. These type of people really need to work on their own startup where they can dictate the quality of work vs selling the product. It's the only way they will understand how to make the compromise between high standards and other long term product decision consequences.
paholg 3y ago
I worked at a company where every year we'd decide we were going to do OKRs or something similar, and we "were going to do it right this time". We'd spend weeks in meetings coming up goals and things we could measure, and end up with something like, "increase foo from X% to Y%". Here, "foo" is a placeholder for something or other, but the X and Y are not. We would literally leave them as variables, under the impression we'd fill them in eventually. A year later, we'd look at them again and see that we never filled in the numbers. Then repeat. It was pretty wild.
- berniedurfee 3y ago
  Yep, I was on a team that tried to do OKRs only to waste months debating about how to correctly define OKRs. The fad wore off before we agreed on how to write OKRs and we never spoke of it again.
al_borland 3y ago
I find the out of range goals to be very demotivating. During the quarter they will hold our collective noses to the grindstone telling us to get this stuff done and hit certain dates and numbers. Then maybe once a year they will say they don’t expect us to hit any numbers that are set, in typical OKR fashion. If a game is setting me up to fail, I don’t want to play that game. My productivity has gone in the toilet ever since our management started pushing their brand of OKRs.

locallost 3y ago

Couldn't agree more. It's a fantasy that there is a magic wand or a system that can make anything and anyone efficient and productive at everything. I agree with the author, some process is needed to have a group of people on the same page, but it's not the driver of good results. In my experience, these ideas - broadly detailed processes, not just OKRs - are pushed very strongly by ambitious people who don't want to actually work or get good at something. So they push the idea that we should have processes everywhere that solve problems on their own.

Lionga 3y ago

Same thing with SCRUM or all the other bullshit that people who can not actually bring anything to the table use to justify their payroll, while only making things worse for anyone else involved.

mythhabit 3y ago
SCRUM is a great starting point for a team with dependable and medium to high performing members. It's important to remember that it is not a rigid framework, it is a starting point and a process to iterative improve the process. At some point you transcend SCRUM as we know it, and completely own the process. But there is not consultants salaries or SAFe in that, nor is management often completely on board with it, which means it is doomed from from the start, or at the very least crippled - earning the nickname "SCRUM-but"
- Lionga 3y ago
  The SCRUM Guide literally says the if you change ANYTHING you are not doing SCRUM. It is the most rigid Bullshit ever.
  - mythhabit 3y ago
    If you view SCRUM as a rigid framework, you've already surrendered and completely missed the point of agile in general. Just because something was formulated once, does not mean it's not evolving and not improving with learning and new findings. It's nearly 30 years old at this point. The SCRUM guide is vague, and only provides basic roles, event, and definitions. The SCRUM alliance explicitly state that SCRUM is a starting point, and following the Shu Ha Ri principle a good team will eventually transcend the starting point. But you need to be disciplined when starting and learn it as it is defined. In my experience the main issue with SCRUM is actually with the team members. Either they're not dependable or too low performing to be give the freedom and self-management it requires to succeed, and management is not willing to foster the necessary environment and/or get the right people.
  - al_borland 3y ago

highwaylights 3y ago

I think this is mostly the case except that it’s not about weak people, personal growth or even mostly about culture. If people aren’t willing to go the extra mile for you, that’s on you honestly. If you’re incentivising and looking after your people they’ll feel like they have a stake and be personally invested. I don’t think anyone would argue that investment banks have great culture from the outside or be motivating their people by the virtues of their higher purpose etc. but the incentives are there, and they work very effectively to get people’s commitment.

Lutger 3y ago

I see this type of backlash against process a lot here. But I don't think 'just good people' is the answer. A lone hero can do a lot, maybe a band of them kick real ass, but it doesn't really scale beyond that nor does it last. Furthermore, even the best make silly mistakes, you need to have a lot of mechanisms to both prevent and mitigate against the consequences of failure if that is important to your business. Just imagine operating a hospital on the maxim that you 'only' need good people and process is evil. I know this is a bit of a straw man, I just want to make it clear that eradicating all process in favor of 'good people' isn't the answer. So what is? A good process can really help a lot in working together. I've worked with a mix of medium to good people, who continuously adapted the process to make it work and it helped, a lot. Medium people can do good work. And good people don't have as many obstacles. It is essential that the people who are responsible for executing also have the mandate of adopting or at least adapting a process to their context. A good process can save a lot of brain cycles and prevent all kinds of organizational waste. Its like automating away a lot of the overhead of working together and achieving goals collectively. But if the script doesn't work for a use case or with certain parameters, you better change it or just not run it to a fault.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
I think everything just has to be a large arbitrary tree of branches, with tasks going into subtasks until they are small bites enough to be divided amongst teams. Then you measure how these tasks are going and if required you change the tasks or branches. Everyone can move around the tree to see which team is responsible for which task and how any task on the whole is progressing.
- Lutger 3y ago
  Well, that is quite top-down and organized. If it works, then great. But I wouldn't push everything into such a plan. On the other hand, I've worked in such a disconnected 'bottom-up' org that after about 8 years, finally the CEO told us he didn't like the business model we had been developing and specializing in. The end result was like 90% of senior devs resigned. We were clueless. Maybe a little goal setting would have helped?

RandomLensman 3y ago

People can for sure be motivated be simply, standardized processes, such as a % of revenues as commission. However, not everyone gets motivated that way and organizations could use different processes in places or also just say: we only want people motivated by X.

ozim 3y ago

You can pull up some employees to be better with processes. You cannot hire only best people because that is not possible. There are too many companies competing. Only thing manager can really do is to fire toxic and highly underperforming employees asap - this is basically only thing I expect from a manager.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

> People will never be motivated to go the extra mile by a standardized, bureaucratized process. As much as anything else, standardization & bureaucratization & Taylorism are most generally forces of stability & predictability & control. A well.managed company does not go extra miles. It goes exactly as many miles as the company said it would. If everything is working well. In bad times and in desperation, extra miles are what keep things together, what plugs leaks and patches tares. I believe so strongly in extra miles, in going overboard, and pouring in extra. In making things better than they had to be. But these extra miles are, in my view, owned & done by individuals. Extra miles are what competent happy craftspeople do when they are enjoying their craft; embellishing & exceeding. The extra mile is almost always a person's own thing. It is almost never something management or the org can pursue. The org can set conditions: create space & permission & happiness. And when these positives align, then we see real extra miles. > There is no replacement for good people. And giving them time and space to put in some extra miles.