Posts Tagged with "organisation"

#1e: The importance of buy-in.

Gaining buy-in is a key reason for communicating well. As you rise in an organisation, the outcomes expected of you outpace the growth in your capacity as an individual contributor.Read more →

#5: At scale, your systems will break.

Systems will break past a certain scale; this is inevitable. In the case of software, systems generally survive one order of magnitude of the growth — for example, in network traffic.Read more →

#5a: Organisations and their capacity for change.

Since systems are designed for certain scales, and most companies pursue continued growth, most systems within successful organisations will inevitably break. This failure can be mitigated through deliberate change management — but some caution is needed.Read more →

#6b: Mission, vision, and strategy.

Mission is the "what" of your organisation, vision the "why", and strategy the "how".Read more →

#8a: How the needs of information sharing shapes an organisation.

The need for broad context to guide good decisions shapes an organisation's structure. As an organisation grows, fewer people possess a broad enough context to make optimal decisions.Read more →

#8a1: Silos are inevitable.

Despite the need for shared alignment, cross-functional knowledge, context, and expertise, silos still form within an organisation. Silos are natural and inevitable.Read more →

#9a2: Your role in shaping positional authority within the organisation.

At higher levels in an organisation, positional authority becomes less important than influence. There are more politics and ego, and fewer concrete answers. Yet this does not mean you can ignore the impact of this type of power in your organisation.Read more →

#9c3: Management should be well-defined.

The role of leadership is to inspire. The role of management is to execute. Leaders may exist at all levels, and their role as a leader may not necessarily be formalised. But management should be well-defined.Read more →

#9d: Leader as organisational architect.

The higher you climb in your organisation, the more you must take on the role of organisational architect. You are responsible for creating and aligning the key elements of the organisational system.Read more →

#10: Technology companies are human communication companies.

Almost all the companies in the business of technology are, primarily, in the business of human communication. Success of failure of a company relies not as much on the quality of its technology as on the quality of its communication at all levels.Read more →

#12b: The high cost of high employee turnover.

High employee turnover is one of the greatest threats to the long-term success of business. Consider, first, the monetary cost of an employee leaving. Around 20% of all people-related expenses are attributable to turnover:Read more →

#12b1: Do you know your company's retention rate?

Despite the dire consequences of high turnover, a company's retention rate is rarely known by its talent team or senior leaders. It is even more infrequently shared across the organisation.Read more →

#12c: How high turnover damages performance and culture.

More damaging than direct loss of investment in your employees, but less visible, is the effect of high turnover on team performance and company culture. A team that loses a key member not only loses their expertise, but also suffers a loss of cohesion.Read more →

#13a: Culture, values, and performance variation across companies.

An employee's at work experience is greatly affected by their local environment, yet a company's performance does not comprise only the sum of its employees' individual experiences. Performance variation has been found to be stronger across companies than within them.Read more →

#13a1: To improve individual performance, improve team performance.

Individual performance follows a power law: the best outperform the worst by an order of magnitude. A manager is unlikely to change her people in a meaningful way, so it is unlikely for low performers to become high performers and shift the distribution (at least, within a company or team).Read more →

#13b1: How understanding company culture helps you succeed.

Culture is multi-layered and pervasive; this has several implications for how to succeed within a company.Read more →

#14a1: Repeated actions change organisational beliefs.

The connection between repeated action and belief change is not only true for an individual but also for an organisation. New ways of thinking and acting brought from the outside, or internal mobilisation to respond to a changing world, drive organisational change.Read more →

#17a: To reduce risk, aim for small, single-purpose teams.

From consideration of a portfolio-based approach to managing organisational risk and of the efficacy of single-purpose teams, it follows that a company should prefer to comprise many smaller teams — each managing a single project — over few, larger project teams.Read more →

#18a: Turnover loses not just the person but their knowledge.

Since organisational knowledge lies within its people, there is great hidden cost in layoffs and high turnover. Laid off staff take with them part of the organisation's learning; this partially offsets whatever expense is saved in salary cost.Read more →

#20: Don't just learn your role, learn the system.

To succeed in a role, it is often not enough to learn your job. You must also learn the system.Read more →

#21: The goal of process is to remove itself.

The goal of process is to remove itself. Process should not be an end in itself, but a means.Read more →

#21a: How to help your team internalise a process.

After being introduced to a team, process may sometimes persist overly long and fail to become internalised. This may be due to process creator (often the team's lead) being invested more heavily in the process itself than the problem it aims to solve.Read more →

#21a1: Why your team isn't adopting a process.

Your team is unlikely to adopt a process they don't like or believe in. Seek to understand their perspective. If your team is not buying into a process, chances are it was implemented without sufficient consultation. They may disagree with the specific approach.Read more →

Reference #51: An Elegant Puzzle

Larger organisations tend towards centralised groups for product and engineering decisions. These are commonly "product review" groups for standardised product decisions, and "architecture groups" for consistent technical designs.Read more →

Reference #53: An Elegant Puzzle

To guide decision-making, consider your company (which includes other teams), your own team, and yourself, in that order.Read more →

Reference #54: An Elegant Puzzle

There three broad types of engineering management roles:Read more →

Reference #148: Peopleware

Organisational standards such as professionalism are generally for the benefits of insiders, not outsiders.Read more →

Reference #149: Peopleware

Entropy always increases within an organisation. The longer an organisation exists and the larger it grows, the greater that organisation's uniformity.Read more →

Reference #170: Peopleware

People have a need for closure. As a manager, you should ensure there are opportunities for it.Read more →

Reference #177: Peopleware

While an open organisation in which people are happy to have their work seen is admirable, this organisation can become dysfunctional.Read more →

Reference #179: Peopleware

Chaos is an inevitable step in the process of organisational change. Virginia Satir provides the following model of change:Read more →

Reference #200: The First 90 Days

Culture is a consistent set of patterns people follow for communicating, thinking, and acting. It is grounded in their shared assumptions and values.Read more →

Reference #202: The First 90 Days

When joining a new company, you can benefit from finding a cultural interpreter.Read more →

Reference #203: The First 90 Days

Understanding an organisation's history is important to a leader. Without it, she risks changing structures and processes without knowing why they exist in the first place.Read more →

Reference #205: The First 90 Days

In the shadow of the formal structure of many organisations exists the "shadow organisation" — an informal set of processes and alliances that strongly influence how work actually gets done.Read more →

Reference #206: The First 90 Days

When diagnosing a new organisation, a leader should ask her direct reports the same five questions:Read more →

Reference #209: The First 90 Days

New leaders may find themselves moving into one of the five common business situations: startup, turnaround, accelerated growth, realignment, and sustaining success. These situations are collectively known as STARS.Read more →

Reference #210: The First 90 Days

Successful businesses do not remain successful forever. Due to internal complacency, erosion of key capabilities, and external challenges, they tend to drift towards trouble.Read more →

Reference #211: The First 90 Days

Success in transitioning depends in large part on your ability to transform the prevailing organisational psychology.Read more →

Reference #212: The First 90 Days

The STARS model can be applied to all levels in an organisation.Read more →

Reference #213: The First 90 Days

While a business situation may fall neatly into one of the STARS situations at a high level, the portfolio of products, projects, processes, plants, and people you manage almost certainly represents a mix of situations.Read more →

Reference #216: The First 90 Days

According to a Harvard Business Review survey on transitions, accelerated growth (11.6%), startup (13.5%), and turnaround (21.9%) business situations were judged as the least challenging (where % is the percentage of respondents who described the situation as the "most challenging").Read more →

Reference #217: The First 90 Days

Measuring success is more difficult in some business situations than others.Read more →

Reference #226: The First 90 Days

Identify early on what your boss cares about. In particular, learn what parts of the organisation — such as products and people — you should not push to shut down or replace.Read more →

Reference #227: The First 90 Days

Underpromise and overdeliver early in your role to build credibility.Read more →

Reference #235: The First 90 Days

As a new leader, be careful not to fall into the low-hanging fruit trap. This occurs when you focus most of your time seeking early wins that don't advance larger and longer-term business objectives.Read more →

Reference #241: The First 90 Days

The best way to lead change depends on the situation. After identifying the most important problem, you need to assess whether the organisation is ready to change — in which case a plan-then-implement approach will work well — or whether you need to engage in collective learning.Read more →

Reference #242: The First 90 Days

People and organisations can only absorb so much change at once.Read more →

Reference #243: The First 90 Days

Changing your organisation likely means changing its culture.Read more →

Reference #245: The First 90 Days

Leaders must be organisational architects.Read more →

Reference #246: The First 90 Days

Understanding organisational systems builds credibility with more senior people in your organisation.Read more →

Reference #247: The First 90 Days

A reorganisation is not always the solution to organisational issues.Read more →

Reference #248: The First 90 Days

Your organisation is an open system. It is affected by the external environment — such as customers, competitors, and suppliers — and by the internal environment — including morale and culture.Read more →

Reference #249: The First 90 Days

Your organisation has limited capacity to absorb change.Read more →

Reference #250: The First 90 Days

Being a system, your organisational architecture comprises distinct interacting elements. These must be aligned to work for the organisation to work well.Read more →

Reference #253: The First 90 Days

Much of an organisation's power is allocated by its structure. The structure defines who has explicit authority over what and whom.Read more →

Reference #254: The First 90 Days

An organisation's structure is how it organises its people and technology to support its strategic direction.Read more →

Reference #255: The First 90 Days

Every organisational structure has trade offs. Your challenge is to find the right balance for your situation.Read more →

Reference #273: The First 90 Days

To understand the influence landscape in your organisation, consider mapping influence networks. These show who influences whom on issues that concern you.Read more →

Reference #303: Empowered

Weak first-level people management is the main cause of weak product companies.Read more →

Reference #411: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture is socio-technical. It solves for issues of internal integration (how the group works together) and external adaptation (strategic, problem-solving). Effective organisations align, if not integrate, the external and internal dimensions.Read more →

Reference #430: Organizational Culture and Leadership

O'Reilly and Tushman (2016) found that the long-term survival of an organisation hinges on two factors. Can the organisation to manage its existing, currently successful business? And can it concurrently develop a new business that is responsive to changing environmental conditions?Read more →

Reference #432: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A mature organisation differs from a growing startup in many ways:Read more →

Reference #434: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Organisational culture often reflects both the originating national macroculture and the underlying technology of the business. It cannot be understood without looking at the macrocultural contexts in which the organisation exists.Read more →

Reference #443: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every culture has a basic time orientation toward the past, present, or future. Anglo-Americans have been found to primarily orient toward the near future, while the Japanese sit at the extreme of long-range planning. Time orientation also affects organisations. U.S.Read more →

Reference #459: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural misunderstanding can across levels of organisational hierarchy, even where the same macrocultures are shared. Going down the hierarchy, the miscommunication mainly results from misunderstood instructions. Going up the hierarchy, the main misunderstanding comes from lost information.Read more →

Reference #471: Organizational Culture and Leadership

An organisation is a socio-technical system. How it deals with survival in the external environmental, and how it organisations itself internally to deal with human problems of integration, are equally part of its culture. These problems are highly interconnected.Read more →

Reference #472: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Most organisations have multiple functions, reflecting multiple stakeholders. Some come from espoused values and are called "manifest functions". Others are unspoken and arise from shared taken-for-granted assumptions, called "latent functions".Read more →

Reference #473: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Strategy must consider and make sense within its organisation's culture. Shared assumptions about an organisation's identity are important elements of culture, and so limit strategic options. A strategy must be consistent with the organisation's assumptions about itself.Read more →

Reference #475: Organizational Culture and Leadership

There are six primary mechanisms through which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation:Read more →

Reference #476: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The mechanisms through which leaders primarily embed their beliefs — and in so doing teach their organisation how to perceive, think, feel, and behave — directly create the "climate" of that organisation.Read more →

Reference #477: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In addition to the six primary mechanisms by which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation, there are also six secondary reinforcement and stabilising mechanisms:Read more →

Reference #479: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Among other functions, organisational systems and procedures make life predictable for members of that organisation. They relieve ambiguity and anxiety. Systems lend structure to an otherwise ambiguous organisational world.Read more →

Reference #482: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Among other subcultures, every organisation contains three generic subcultures: operators, designers, and executives. Without explicit management, misalignment and conflict may arise between these subcultures as they have different functions and face different environmental problems.Read more →

Reference #483: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The executive subculture is unique among the generic organisational subcultures in having to manage other functions. Its members must hence understand and manage the culture of those functions. They must manage other subcultures.Read more →

Reference #484: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In an organisation's early stage, the emphasis of culture is on differentiating that organisation from its environment. It is the psychosocial "glue" that holds the organisation together and gives its members identity.Read more →

Reference #485: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Absent major external stressors, and if the founder remains for a long time, early stage company culture evolves in small increments by assimilating what works well. This occurs through two basic processes: general evolution and specific evolution.Read more →

Reference #489: Organizational Culture and Leadership

If you seek to learn about an organisation's culture, an effective approach is to act as a helper or in a consultant role. Members may see researchers as outsider and hence not give an accurate picture of culture — for example, by exaggerating to impress you, or by hiding information.Read more →

Seeing your organisation as a system

Have you had all the right elements for your team to perform, but didn’t get the results you wanted? Have you tried changing one thing, only for something else to break? I have. I know why. The secret comes from seeing your organisation as a system.Read more →

Meet the team: a primer on product teams

Let's say you're running a software organisation for the first time. You've got plenty of questions: who does the work? How does work get done? Where does the work come from? And how do you keep your teams aligned? Let's answer these questions.Read more →