You recognize that your software development organization isn’t what it could be, and you’ve learned some ideas that you believe will improve things.
A sweet siren’s song is playing that if you just teach these ideas to enough people, your teams’ behaviors and processes will organically trend towards the improvement your organization needs.
It won’t happen.
Look, I’m a True Believer™ in spontaneous order, but it doesn’t seem to happen in firms. Perhaps the causal mechanism has been discovered via research, and if so I’d like to correct my ignorance of it, but speculating, leadership in a firm has a more direct influence on workers than any leader does on society at large.
I love the way Craig Larman phrased it in Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior:
- Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.
That link then describes several corollaries to this law.
The truth is, the org you have, for better or for worse, is the result of your leadership.
The dismal science—economics for those of you who have friends—has taught us at least one useful thing: humans respond to incentives. You’ve incentivized behaviors and what your people focus on.
If you have low quality, you haven’t demonstrated that your org values quality. If your employees are rude or abusive, you have demonstrated that your org accepts these behaviors.
On the other hand, if you rarely have production outages, it’s because you’ve modeled excellence in operation and put the structure in place to make it easy for your team to realize this result. (Or, you haven’t shipped anything because you can’t have a production outage if you have nothing in production, ha, but you get the point).
Deming said, “the job of a leader is to accomplish transformation of his organization.” (The New Economics, chapter 5, Leadership). That’s a sobering statement that’s causing me a lot introspection as I write this. It’s up to us as leaders to change the structure. It probably isn’t pleasant—transformation rarely is—but it’s the job.
I like how Ken Craddock phrased not doing this as “the abdication of leadership.”
