commentary

What Advice Would You Give? (Part 2)

After reading Tim Walker's though-provoking What "Real Advice" Would You Give Your Company?, I clicked over to a related question posted in October of this year.

My work often brings me into contact with college students — undergrads and grads — who are 10+ years younger than I am. Sometimes they, in all their wide-eyed naivete, ask me for career advice. Usually, in all my megalomania self-assurance, I give them some.

(What Advice Would You Give?)

Tim provides some excellent advice, interspersed with delightful images of cautionary signs. I encourage you to read the full post, then think about what advice you would give.

Here's mine:

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What Advice Would You Give

Tim Walker (Hoover's Business Insight Zone) asks What "Real Advice" Would You Give Your Company?

Quick fix = easy.

Tips-’n'-tricks = easy.

Actually doing things better = hard.
...
Even the best of us can fall for this illusion some of the time. In the business world, managers of high quality don’t believe in money for nothing. But even they can fall into the chasm between knowing that a problem exists and acting on that problem.
...
It’s going to take more than tips-’n'-tricks to get them where they need to be. It requires real advice, which is hard to give and hard to hear.

YOUR Advice

So, that brings us to you.

• If you could offer it without fear of recriminations . . .
• If you knew that it would be heeded and acted upon at the highest levels . . .
• If you knew that your organization was willing to go through the hard slog of making itself better . . .

. . . what REAL advice would you give?

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Job vs Company; I'll Take the Job

When I began working for Cotheme (the Company that employs me), it was with decidedly mixed feelings. I hadn't gone looking for a job there; they found me. I wasn't in their customer demographic. I didn't use any of their products or services. The location was at the far edge of the distance I was wiling to commute.

But, they had a position available and I needed a job. Many of the people in the department used Mac OS X, so Windows wouldn't be an issue. I wouldn't have to drive; the location is reachable by train and shuttle. Telecommuting one day a week was not only permitted, it was common.

And, after all, I didn't actively dislike the Company or any of their products or services. Working there wouldn't be philosophically repugnant. It just felt a bit odd that I didn't really care about what they did.

Besides, it was a only 3-month contract. And then it became full time...

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Re-orgs Hazardous to Teams

On Monday, my manager said "We're having a re-org. But don't worry. it doesn't affect anyone in my group."

She was partially correct. There is no immediate, direct, acute effect. However, the longterm indirect effects are demoralizing. We're losing three people from the Team.

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Changing the Culture? Start with the Meeting!

The Company That Employs Me has decided it needs to Change. To get the employees to understand and "internalize" the new Purpose, they're holding "Corporate Purpose, Strategy and Culture" meetings. Specifically, mandatory, 3-hour, in-person attendance meetings.

This is not a Company with a history of holding effective meetings. You could say that effective meetings are not part of the Company Culture. It seems to me, then, that a good way to start changing the Company Culture would be to start with that first meeting.

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Four Walls and a Door

In 1992. I was working at Apple. Apple had recently completed and opened a new R&D center — 6 large buildings, across the road from where I worked. Our group wasn't moving but we'd heard the rumors. Everyone in the R&D center had an office with a door.

In 1993, I went to work for Taligent, the Apple-IBM Joint Venture. Taligent was about to start construction on new office space. They studied what Apple had done, then proceeded to follow the same model — a hard-walled office for every employee, complete with a door.

The space wasn't large; it had less floor space, frankly, than my former cube. But it had real walls and a door, a door I could close (and often did). It had its own lighting controls.

It was private. It was conducive to thought and productive work.

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Whisper Campaign

I recently switched to a new manager at The Job. By "new" I mean both new for me and new to the Company That Employs Me.

Our first meeting was not what I expected. My new manager's first words were:
    "So, what's with this email?
        (What email?)
    The email you sent yesterday.
        (Which email?)
   You seem very frustrated?
        (Um...no?)

Things went downhill from there. She asked me to send her anything I was planning to send to a "large audience" first so she could preview it before I sent it. Over the next week, I kept getting battered with repetitions on the theme. The preview requests went from "email to a large audience" to "email to managers" to "long email" to pretty much any email to anyone.

I began to wonder what was really going on. Was she micromanaging? Or did someone put her up to this? And why?

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Empowered Teams

Companies fear empowered teams. Employee empowerment represents the end of management as we have known it. That cannot happen too soon for me.

I have been privileged to have worked in an empowered team. Without a full-time "official" manager, they were self-managed. Proponents of the corporate management hierarchy might fear anarchy. Instead, this team was democratically run. They were independent, innovative, professional, and accountable; they shared responsibility and ownership. They got things done.

Being a part of an empowered team is a heady experience. Once you've experienced that, you want it again.

The team still exists, but it's "under new management". In other words, there's a "real" full-time manager now and he's taken charge in the way of all managers. There's hope, however, if not for us, for others.

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Do You Pass The Joel Test?

Do you work for a Tech company? Are you part of a software team?

Does your team pass the "Joel Test"?

Seven years ago, Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software) created "The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code". He calls this his "own, highly irresponsible, sloppy test to rate the quality of a software team".

The neat thing about The Joel Test is that it's easy to get a quick yes or no to each question. You don't have to figure out lines-of-code-per-day or average-bugs-per-inflection-point. Give your team 1 point for each "yes" answer. The bummer about The Joel Test is that you really shouldn't use it to make sure that your nuclear power plant software is safe.

A score of 12 is perfect, 11 is tolerable, but 10 or lower and you've got serious problems. The truth is that most software organizations are running with a score of 2 or 3, ...

A friend of ours recently pointed out that the Joel Test is part of the submission form for job postings to jobs.joelonsoftware.com. I think this is great. However, I would add three more steps.

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Business Communication

There is a popular belief, generally put forward by human resources departments, time management consultants, and other "experts", that formal communication and discussion between people in the workplace should never be handled by email (i.e. written). "Important" communication should be handled by voice.

Preferably, they say, this communication should be in a face to face meeting. If that's not possible, they recommend using the telephone. The rationale that is typically given is that written methods of communication (i.e. email) don't convey tone and facial expression.

A recently published study would seem to support this view.

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