Not really. Each point puts me in a position where I appear as a weak or ineffective employee, which is likely to harm my coworkers and managers assumption of my skill level and therefore bonuses, raises and future employment.
If I inform you now about the risk of missing the deadline, I look weak, ineffective, etc (even if it is better for the team) but if I wait and some situation develop which I can say will prevent us from reaching the deadline, I don't look nearly as weak.
His 3 points are very good, but unless you are working a small company or a start-up, you have to play politics.
>His 3 points are very good, but unless you are working a small company or a start-up, you have to play politics.
I guess that's the perspective I'm missing.
From where I sit, it's almost unimaginable that those three points are anything but a given. But I've never worked outside of small businesses/startups.
If I don't tell my boss -- the founder -- up front that we can't make a deadline, or that a feature won't happen, it's much more of a risk.
How can programmers help change large corporate culture so that playing politics isn't as important? Or, at least, so that more honest communication can take place without risking blowback?
I think if anyone figures out a general solution to that one they'll probably have solved a much more important issue than corporate cultural dynamics; they'll have solved government.
The dynamics of risk change with the size of the entity involved. For example, in a small startup, losing a hard drive could mean the end of months of work - could kill the company. Or since everyone makes backups / uses hosted services these days ( right? ;) ), maybe a better analogy would be an employee being lost to sickness for months.
In a 100+ person company a broken hard drive should never be anything more than annoying, losing an employee is going to be unfortunate and might even significantly delay a product/feature; but it won't be the end of the business.
There's a raft of interpersonal dynamics which change too; the larger the company the less likely you are to be pally with everyone. Simple factor of surface area - you can't cover them all. So relationships become more formal. As spheres of responsibility begin to form, people develop moats around those responsibilities for better "separation of concerns".
At some point I suppose stuff starts to slip between those self-defined spheres, especially as people move in and out of roles, subtly redefining them each time.
Making sure you're not being negligent (or seen to be negligent) in a multi-million dollar company is kind of a big deal if you expect to work somewhere else in future (and especially if you intend to keep working at that company).
Again, this could be coming from my lack of experience in this world.
While your points are well taken, I'm not sure how those three points change between small & large companies. I'm going to focus on "WARN": the other two seem to be less contentious.
Working in small companies, if I'm not going to be able to make my deadline, the proverbial buck stops at me -- so I'd better own up to it, and tell my boss why it happened, and more importantly, what I'm doing to fix it.
Is it just that in a large company I can spread blame around a bit more? "It's not really my fault -- my team lead wasn't on the ball, we had too much pushback from sales, and if we could cut some of the dead weight from this team..."
Is that the issue? Or is it something I don't see?
It's less that you can spread the blame around than it is that the blame is spread around a bit more. Tasks get broken up, redundancy gets built in.
One of the most important goals for my "parent" company after we were acquired was to make sure that I (as the first and only employee) was not going to be killing the company if I left to pursue something else or got sick, etc.
So you've effectively got it, it's just that, in a big company, unless you're the CTO or in some other relatively lofty position, the buck probably does not stop with you.
Depends on the company obviously, YMMV, but I think the important takeaway is that "big" companies aren't just larger "small" companies - they're very different entities.
There's an interesting talk from Geoffrey West that (if I recall correctly) is somewhat related to this topic (the scaling of cities vs companies) - http://edge.org/conversation/geoffrey-west
Apologies if I've left you more puzzled than before!
I agree with you this does seem to be the case in most companies, but I think that is because a majority of the people would look at it the exact same way you are. If you, your manager, their manager...etc all think this way, then you will think a person asking you how to solve a problem is weak because you would never do it yourself. Now if the majority of the people at your company believed in these 3 points personally, then the whole dynamic would change. Granted this is a bit of a perfect world scenario, but it is one that any new founder or hiring manager can start putting into place from day 1.
If I inform you now about the risk of missing the deadline, I look weak, ineffective, etc (even if it is better for the team) but if I wait and some situation develop which I can say will prevent us from reaching the deadline, I don't look nearly as weak.
I don't think it makes you look weak at all — putting the success of the team first shows leadership and maturity. Waiting for a situation that covers your ass but hurts the project is not likely to bode well for one's career.
As team leader, I appreciate honesty more than how someone sees their self. It takes a stronger person to be honest that they are in danger of missing a deadline. Resources and priorities can be shifted. Teams can adapt, and I'm sure that the product owner would like to know earlier rather than later that the deadline may be missed.
Because you don't just need to do it, someone on the other end needs to receive it. If every "ask" is met with annoyance, every debrief with "uh ok, still ready for september deadline?" and every warn with "but you promised! does this mean we will have to move the september deadline again?" then it's not hard to imagine people stop doing it.
His list implies a promise that he will not respond like this.
I think that is the intent too, but he really should spell out what his response will be to each of those things: "Ask", "Debrief", "Warn". The onus is on the manager to handle each mishap in a way helps the project and supports those doing the work.
In quite a lot of work environments, being a bearer of "bad news" will often lead to getting your head chewed off. A certain level of trust is absolutely required for workers to be truly frank with their project manager.
This was my thinking, too. We had a Lt in the air force that was fond of saying "if you have any concerns, come to me. my door is always open." The problem was that if you did that, your concerns were either blown off or interpreted as personal criticism.
The points made in the OP are good, but saying that is easy. It's when the deadlines start blowing by that the real test comes as to whether he can actually live up to it and not start backsliding.
Maybe they aren't put into practice because many leaders don't introduce the ideas to their team and set the expectation. You don't have to have a team of automatons to make good communication part of your culture. Set the ground rules and hold people accountable for the behavior. If you can't do this maybe management isn't where you need to be.
Not all leaders can commit to these rules themselves, that's why.
If they're not leading by example (as the writer says) then it's possible that "doing the right thing" and being communicative will eventually get you reprimanded, not rewarded.
Which is why it is important as someone who reports to others (most working folks do), it's important to make sure you know your management and choose (if possible) good management who you can trust and support your work-style.
Should be easy... the boss, asks his guys on the way back from lunch (as you really don't want to distrupt during work): "So you are doing that submission form, right? Is the shoe size field required? Great!" Wahaaa! :)
Easy to put into practice if your team is composed of automatons that will execute your directives with instant and willing obedience. But the reality is that we're just people, each of whom has their own concept of what's expected from them and what they're actually willing to do in return for a paycheck and it varies widely. In a perfect world we would all be striving towards a common goal with a clear understanding of what that goal is, the milestones to be reached and the methodology and processes to observe but none of that rarely survives the first sprint.
