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During the current Dusshera celebrations, our tradition is to have multiple thanksgivings. We thank our house, tools (like scissors, kitchen knives), books, currency, vehicles and anything that helps us earn our livelihood and live comfortably. People whom we employ for domestic help are gifted something as a token of thanks, as they make our lives easier. This was celebrated as a festival in our region called Ayudha poojai and Saraswati poojai. In hindsight, this was nothing but a tradition introduced to value our various stakeholders in life. It instills a sense of gratitude and a reminder every year that we owe our success to our stakeholders. I have seen this first hand when I visited a small restaurant owned by a relative. They were serving unlimited rice in a meal, I asked what if people eat a lot and leave you with less profits, will you add slaked lime to make them feel full faster? The restaurant owner replied, that is killing your customers, it is a form of fraud and you should never do it.

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On the corporate side, I have never observed the word stakeholder holding a 360 degree meaning. It is almost and always a person who has invested in the company through money, a share holder or an owner. Stakeholders are never employees nor customers nor tools, in other words these are numbers to be used for profit generation. What this leads to is a quarter on quarter rush to increase shareholder value neglecting the real stakeholders. A restaurant treating their customers profit sources will lose in the long term than the ones who think about them as patrons who deserve good hospitality.

Success is a collective construct, keeping that 360 degree view will help to keep decision ethical, create long term loyalty from customers & employees and also keep the workplace morale high. There are very few examples like Costco, Semco who genuinely attempt this mindset and is able to succeed. Many of them are lured by the short horizon profits and lose out in the long run.

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The recent news about overwork death in one of the organisations ,reminded me of some episodes overwork health issues in my work and my friends’. Given a choice everyone wants to get things done quickly, so that either they have a lot of time for leisure or can do a lot more in a short amount of time. When I transitioned to work from college, one major shock was the amount of time that I have to spend at the office even when I did not have much to do. Presenteeism was encouraged, people walking around visibly unwell, staying long hours, eating fast food at desk for lunch.

What people did was just hustle, when what they really wanted was to expedite work. This resulted in chronic overwork, under productivity and poor health (both mental and physical) which was impacting businesses far negatively. When I went to Europe for an assignment, I was so surprised when my client had working hours of just 10 to 5 including lunch and breaks yet that was one of my most productive stints ever.

As orgs grow, workplace dynamics become very complex. A nimble startup growing too fast will lose its nimbleness, it becomes an empire from a small tribe. What contributed to a startup’s success was expediency and fluency.

Expediency is the ability to find a quick way to address a solution which is simple, effective though not a complete one. Richard Gabriel talks about this in Worse is better, it is particularly very helpful in first mover advantage situations and product market fit cases. The simplicity of the solution will also make it easy to amend and extend based on the feedback. Communication and shared understanding across the entire group is the key to expediency and that is where a small team always excels at.

Fluency is the capability to do the right things fast. It is the ability of the people to do things repeatedly without getting fatigued or bored by a healthy blend of capabilities of people, process and engineering. If the team has a robust continuous delivery pipeline, they would not worry about making frequent changes to production. If the team members are highly skilled and disciplined you need less management oversight to make them to follow the right things. If the culture is established that visibility of work is a right and people have a good degree of control/autonomy over how work is done then we have a lot of motivated individuals to realise the goals.

A lot of leaders like expediency alone and it gives them results, they are not able to build on top of it because of poor investment in fluency. This results in a hustle culture with declining return on investments and creating fatigue. On the other hand, leaders focussing only on fluency will create a lots of bored and frustrated teams. Scrum though intended to bring teams to a productive sweet spot is misinterpreted and often ends up creating fatigued teams or indifferent ones. A good focus on the value and intent behind the agile practices like XP and constant questioning & improvement is the key to ensure that the teams are both fluent and expedient.

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In the early days of my career I have observed professional managers hired to lead the projects in software development, who go by numbers, processes, tasks and objectives, the more and more I observed them, I started to dislike their leadership style as it was very disjoint from what the team was doing. To add more to the dislike, low performers were termed ‘Manager material’ and an option was given them to train on professional management, giving a bad example for leadership aspirants. Not just me, a lot of individual contributors like App developers, QA, Infra developers started to lose the respect for managers as the only leverage these managers had was coercive powers like say on appraisals, leaves, working hours, weekend work etc.

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For many years this thought made me stick to being an individual contributor until I was no longer able to push what I can achieve through my work. Work got super boring and monotonous, also started feeling helpless many a times. Long working works, weekend work as a result of poor planning became the norm. At the same time, I read two books – Fish! and Who moved my cheese. These two books just drilled the following points in my head.

  • Work does not have to be a boring, repetitive, stressful affair
  • Create a work environment that people along with you enjoy being there and doing it
  • Change is inevitable, which means I should not resist growing up to managing people, just see how to grow into that role
  • Comfort zone will make you rot eventually

This made me ready to ditch the individual contributor tag and take up the lead role. To my surprise, my tech skills did not vanish, instead I was able to get better at abstractions and multiple tech stacks. I was able to influence task breakdown, planning, onboarding and knowledge management which in turn created an easy environment for people to work. Better work environment led to less stress and I observed that the team was always in a mood to help each other out instead of hammering away at their task lists. As a result we were able to deliver what was thought to be an aggressive 4-5 month plan in just 2.5 months without breaking a sweat.

It was a great start for me to become a multiplier and shun the fears of becoming a manager. Techies fit the best to lead other techies. Management does not mean pure management, people can manage while still retaining their tech exposure on a day to day basis.