Organizational Alignment
Hey!
Welcome back to another week of musings. I spent my weekend resting, which made me feel a bit anxious on Sunday.
I hope you had a restorative weekend and spent your days with your loved ones!
Was this forwarded to you? You can subscribe here!
Things I discovered in the past week
- "Why People Really Quit — And How Great Managers Make Them Want to Stay" is a good article by Kim Scott, author of "Radical Candor."
- "Wait! I thought the Team Was Overloaded?!" Related to this newsletter, some thoughts on why it's hard to cut through the comments of teams being overloaded.
As I've progressed in working with leadership and executives, I've come to realize that one of the most important —and often invisible — tasks at a high level is creating alignment.
A lack of alignment can cause an organization to waste time, resources, or, worse, implode. On the other hand, having alignment at all levels will enable all teams to move efficiently and consistently deliver their expected outcomes.
Mostly Invisible Work
Unless we're executives, alignment will manifest for teams in the shape of hiring, schedules, and priorities. Most of the time, we cannot influence this alignment, unless it's the quarterly or yearly planning cycle of the organization.
We know good alignment has occurred when our requests for teams in other reporting lines are delivered as expected on an agreed-upon timeline. In other cases, we'll see alignment between product and engineering in areas such as what constitutes tech debt and when to work on those tasks.
Improve Alignment
Most of the time, alignment is a leadership responsibility, and what we can do is identify areas where alignment is lacking.
However, we can still do our part by calling out any lack of alignment that prevents our team from delivering efficiently. At other times, differences in priorities can make it harder to align; these may require meetings and escalations to resolve.
Step Up
You may wonder if you can start providing or helping with alignment on teams.
One good starting point is addressing tech debt and implementing tech excellence initiatives (such as modernization). This involves collecting and clarifying what tech debt means for your organization, as well as determining how and when to address it. It will also mean owning and selling this message across functions, with teams like Product and Marketing, because it will require explanation why we can do it "the normal way", and instead we need to take a route that will take longer to deliver.
A similar exercise will be needed with modernization efforts. You'll need to come up with a clear idea of what we want to modernize, why now, and a rough idea of the benefits it'll bring us, as well as how long it'll take.
As staff engineers, we often borrow authority from our managers, who may hold director, senior director, or other senior-level positions. That also means helping to align the teams that report to your manager by attending document reviews, architecture reviews, and other key meetings. In addition to reminding people of the organization's top priorities, this helps avoid having people work on tasks that may not yield the desired outcomes.
Your turn!
Have you ever considered how all our teams are aligned? Or worse, why is no one aligned, and I'm losing so much time? Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email.
Happy coding!
website | twitter | github | linkedin | mastodon | among others