Of course, managing them require leadership skills that are not very common, you must adapt to the interlocutor, being able to have technical, strategic or pure project monitoring conversations, not to mention ego and people skills.

The “expert”

Deep subject matter experts that amass large chunks of experience and knowledge. They are critical for example to design a transformation since they control the as-is state. They are also good at telling about previous mistakes to avoid them. They usually suffer from ego flaws and are hard to make them part of a transformation since it directly challenges their way of doing things.

Ideas to manage them: understand how lost they already are in their ego, can they really be a part of this team or they are beyond salvation? They can also be placed in “advisory” roles to listen to what they say but reduce any empowerment. They require large amounts of recognition.

The “autist”

Every team needs an autist that doesn’t give up under any circumstance. If managed properly, they can mobilise teams or carry exhausting tasks like those where people need to be told 100 times what to do. They are great at building followership and attracting talent, advance technically complex issues, etc. They usually suffer from having little “political and social intelligence” which makes them a hard peer to work with.

Ideas to manage them are: keep them close to you as they require constant supervision. Put them on the right role for that profile, e.g., lab type work where the process, quality and consistency is important. Empower them when needed but be aware that teams will become exhausted and pissed at them, so break the glass only in case of emergency. If too tiresome downgrade under another manager willing to put in the time to supervise them.

The “hammerhead”

People who enjoy having everything planned and get overly excited at Gantt charts. They like AND CAN micromanage projects that seniors usually dont have time or skills to do. Large teams benefit greatly from them as they help you focus on more critical initiatives. Depending on the organisation, this type of profile also helps build credibility in certain forums e.g., Finance, Control, and buys you time to make the transformation for real.

Ideas to manage them are: lots of empowerment to open the team blackboxes, make facts transparent but they also need to have decent social skills to win that right naturally. Place them in PMO, control, Agile/program office kind of roles. Put some experts beneath them so they also approach the role from a content point of view and not as the Gestapo.

The “highly regarded”

People that don’t need formal empowerment. No matter how good you feel, as we discussed in other posts, there will always be people against change and it’s very important to have someone on the team who has a long history and reputation to put them to rest. When others see him involved in a crazy idea they think “if this guy is on board I should be too”… they are a seal of guarantee. They usually however can become a problem as their reputation can be bigger than your formal role, even if you are their boss.

Ideas to manage them are: assess their true followership since these people are hard to manage because of their seniority and having them challenge your every decision is unfeasible. Aim them to the outside, instead of critisinging your every move on how you do things, have them lead client (internal client) like roles where they can align receivers of what you do. They can also lead control functions, especially those that require complex approals and bureocracy they can navigate. Decent also at interim roles.

The “umbrella”

People that play the first line of defense on the team. Although it depends on the sector, all large organisations have internal processes that can down you with problems. Bureaucratic and tedious processes that can kill the bandwidth of teams like PMOs, audits, risk management or security in the case of more traditional companies. It is important to have a person who knows these processes and can funnel all work through him…they act as an umbrella so the rest of the team is not affected on a day-to-day basis. Ideally, they should also act as a lever of change for these processes, but ensuring that they do not affect their colleagues too much will already be a great achievement.

Ideas to manage them are: similar to the hammerhead, lots of empowerment to align the teams they are actually helping is ideal. They require recognition, especially informal one form everyone as their roles is tedious and frustrating.

There are many other profiles that are more straight forward, like the “follower” who usually are good at executing orders without questioning or the “visualizers” that are amazing at connecting a vague ideas to action through a good team setup, plan, etc. However, there is also…

The “stupids”

Although this is not a profile per se, there are people that doesn’t fit in the previous categories. Their main feature is their inability to do anything, sometimes just complaining about how bad things are. You will find them in your team or as peers and their stupidity needs to be dissipated… just like heat.

The best way? Create a project that apparently sounds relevant, staff them and aim also the burocrats towards it so they have fun together. With this we limit the damage they can cause to the rest of the team. When it is seems their project is not moving, rename it (e.g., something 2.0), launch it and repeat.

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Do you know the strategy of the company you work for?

For a lot of people that question leads to explanations of how the company makes money, their products, the mission or its biggest projects, but thats not a strategy. Where will your company be in 2-3 years and how that links to what its doing every day? If the strategy is international expansion then who, when, which countries, how, etc. are we going to get there.

This is a problem as it leads to confusing priorities and wasted resources. Which of my 2.000 projects is more important? (answer: the ones that align to the strategy), should I invest resources in this business unit? (answer: is your company planning to keep that unit in the next few years?) and should I hire? (answer: is business expanding or looking to save cost?). Should I raise the price of my product? (answer: is your brand looking to compete on value or cost?)

Strategy and culture instead of tasks

Having a strategy is not enough, we need to communicate it and connect it to reality. Employees in every level should tell the same story of what success looks like in 1-2 years (more maybe but depends on the company), and need to also explain what I’m doing in a day to day to reach that point. If our strategy is to expand then HR analysts should tell a compelling story of how they are finding the people we need, profiles, etc.

Communication can come in many shapes but the most important way is leading by example. Managers that constantly link their strategy in the mid-long term to the decisions they take every day. Implanting this 1:1 rule in its teams.

However, this is not the norm, bad managers tend to lead by assigning tasks to people. Instead of explaining to that HR analysts what are we trying to solve for, we ask them to find me 20 CVs with X position. We tend to jump directly to action instead of investing on syndicating the strategy and the objective we are trying to achieve.

Why is this a problem?

If I know my objective is to get from New York to Boston, I will be able to improvise. If there is an accident I can take a detour. If I’m late maybe I can pick up the pace. If I don’t have a car I will plan to take a train. When we give employees order we cripple their ability to adapt and when challenged they will insist on the approach “my boss gave me”. Corporate zombie like behaviour. Even worse, it’s a source of friction, when two employees fight over something that could easily be solved if you fall back to the strategy and which approach is best aligned with it. Taken even one step above…

The ultimate source of alignment is culture, but thats for another time…

Alining everyone on different horizons

A good strategy can be broken down in different horizons. Like in a team, we might choose to save a certain player for another match (the mid-term strategy) while defining how to play with others in this specific match (the short-term strategy). The team can even have in their roadmap the acquisition of new players in the next seasons.

To help people deliver, especially big teams subjected by the complexity of a large company, we can think in three horizons:

• 2-5 years depending on the industry, to explain to everyone what success looks like in the long term. Is this a business that we see growing or our objective its cost reduction or selling it? How we plan to do it?

• 1 year statement of intensions explaining to everyone what should be accomplished before going into vacations and what will be linked to their bonuses and other incentives. This doesn’t have to be written in stone or even a full commitment by the team as the strategy might have to be adjusted mid-game but directionally needs to align people on the 5-6 main missions or “themes” for this year. Are we going to focus on new functionality, or we should prioritise security and reliability? Are we expanding to more countries our we focus on the ones we have? Are we going to grow the team or instead we need to tighten our belts?

• 3 months detailed planning and commitments for what we, as a team, will deliver this cycle. In Agile terms this is a PI planning or QBR (Quarterly Business Review) but essentially, we align on the list of objectives to delivery (e.g., improve security in x service), teams have the time to analyse and commit to achieve that goal. In other terms, this is the breakdown of the 1 year statement in months and committed by the team.

To get practical, the 2-5 year strategy can take the shape of a document or presentation that can be shared with shareholders and employees. 1 year statement can be a Word like document we write together, as a team, to align on our goals and finally the quarterly plan must be translated into something more actionable, not documents. Many teams use tools like Jira or similar to sign and breakdown things to an actionable level.

At the end, the goal of any of these exercises is to align people, to have them say the same things on the elevators and coffee machines so everyone works on the same goals even if their contribution is marginal. How many of you employees can tell the same story? do the test and reflect on it.

We found also that it’s great to have certain “themes” or topics to create a sense of purpose on each discussion… a motif. Imagine starting a planning session telling your team that this quarter the main mission is to improve the quality of your product, even if they need to have tons of discussions and micro-objectives to achieve such a purpose, the sense of a theme will leave them aligned towards what to prioritise in a day to day basis.

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Loyalty vs. brilliance

If we oversimplify, a manager must decide if he wants to be surrounded by loyals or brilliant people, and hopefully is a decision and not something that happens subconsciously (spoiler, must times is). Obviously, many teams will have both but its difficult to keep them on the same boat before brilliant people becomes frustrated by the others.

When you’re forming a team it’s difficult to know who is who, keep an open mind and your back covered! Someone who at first seems bright can really be a "smoke seller" when challenged to deliver. Also, quick loyalty vanishes when people are tempted by power and other opportunities.

A balance between both is necessary. Too much loyalty leaves you with an absence of criticism, that ultimately puts you at risk. On the other hand, an excess of "bright" people makes a team ungovernable and egotistic.

Ambition vs. stability

Teams need to evolve as projects do, especially in transformation roles. Being aware of the “moment” helps you choose wisely.

For example, if you manage a stable operation, like a factory, chemical lab or planes, putting a lot of ambitious bright people could be a ticking bomb for unpredictability in quality or churn. On the other hand, having automatons leading a transformation wouldn’t be a good idea…

People are also greatly affected by their personal lifes. A young person living with his parents doesn’t function in the same way as one with small children who is not allowed to sleep at night. Nor those who have older children, 50 years and 2 mortgages… they tend to say yes to everything.

Everything at some point becomes business as usual. Transformations take 2-3 years to start delivering, 1-2 more to scale, optimise and wrap-up things and from there it becomes routine. As you can imagine, teams need to evolve.

At first you will need people with significant ambition and motivation, willing to fight to break the status-quo. Outsiders are a must to see things differently.

Then, you will need more people who know the company and have more experience to deliver the hardest parts of the transformation. You will still require innovative people but they should take the backseat.

In the third is where the team must evolve more drastically. You need “day-to-day people” who probably would never have been able to engineer the transformation but are comfortable managing the outcome, the users, waking up at night to solve an incidence and worry about lowering the cost in the long run.

These moments also overlap over time, so keep an eye on how your teams manage “run” and “change”. There is no simple solution as it depends on the problem but ideally there is some level of “oxygenation” between people managing each.

Keep in mind that some things cannot be taught. Commitment for example is either there or not. People that feel pain in failure and are willing to wake up on a Saturday at 2am to fix a problem. So how do you probe for that on a job interview? I have no idea…

Right hands and successors

Choosing the people you give more responsibility, empowerment and who you consider your “successor” is also key for the wellbeing of the team. Being conscious about it helps you understand the dynamics you are imposing on people.

Having a clear “successor” is the best way to position yourself for something new. Bosses will rarely promote you if they think it will create a void of responsibility. Using your “right-hand” to assume certain functions will give you extra time to be with your teams or think more strategically. This idea succession could also change over time and could be linked to the moment of the project and the company.

Who are you?

And now it's time to talk about you, the manager. You also have some specific skills that are better adapted to certain moments, projects and teams. That is a fact and denying it is useless.

Some managers are strategists who can understand the roots of a problem, visualise the solution and lay the road for victory. Others are resilient drivers on that road, managing teams and delivering impact without getting tired. And others are good on the day to day, which usually end up paying for the salary of the other two.

Do you know which one you are? do you know what are your real skills, the moment in your professional career and how they are conditioned by your personal priorities? Not knowing these will take you down the wrong path or make you assume absurd risks. Holding on to a position where your skills are no longer needed can be one of the fastest paths to become a corporate zombie :-)

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What doors are being opened?

From decision to creation

Until 2 months ago, AI was primarily associated with decision making. What is the optimal price for this product?, should I offer this product to my client?, is this picture from a cat? Decisions usually taken by humans with dozens of biases, replaced by a feelingless algorithm. Today we think about AI for creation. Yes-No becomes full stories and draft documents, OCR like image recognition becomes art and faces that don’t exist and we see an exponential growth of AI characters in movies and deep fake videos. This is my favourite so far.

From specific to general

Until 2 months ago, AI was thought to solve parts of a problem, like optimising the price for a product. Today, we envision an AI with the possibility to take over a full problem. Think about the creation of a website, where the AI understands the purpose of the site, designs it, choose and build the technology required and constantly conduct A/B type tests to maximise client engagement. The dream of a corporate businessman… not having to talk with those nasty tech guys.

From data to knowledge

Until 2 months ago, most AI algorithms were trained with an specific application in mind and with the limitations of the available data points. Today, we have seen a machine talking about everything, form hard facts to imaginary stories which provides an added feeling of realism and depth.

What could be the impact on my company?

Skyrocketing productivity… and layoffs

Internet reduced the need for physical sales. Automation (process robotics if you are lazy) reduced back-offices doing mundane tasks. With AI:

Designers and analysts will not only be replaced by algorithms doing 80-90% of the same work in seconds instead of days but will also iterate with hard data to optimise it.

Developers are already accelerating with AI “companions” that autocomplete pieces of code and technical functions (e.g., store this over there) to later see end-to-end AI developers take over more straight forward developments (e.g., a website).

Contact centres will replace 90% of their staff with conversational AI that will only route to humans on a few fancy cases.

Monitoring and 24/7 support jobs will get replaced by AI monitoring massive data (e.g., security cameras, network traffic, factory sensors) with the ability to also optimise how they work.

Pressure for restructuring and layoffs will be higher than ever and countries with less ethics and social concerns will leap above the rest.

Rethinking corporate governance

A problem already, corporate decision making is based on processes built by and for humans. Even its most useless parts provide a sense of traceability and objectivity for someone. With AI:

Uncertainty will have to be accepted, especially in regulated industries, with humans not fully understanding the reasons behind each choice in exchange of the certainty that an optimal result. Employees will act like taxi drivers, constantly complaining that they can do a better job than the GPS to save their jobs… they cant.

Automation will be the only way to trace and audit the decisions taken by machines with degrees of autonomy. Regulators and internal auditors will still fight back to leave some manual controls in place like a human pushing a button.

Facts over feelings, people will no longer be able to lie, with AI “peers” raising the flag. Every decision will be benchmarked with its optimal value to the stakeholder and will have to be overriden by a human to justify any other purpose (e.g., politics, sustainability, equality).

More of everything

The perfect public image conveyed by most companies, solid, efficient, experienced, secure… will be harder and harder to keep. AI will:

Make big problems bigger like Security where the identity of a person will be blurred and machines will trick humans with perfect image and voice replicas. HR and educators will struggle with people fuelling their work with AI content.

Competition will become fiercer, what started with smaller players taking advantage of a leveled technology playfield will expand to quality of service provided by hordes of “free” AI relationship managers. Expertise will be at everyone’s reach, with machines learning years of facts and decisions in minutes. Capital will only play a differential role in asset intensive industries (e.g., manufacture, transport), not for labor.

External pressure will increase in an attempt to save jobs. Regulators will come up with artificial ways to compensate for higher competition masked as corporate greed. Politicians will promise to save jobs from “evil” corporations and public perception will be more important than ever, with the only remaining human in the equation, the client, more relevant than ever…

Like previous revolutions, Generative AI will smash the corporate world and the speed in which it will happen will be far more dramatic, demanding higher resiliency from employees, corporate owners and governments. It will not be easy to hack.

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These stats reflect people’s perception of their job, not their actual performance, as there is nothing worse than a wasted opportunity, having a chance for impact but lowering your arms to become… a Corporate Zombie.

What is a Corporate Zombie?

As seen time and time during my career, a Corporate Zombie is a person that has decided to give up and become part of a system. People, who after years of frustration, bad managers and absurd corporate dynamics decide to give up and go with the flow. They have evolved and adapted and after years of trying they chose to adopt what some authors call… mediocracy.

Many of these people become a “one company worker”, accepting moves between different departments with less and less motivating tasks but with a sense of security that they will never be fired because they are good players.

What is the virus that creates these monsters?

I believe it has two different strains, large corporate salaries and losing touch with the market. They both lead to a self-defense attitude and although HR try to sell you ideas like thinking critically or about your team before yourself, the reality is that once infected anything goes in order to survive.

What drives you evolves over time, you start by wanting to eat the world and finish by accepting it. By then, it’s normal to have a family, which increases the risk of changing scenery, so you decide to stay and hope that you can still progress some more, however, *THEY* already know who you are. Suddenly, in the next reorganisational they decide to hire some “rockstar”, repatriate or promote a friend... anger and frustration make you to update your CV but you soon realize you are out of the market, you earn a lot of money and your skills became crippled…congratulations, you are now a Corporate Zombie.

And beware, the virus feeds from all levels of the organisation. Senior managers are it’s favorite but even lower level employees can get infected if given the right salary, time and level of frustration.

With enough time and frustration, even top performers start to show these symptoms. They start with high ambition, driving large projects and show their credentials and access senior positions but eventually fall infected.

How to save yourself

First of all, there is nothing wrong with taking a conscious decision to become a Corporate Zombie. We all reach a point that some stagnation is appreciated, just make sure you understand its difficult to come back from it.

Critical thinking is your best defense. The moment you systematically see people following orders and not being able to dissent you are in trouble.

Keep yourself connected with the market… interviews, networking, training, measure your real value, if this is gone its only a matter of time you become scared of being out.

There are always opportunities and time does open some doors. There are moments where the stars align and new people appear to challenge the status quo. If you are truly interested in getting off the hamster wheel, riding this wave is your opportunity.

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Although true for both lower and upper levels of the pyramid, the reasons tend to differ. In lower levels, careers tend to be “just a reference” created by HR, where the criteria for ascending, timelines and everything else is just orientative and usually you have to beg or threaten to leave the company to be even considered. The lack of “oxygenation” doesn’t help, so people are usually not promoted unless there is a vacant.

For upper levels however careers truly dont exist. Once you reach a certain point it becomes a subjective game of politics, luck and being in the right place at the right time. Bellow we show you some ideas on how to be in that right place… but remember, it not all about “YOU”, it’s mostly about “THEM”.

Be in a leader’s “inner circle”

This is definitely one of the most successful strategies you can use in order to grow in a big corp, just make sure you select the appropriate person to place your bet… easy, right?

Sadly, foreseeing if a manager is going to be successful in the mid-long term it’s not an easy task. Lots of factors play a role and even when you *think* you selected the winning horse it can become a double edge blade quickly if they fall from grace.

Actually, you could think about the problem backwards, its easier to identify those that are losing horses, they think for themselves, say “I dont do politics”, are not in good standing with their own boss, have been stuck in the same role for years and so on. Keep a safe distance.

Be the “expert subject matter”

If you manage to achieve the status of “expert or guru” in a specific field (whatever that means, its not an objective thing) you may become valuable for the company and ascend the lower/middle part of the pyramid rather fast. Unfortunately, most of the times, you will hit a crystal ceiling quickly, so you might have to (again) threaten to leave or play other games to put some pressure in the wound.

Ascending further also depends on your ability to abandon this “expert” status and start adding more managerial and political tools to your arsenal.

Be the constant “rule breaker”

This strategy can be very profitable in companies that tolerate some mild-to-heavy status-quo challenge, for example those that “want to become a startup” as we mentioned. Trying to be “innovators” forces top managers and CEOs to promote some kind of punk attitude in the company’s culture. This is sadly mistaken sometimes with the way your dress or talk rather than act, so you might have to do those things too.

But…careful, not all the players in the corporate game are equally tolerant with a constant rule breaking and most will want results from this “innovation”, so you have to deliver something (or move away from the bomb before it explodes).

Be the a “job hopper”

Last but not least… another way of ascending in the pyramid is to switch the actual pyramid. Sometimes its easier to get the recognition your want in another place, leveraging the reputation that your company might have to get access to a higher position elsewhere.

Its a tradeoff, as switching jobs always carries some level of risk but also allows you to bypass some of the rules of a place. Its also possible to go back sometimes to the original place in an even higher position if for example the experience you gather is valuable, you spend some time in a start-up and become this “rule breaker” the CEO is searching for…

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“1, 2, All” is a framework to think about this problem… first by piloting your ideas (1), refining them (2) and only then scaling after it builds the necessary reputation (N).

1 - Piloting

• Its objective is to prove your idea is feasible at least in one “place” (could be team, area, business unit, client segment, month,… up to you) and learn how to mature it further.

• Approval is “easier” since it requires a smaller budget and even retractors will say ok to distract or see you fail...

• You will start to see who is who, with some people supporting you while others will make fancy excuses to not be involved or be the guinea pig of your pilot. Some people will also see potential and try to ride you while others will jump into anything senior management says, be careful with all.

• Choosing how to run a pilot is a balance between a “representative” test and managing the risk of failing. If you shoot too low people will say "it worked for them but not for me" and if too high you might fail due to its complexity.

• It's a learning opportunity for you too. You might have a good idea but not be ready to execute it e.g., your team doesn’t have the right expertise or sizing.

• Try to get a sense of the challenges (time, resistance, technical complexity,...). A fake pilot will only build fake expectations.

• Finally, lie to others but not to yourself, dont try to fake its results since failure later can be worse than in this stage.

2 - Refinement

• Its objective is to mature your idea but also build a reputation to ease its roll out later.

• Budget should be a small increment since you already did some investment on the pilot.

• People will start to throw complains on why the pilot was not fully representative so you need to design it in a way it addresses all these comments (e.g., if you felt it wasn’t done fast enough, now it needs to be). Try to use sponsors from the pilot to "sell" how good it was (you can let them take part of the credit so it becomes a win-win).

• If not on the pilot, this is the point where you need to bring a big reference case. Its good to start defining some metrics based on the learnings from the pilot (e.g., I commit to do this in this time, or lower the cost by x%), before it was just risky speculation.

• You and your team need to solve all the issues from the pilot. Your team also needs to be sized and trained accordingly.

• Go big…

All - Scaling

• Its objective is not to roll out everywhere but to reach a certain “tipping point” where it becomes irreversible (e.g., because from a technical point of view cannot be shut down, a certain number of clients love it). Also, most ideas pay themselves without being 100% successful.

• Approval should be a straight forward discussion if you had 2 success cases in your pocket. Not going ahead might still leave you in good standing since you proved it worked but others decided against it. You should be careful to not falling into the trap of living in pilots forever...

• Some people might still be against your idea so ask yourself if they are part of the tipping point or not e.g., a country manager doesnt want to adopt your idea, will he/she be able to stand when all the other countries do?

• Sequencing the roll out still needs some thinking as a bad example might still destroy your reputation, so its a good moment to slow down and capture low hanging fruits.

• Your team needs to scale and mature as the idea rolls out.

• Repeat...

Although simple, this framework can save you form the urge to aim too high or too fast when trying to scale in difficult settings. Piloting and maturing your ideas in the right place, with the right partners you trust that will later support you “selling” this to the rest of the organisation is key to success.

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Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery… yet, some are so bad that is insulting

Many large corporate CEOs believe that the solution for many of their challenges lies in acting more like a start-up and, on the surface, seems logical right? For example, only in healthcare in Europe there are more than 30.000 SMEs trying to disrupt the value chain through technology, higher risk appetite and agility.

The problem is what should you copy from them?

“Lets copy what it says here”

A lot of what you read online about companies are at least exaggerations in a PR attempt to boost reputation, specially for start-ups looking to increase their value pre-investment or IPO. Theranos might be one of the most hardcore examples in recent years but to some degree all play the same game.

Copying requires understanding, not only of what you want to copy but the industry’s inner-workings including the processes used to deliver the good or service, the organisation, talent (including how many people are involved), regulatory constrains, financing and much more.

“OK, lets copy the way they work”

Sure, it’s very simple man, my 50K employee corporation should just work like the 15 employee start-up. Ok but what about the other 500 products we have since they only have one? or the international operations, should we close our presence in 8 other countries? what should each country do vs. the central “start-up” team? Should we also stop doing all these compliance, legal and regulatory committees or should we just risk it like FTX did? Should we forget about our legacy and start a new venture?

Copying how a start-up works makes sense but you should copy their empowerment and accountability. Because they are smaller, you always know who is responsible and is somewhat easy to agree since power is concentrated on a few people. Copy that and read this our article on empowerment vs. accountability.

“Fine, lets instead hire some of them”

A topic to be discussed in length but this argument again, on the surface makes sense, but fails for several reasons. Large corporations are talent grinders, for example by not providing a good value proposition for younger people to develop or even in good intentions by paying a lot and creating the incentive to protect your job at all cause.

Large corporations also require a different kind of talent, with the ability to navigate politics, understand complex processes, use legacy technology tools and overall show a bigger sense of resilience towards frustration.

Hire but also fix the underlying problems, look also for rockstars that are hidden and remove the bureaucrats that hid them in the first place.

“Lets try to match their prices”

From entropy over time, most corporations are bloated with people and cost structures that just make it imposible to match the efficiency of smaller players. Intuitively you would think that economies of scale give corporations an advantage, but most of the time is wasted on unnecessary overhead instead of going to the client. Large corporations also struggle, specially in some regions, to quickly reshape because of regulation or their gov. links.

Competing requires some very hard decisions, firing people, selling or closing unprofitable businesses, saying the truth, be able to fail and dont fear the consequences, something extremely hard when you’re playing with other people’s money compared to start-ups where the owner can be sitting next to you…

“Lets boost our innovation”

For many companies innovation is a department, sometimes isolated from other areas where “innovative people” are trying to find the next Coca-Cola. This approach is fundamentally flawed for not being close to the actual business and their problems, the people that posses the highest expertise and lacking real incentives other than playing with new cool things.

Invest in innovation, give your teams the time and resources to get their heads out of the day to day from time to time but dont isolate it.

“I give up, lets just buy them”

Great idea, lets absorb these 15 guys inside our 50K employee organisation because they will for sure have the energy, empowerment, expertise and willingness to transform us after we fill their pockets with millions.

I’m glad you agree, you incentive this year is to buy at least one start-up, don’t fail me!

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Defining the “right” KPIs

The statement around the KPI, the metrics and the objectives, if not defined carefully, could result in an output very far from the goal of the KPI itself.

Here is a real example. In an effort to increase developer productivity in a software shop, the CTO of a large multinational retailer decided to measure, AND INCENTIVISE, a KPI called “number of features developed”. Sounds decent right? Who wouldn’t want to improve this metric?

As a result “productivity” skyrocketed in a few months in order to comply with the bosses wishes. Lots of code pouring from developer machines, as fast as possible to deliver on the KPI but also on the millions of features business gurus have thought “carefully” before writing two lines on a post-in note. But, like any action there is a reaction, production incidents increased in the same violent way. Agility without enforcing the necessary code quality, resulted in a dramatic reliability and security period for the company… you get the idea.

False sensation of control

Another relevant point around KPIs is that provide a false sensation of control, especially to the top management. Having tons of KPIs it’s usually what managers do when they don’t understand the process under their responsibility. We have been taught since high-school that measuring things is good, but how many times about the importance of spending time with the teams, walking the halls, talking to people an actually making your own mind about how things are going?

These managers believe that having hundreds of KPIs will result in a “I have everything under control” state of mind. KPIs should be the result of a deep understanding of the manager responsibility, not the other way around. Think about how many hours a pilot needs to learn about his plane before trusting the instruments…

The mindset should be:

1.- Understand my scope of responsibility, mission and goals

2.- Full understanding of the processes that support those goals

3.- Identify the “things that need to happen” (a.k.a. what good looks like)

4.- Create KPIs

5.- Measure, repeat, adapt

Usually number 2 and 3 do not happen, especially in managers that are assuming roles that don’t fit their previous expertise and think that creating KPIs would give them the appropriate control within their function.

The KPIs industry

Another undesired result of obsessing about KPIs is the army of people needed in order to track them at scale. Dashboards with hundreds of numbers need to be gathered and processed, rarely KPIs are as easy as going to a system and reading some number, sometimes they require dedicated people, talking to other people, making calculations, interpretations, it’s consuming.

So…next step is to create an organisational structure with the only objective to do so. Of course this team doesn’t even understand what the KPI shows or the behaviour is trying to introduce. Their only goal is to chase people doing actual work to fill some nice coloured dashboards and fill their bosses with the sensation of control. This is also why PMOs have such a bad reputation, with hordes of consultants chasing people without actually being involved in the delivery and the understanding of the root causes for success.

We have seen crazy examples of organisations where doing this at scale while also dealing with committees, audits, offsites, team meetings, traveling, coffee chats and more, ends up becoming the ACTUAL JOB. What percentage of your job are those?

End result… after months of frustration with this culture human nature starts calling and you start thinking… how can I hack this KPI?

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Some real situations

I remember one, some years ago, a person started to get emotional after 5 vodkas and started crying and complaining that the corporation had been extremely unfair to him. Everybody started to look, ask what was happening and at the end some colleagues helped him to bed. Not to mention to mention that 2 vodkas before all the crying he tried to hit on another younger colleague, not cool. Next day everybody started to ask him if he was ok… in reality they were really wondering how bad the hangover (and shame) was, not cool.

Also, you can get out, have a few laughs with your colleagues, drink a bit but… BE ON TIME THE NEXT DAY. Most of the senior managers that are in charge of these events know people will party, actually is part of the plan, but being late is disrespectful. These managers also tend to go to bed early (thankfully, so they dont see all the crazy that happens), so be careful.

On the other hand, you don’t want to be the weird guy that sits in a corner looking very busy and does not socialise with the rest of the team. Finding the sweet spot is usually the safest option in this events. There is no need to be the coolest person but nor just being by yourself all the time is not a good option either. Partying requires practice, so go get some…

Show some interest

Depending on the context, at least 50% of the audience in corporate events don't understand or care about most of what is being shared (source: we have been to many offsites). If this is your case, don’t forget to pretend you do. Most of the presentations will be delivered by people that play a certain role in the organisation, usually a relevant one, specially for their bosses (aka organisers). Doing some email is acceptable, maybe even some newspapers, but don’t look disconnected. A couple of questions from time to time always enhances the idea that you care and your colleagues presenting will thank you.

Anyhow, chances are that most of it gets forgotten within a few weeks. Only chance for not happening is if there is some hard KPIs and commitments (e.g., sales) being put on the table, everything else is just smoke…

Smile, nod and agree. A little bit of clapping, couple of beers, some pictures yelling “one team” and back home! Next year’s offsite will be better for sure…and probably you’ll discuss the same things again.

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So lets say that you are appointed as Head of Legal in a large corporation and your objective is to improve their risk management practices since the company has been involved in several “small problems” recently. Projects are launched without enough scrutiny, and although compliance requirements are published in a fancy PDF on the company’s intranet… people don’t pay attention to them. So what can we do?

There are two things we need to solve: i) where do we “intercept” what people are doing and ii) what hard incentive we put so they follow

On the interception

This is harder sometimes than it sounds. Common sense says that decent companies should have (as least!) a list of projects they are running, after all, most of them consume some sort of resource like money or people’s time, but… thats not always the case. So option 1 is that they do and that list will point you to the people you need to “convince” to do a certain thing.

If the list doesn’t even exists, the best option is to “probe” a certain moment where all projects meet. For example, lets say that in order to get funds teams have to navigate some sort of approval process, fill some docs, etc. Therefore, the guys running this process, a portfolio team or Finance, are your best allies to embed your own requirements. For example, lets say that in your new role as Head of Legal you want all projects to staff a lawyer from your team to review what they are doing, therefore, the portfolio team approving a project should also ask for that lawyers signature during their review. This usually is not that difficult because the portfolio team have no incentive to put the company at risk or to approve projects that are not compliant.

Other places can be in some sort of project committee where people check on the progress of things or during go-live where there is usually some sort of user acceptance test or closure process, for example, in IT projects have to pass some checks in order to release their product to the public. It’s important to try to establish this checks as early as possible (“ex-ante”) since it will be easier for people to comply without rework. In technology there is a whole trend talking about this called “shift left”

It’s good to acknowledge that if you decide to put a roadblock on people you better be ready to act when they come for you. For example, if you want to approve all these process designs you better have a pool of well trained, sized and motivated engineers to help projects do things “in the right way”, other wise they will rebel and raise to the CEO that you are a stopper.

On the incentive

There are only 2 ways to incentivise people… money and automation.

Money can be used in multiple ways, for example, our previous case of asking the portfolio team to not approve projects without the sign-off of a lawyer is a VERY EFFECTIVE way of cutting funds to bad corporate citizens. Some companies are also releasing funds every quarter, so they can be sure they are compliant also during execution.

Another way is to play with people’s financial incentives aka their variable salary. So you can link a certain objective to that and unless they make a miserable amount of money they will tend to follow.

A corollary of money is reputation, for example, a long time ago I worked in a factory that published the time people spent working (calculated with the turnstile) in the company’s intranet, so literally everyone knew how many hours you sink at work. Very evil but worked because people think that a good reputation leads to money and promotions. So for example, creating a public dashboard about anything will create this peer pressure effect where people dont want to appear at the bottom showing they are not doing something right. Lets say you have a metric to measure team’s morale, who would want to have his name in the bottom of that list?! (some people but thats another story)

Companies also going through an operating model transformation need to think about money as the main incentive. Lets say that your big corporation is shifting from an local model where every business unit do things their way towards a homogenous global way. You have two alternatives, the nice democratic way where you beg local managers to please listen to how you want to do things or you take control of their budget (and people, even better). It’s common sense, like when your dad didn’t want you to do something as a kid by not giving you any money, and yet many managers because of politics, fear of accountability or inexperience choose to play the democratic way thinking maybe a consultant will give them a nice trick on how to solve this without having to go through those nasty budget discussions.

The second incentive is no incentive at all, is automation. If there is no way to skip a control then you need to live with it. There is a cool case in Google where all processes, for example when you click on Gmail to send an email, need to run under a certain time, otherwise stopped automatically. This is great because is forcing engineers to ensure their code is fast.

A more human example are employee expenses. Instead of paying for the corporate credit card of an employee and then waiting for their expense report, what most companies do is link the card with the employee’s personal account so they are compelled to do the expense report. This is an evil model that works perfectly, no begging for people to do reports, they just have to do a lot of paperwork to even out and get their personal money back and any mistake will be on them… brilliant.

A cool side effect

Intercepting the flow and incentivising people also allows for a major change in a company’s culture, you can start managing by exception. For example, if you create 10 requirements projects need to follow, any project that proves they are compliant can move ahead automatically. You can even create the time to market incentive to follow the standard instead of reinventing some greenfield way of doing it. On the contrary, anyone that doesn’t follow the standard needs to ask for an exception and prove its needed. Lets say you, as CIO of a company, declare you want all your applications to be coded in X programming language from now on… 95% of projects will have no valid reason not to follow this rule (otherwise no money for them!), but 5% will actually bring good reasons why they need to skip this rule, so therefore only 5% of project will require additional analysis and consume valuable time form your team.

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The naive mindset

Unexperienced managers think that by saying something in a meeting, writing a nice policy doc or sending an email things will happen, and it will not… why?

• people don’t agree but don’t say it

• don’t report to you or they have more than one boss who doesn’t agree also

• forget or are lazy

• are incentivised to do the opposite

• don’t know how to do it that way

• are anarchist

• want to get fired

• …should I continue?

This problem is also proportional to the size and footprint of the organisation, where you believe that you can manage a team in another continent just by sending some emails… take a plane please… This is specially evident in managers in holding or global roles that all the sudden start owning things 14 hours away, where timezones overlap maybe 2-3h a day, with different cultures, languages, priorities, ways of working and more. Also is depressing to see managers with many reports falling to their comfort zones by putting more attention on the teams that speak their same language or that listen more instead of focusing on the real priorities, like they don’t exist, it’s human nature…

What do you want to control?

Honestly people do a lot of things and depending on your mission the majority are irrelevant. There are some hardcore examples but they are so bizarre that you will think it’s a joke, but anyway, I once saw a manager with more than 40K employees trying to control where they physically sit!, I’m sure it makes sense for a 10 people but 40.000!! Can you imagine that? do you have time for that?

Instead lets think about control by imagining a very sick person, I don’t know, Cancer, that just had a car accident (bad things come in two’s, look at this), would you try to solve first the Cancer or the bleeding from the accident? Obvious right? well, this is the same simple question many managers fail to answer by putting so much focus on the “stock” of problems instead of the “flow” of new ones.

Lets say that you are in charge of designing the processes of a company, for example, how clients pay or subscribe to certain things, and the company is executing hundreds of projects each year that create or change some of them. Would you try to fix the thousands of issues in the stock or would setup your team in a way that you can intercept the flow of new processes to design them in the right way? Another techie example is the adoption of new technologies, companies for example are spending millions to move old systems to the cloud instead of first learning how to do projects natively in them. Of course, at some point you can start treating the Cancer, there could be a powerful business case to redesign people intensive process, but that should come after.

Some companies expend so much money in new projects that sometimes is enough to just “ride the wave” to start impacting the stock. For example, if this manager goes and asks for 10MnUSD to fix many old processes the CEO will probably say no, but if he tries to “embed” himself in all the projects that are tweaking the legacy processes he might end up fixing many things literally for “free” (paid by the project).

OK but I still dont know how to control people

In the next post (every Sunday and Thursday) we will discuss where and how can we use money (e.g.., budgets, monetary incentives) and automation to steer people in the right direction.

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Owning you team’s problems

When Susana got appointed to lead the Operations team in a large energy company, area which drove a lot of client facing processes like their onboarding, she realised the huge gap compared to rest of the company, including low excitement and sense of pride about working there, obsolete equipment, dark physical spaces, low salaries and more.

Susana therefore decided to hire a friend of hers, an ex-HR manager from a consulting firm, to help her on some of these issues, beginning with low hanging fruits like redesigning the awful cafeteria and changing the food subcontractor to make it look like you actually wanted to eat there, cleaning (deeply) the bathrooms, negotiating with a nearby shopping mall to get a good deal on parking spaces, making coffee and sodas free and many other small but cool perks which made employees realise that Susana was really trying. Side note, a Union started to complain because offering free things to a few employees violated some agreement and therefore the same perks had to be given to everyone, the Head of HR wasn’t thrilled…

After this first “easy” changes they decided to start addressing more structural problems. For example, the yearly employee evaluation process of the company was at best simplistic, requiring only a form to be filled by the person’s manager and that’s it. Both coming from consulting they envisioned something far more useful, with a proper conversation between the person and manager, a true focus on developmental feedback, involvement of peers and internal clients, doing it every 6 months and many other improvements. But could they implement that only in their area? do they even have to tell HR? In true hacker style Susana decided to move ahead without them.

Filling the interstices left by the system

So, their idea was simple, lets implement our own processes but try to couple it with the company’s one. For example, if the company want us to fill some forms every year, lets then align our second yearly review so the result can also be used for that. In other words, we build our own thing but with the right interface to “connect” with the company.

The process was a success and Susana grew her own “shadow HR” team to now 3 full time employees managing not only reviews now other activities like coaching, staffing, metrics, compensation and even started redesigning the roles and careers to better reflect what her team did. It’s very common for large companies to assign generic roles to people like “manager” that doesn’t mean anything, this is specially true in IT where instead of being called “software engineer” you get this generic roles just to keep things homogenous with the rest of the company (or laziness). At the same time many companies have roles that are messy and the result of many iterations like manager A, B, X, 2, 5, III and so on. Lacking this common “framework” complicated their performance review since it was hard to compare apples to apples.

But then, things became complicated, the Head of HR took notice. Of course, the first thing is that he did was to raise the issue to the CEO arguing that Susana was “bypassing HR”, they even brought all the Union complains but fortunately the CEO decided to support her seeing the amazing transformation she had done and the feedback from some of her employees. A happy ending, or not?

HR was still mad since it also exposed their own flaws so they decided to hack Susana back… instead of fighting they were gonna support her, even better, Susana’s ideas were so amazing that…

Long story short, a year later nothing happened with some initiatives stuck while others mutated so much that HR took credit for them. Still, it was worth it. People took notice and valued her efforts to improve things. This not only increased the engagement toward the project but followership, people are not stupid, they know who does each thing. A new culture began to grow in her team addressing also the sense of “second class citizen” she had found months before an a new “not many problem but its my fault” mindset began to appear.

So, in conclusion, building a shadow anything is not ideal but sometimes is the only option to cope with the missing components of an organisation. Also, filling the gap is not a problem as long as you can connect back with the processes and requirements other organisations like HR put on you, they shouldn’t be mad if you try to improve on top of their initial idea, but at the same time there are other hacks to bring them on board that we will discuss in other articles.

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Both are dysfunctional examples that happen every day in large organisations and are the result of bad managers and understanding of how their company works. They diminish not only the success of the company but build the frustration of talented individuals. For example, many large corporations have a clear separation between a “business” and a “technology” team, often creating a model where one “asks” for something and another “delivers”, leading to constant frustration and lack of recognition hidden to the outside.

You can even see this fracture inside one area, where one team “builds” something and another “maintains” it. Build teams tend to run fast, usually under pressure by commitments while maintenance teams will later have to cope with the lack of quality and shortcuts they took. See DevOps.

Because of this, many companies have started to experiment merging business and technology teams into “squads” or areas that own the whole problem instead of a function. This merger can be either virtual where teams sit together, report to the same manager or actually act as one. Although the first couple of moves improve the communication, leaving them separated, even if they report to the same person, doesn’t completely eliminate the problem.

After successfully piloting Agile and the idea of merging some teams together, Brian, the CEO of a large retailer in Europe, decided to roll-out the model to other areas of the company, including the points of sales (POS) in the stores. Traditionally led by a small “business” team that gathered, prioritised and sent requirements to IT, Brian felt that merging them with the corresponding technology team would eliminate the complains about time and cost he usually heard. He asked both the “business” responsible and the CIO to “do it”…

They met with the objective of defining which teams should be moved from IT and ensure they had all the levers (empowerment) to make POS operations a success. Before the meeting they agreed to come with a proposal, hopefully to ease such a hard conversation. The first chat was a surprise, the new “Head of POS” (fancy title by the way) only requested for 15 engineers while the CIO accounted for more than 200, how can the difference be so large? The mindset was the opposite the CIO anticipated, why instead of “stealing” a large amount of people and budget this guy only wanted 15?… ahhh

The Head of POS understood the POS as an application, with his old responsibility being to define nice user requirements in a computer screen for the store clerks to use, he didn’t account for everything that was behind, including the physical hardware, the contracts with companies that provided it, the 24/7 support to the stores, the credit card terminals, and much much more…

After weeks of discussions and frustration by the CEO it was agreed he was not the right person for the job. Accountability must match empowerment, one cannot be responsible, taking all the credit, reputation and empowerment without also taking ownership of the challenges and problem that role bring. The role “Product Owner” for example is often used for people that are really playing something closer to a “Project Manager”, a person driving a certain initiative but that will necessarily own the full scope of the problem, like its operation or success in the market.

One reason why accountability and empowerment become distorted is the way managers design their organisations, often having to care for some people, something of a “personigram” where you have to ensure everyone has its own role and team. I have also seen managers argue that the size of teams reporting to each person should be the same like this is some sort of requirement, probably so they don’t complain and have similar relevance in the organisation.

In reality organisation follows strategy, one should know what you want to do, design the organisation that best fits that missions and THEN place the best people to do the job independently of their affiliations and politics. Only bad managers don’t do it this way.

One can also “tweak” empowerment a few to achieve this balance. For example a CEO saying publicly that a project (or a person) is high priority goes a long way but this tools shouldn’t be use for everything, its the role of a good manager to design the organisation for smooth operation, with clear areas of responsibility, empowerment and no overlaps that fragment that responsibility when things go wrong.

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Continuing with James case, when he arrived to the CTO role he shaped with his team a very large list of problems to solve, going from complex strategical issues like the adoption of new technologies, enablement of certain business features, development of new mobile apps and completely redesigning the data architecture of the bank. At the same time, the team knew they would have to cope with a lot of day to day issues like day to day operations, audits, renewal of hardware, deployment of certain applications missing in some countries and much more. This left them with a long list of projects and the challenge of getting each of them approved and managed, which seemed like a frustrating mission in a company known for its complicated approval and funding processes, how in the hands of Finance (instead of an area with more strategical ownership).

Frustrated, James decided for a different approach, instead of fighting each battle he merged the majority of projects into a single program meant to build a new technology platform for the group. A large initiative requiring the resources of all the projects it housed but not the equivalent bureaucracy, it increased the changes of getting everything approved at once and created a more compelling transformation story than each project fragmented narrative. Of course, more money more questions, but the focus of the CTO, CIO and many other leaders into a single problem, story and flag greatly simplified the way to get the funds needed.

The new program also had an added bonus, it told a transformation story that later became the flag for the CIO and even partially the CEO of the company. Instead of talking about technology a sum of small things diluted the big investment being done, telling the story of a big platform, bringing a compelling set of new business features and present in many countries at once, something not done before since each business unit had the empowerment to chose their technology, created a sense of direction and excitement not seen before. The team also invested in the branding and internal marketing for the program that brought more visibility to it and therefore minimised any chance of Finance reducing its support to the program.

The same hack can be applied to many things. Forgetting for a second about the financial point of view in this article, think about fighting for salary increases for your team with HR, of course there is a limit but the tiredness and complexity of the conversation for sure doesn’t scale in a linear way if more people are bundled together. Same for technical problems, imagine for example being responsible for the source code of the company, would you rather have everything on a single place or multiple fragmented repositories. Of course, the first one has a bit of embedded risk to it but control, monitoring, security, backups, etc. are easier when the fragmentation is reduced.

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In 2016, James, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for a large multinational bank, had the challenge to grow his team by more than a 1.500 engineers in order to cope with the digital transformation of his company. As usual for him, HR didn’t provide much support, on the surface due to politics but on reality a total ignorance about the roles he was looking.

Still, he understood that its the responsibility of a good manager to shape his own team and therefore took ownership of the recruiting process, starting to look for candidates outside, especially in parts where his current team was not enough, domains that at the same time many other companies in the market were recruiting. The first quarter of 2016 went by and it was obvious that something had to give. If you combined finding candidates, navigating the hiring processes (taking months sometimes) and then land a decent offer, MAYBE it was possible to find 4-5 new engineers by the end of the year. But then, a couple of things started to happen that really made the difference…

In parallel to hiring, the team started to draw ideas of what would later define the technology strategy for the bank. It was an exciting exercise with almost no restrictions and with full empowerment to tackle the issues and leverage the right technology. The team entered a powerful spiral of ideas driven by a pragmatic equilibrium of people with a lot of experience and new talent able to challenge the status quo.

One of the main forces behind the new vision was a new global platform, able to provide the technology capabilities to all business units. In concept its similar to other platforms like Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP or Salesforce’s Heroku but made specifically for the banking industry. With a lot of convincing the project was launched and quickly became a flagship not only for the CTO but for many other leaders including the CEO’s own strategy.

As time passed, interviewing candidates wasn’t only about hearing from them but also selling their vision. More and more, it was obvious that the platform was becoming an amazing selling point for engineers that wanted to avoid a boring job of maintaining some legacy system and wanted to move the frontier of what meant to work in financial services technology. Good people are motivated by difficult challenges and in this case trying to build a platform was probably of the biggest challenges for any engineer due to its criticality and complexity.

Through word-of-mouth people started to come more and more and the “selling” of our project became viral. Hiring started to accelerate but still didn’t reach the point to where we wanted it.

In mid 2016 James got an interesting CV from his team in Asia. It was a senior banking engineer (35 years or so) expat looking to return home. Although he worked for a system integrator (SI) he was interesting in moving closer to James and joining the bank directly not only for personal reasons but because his company had just been acquired. He was unhappy and heard about Jame’s project and wanted to have a peek. After only 4 months of interviews and negotiations with HR he was in…

What happened later was a surprise... This guy was somewhat famous in the market and started attracting candidates, many from his previous company that also shared his frustration with the new owners, bringing around 25 world class engineers in a week alone. It was not only that but the fact that James was getting a cohesive team that already knew each other and were productive in a very short time. 

Later that year James repeated the same process with another engineer looking to leave a competitor. He was in his 40s and part of a unit that was dismantled for cost cutting. During his hiring process he delivered around 25 CVs of coworkers that were interested in the change.

This process was repeated at least 3 or 4 times in the following years, but with one important downside, James got multiple teams that were used to work together but they were not used to work… with each other, meaning a lot of work to dismantle the individual mindsets and rebuilding it as one.

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Having dealt with it ourselves for more than 20 years, we tried to compile a list of tricks or “hacks” to help you cope in similar situations. We also hope some of the decision makers in these companies feel inspired by these stories to analyse what can be done better.

We believe that one can truly design an organisation for paralysis, an organisation so complex, overlapped, bureaucratic and mismanaged that it’s truly impossible to work, we know a few. Small decisions can have a huge effect on the day to day of thousands of employees and managers sometimes simply do not understand the consequences because they don't see the day to day, especially those that reached the top without being part of the bottom.

Everything you read here is based on real life examples… unfortunately.

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