I don’t often do job blogging, but these articles are worth pointing out.
Let’s start with the latest essay from the always interesting Joel on Software: The Development Abstraction Layer.
I’m going to pull a very tiny segement out of this article, and the emphasis here is mine:
Your first priority as the manager of a software team is building the development abstraction layer.
Most new software managers miss this point. They keep thinking of the traditional, Command-and-Conquer model of management that they learned from Hollywood movies.
According to Command-and-Conquer, managers-slash-leaders figure out where the business is going to go, and then issue the appropriate orders to their lieutenants to move the business in that direction. Their lieutenants in turn divide up the tasks into smaller chunks and command their reports to implement them. This continues down the org-chart until eventually someone at the bottom actually does some work. In this model, a programmer is a cog in the machine: a typist who carries out one part of management’s orders.
Some businesses actually run this way. You can always tell when you are dealing with such a business, because the person you are talking to is doing something infuriating and senseless, and they know it, and they might even care, but there’s nothing they can do about it.
The whole premise of the article is about how the role of management in a software company should be to facilitate development: i.e. producing software. I think many of the people above me in the org chart understand this intellectually, but I am not seeing any evidence that they are practicing it. Of course, I might just be having a cynical day.
The second article I want to direct you to is Why Your Employees Are Losing Motivation over at Harvard Business School‘s Working Knowledge site.
The piece starts of with what should just be common sense, but seems to be remarklably uncommon knowledge in practice:
Three key goals of people at work
To maintain the enthusiasm employees bring to their jobs initially, management must understand the three sets of goals that the great majority of workers seek from their work—and then satisfy those goals:
- Equity: To be respected and to be treated fairly in areas such as pay, benefits, and job security.
- Achievement: To be proud of one’s job, accomplishments, and employer.
- Camaraderie: To have good, productive relationships with fellow employees.
To maintain an enthusiastic workforce, management must meet all three goals. Indeed, employees who work for companies where just one of these factors is missing are three times less enthusiastic than workers at companies where all elements are present.
As I read this piece, I felt like I was reading a checklist of everything that has demoralized me at work over the last several months–everything they say to do to maintain high motivation is something that I have felt a lack of.
An example:
5. Communicate fully. One of the most counterproductive rules in business is to distribute information on the basis of “need to know.” It is usually a way of severely, unnecessarily, and destructively restricting the flow of information in an organization.
Workers’ frustration with an absence of adequate communication is one of the most negative findings we see expressed on employee attitude surveys. What employees need to do their jobs and what makes them feel respected and included dictate that very few restrictions be placed by managers on the flow of information. Hold nothing back of interest to employees except those very few items that are absolutely confidential.
So my motivation is at its lowest in the past decade, but at least the company is the #3 software company in Forbe’s Fortune 500. (You probably don’t want to click through to that EPS panel, though, if you want to be impressed by the company’s presence on the list.)
