tl;dr
- Discussed top-down leadership decisions
- Discussed how hero culture affects those decisions
Full Notes
This week was basically one long discussion topic. There will be more written artifacts coming out of this discussion, but for now, let’s dive into what we have!
The agenda item that spawned the discussion was an incident wherein leadership got involved with an engineering decision and team members felt there was no option to push back on the decisions made. We’ve strived to cultivate a culture wherein anyone can speak up to any decision, so this is a call out we have to address.
The specific incident referenced was an off-hours Slack message that sent engineers scrambling. A feature that has been delayed over time (for a number of valid reasons) was pushed on, and engineers felt obligated to jump on the ping on a Sunday while deferring to a decision made outside of their control that they should have had say in.
There are a number of issues identified in this incident that are not tied specifically to this instance:
- Leadership is influencing decisions more strongly than they should
- Some don’t feel comfortable or capable pushing back on decisions from leadership
- Off-hours slack pings set the expectation of working during off-hours
- Flags that should be raised are not being raised
There are a number of reasons and potential remedies for each of these. While the conversation weaved back and forth between these, for these notes we’ll break this down by item for ease of consumption.
Leadership is influencing decisions more strongly than they should
Those in positions that are perceived as authoritative are making decisions that should lie with the engineers. This is often, and usually, not the intent, but the perception is vital to keep track of. This is a miscommunication that we need to fix by aligning the perceptions of leadership with the rest of the team.
Leadership must be more aware of the impression given when we jump in on decisions. We are a larger organization now, and that means the individual relationships we are able to build will not be as strong, and not everyone will assume the same intent during these interactions. We must be sure to proactively solicit feedback when we weigh in on a decision.
Some don’t feel comfortable or capable pushing back on decisions from leadership
This is another side effect of our growing team. We need to ensure it is clear throughout our culture that anyone can push back on any decision made at any level. Sometimes decisions will need to be made, but there will never be negative consequences for disagreements had in good faith. The discussion in Leadership retro had several of these, in fact.
To help disseminate this throughout the organization, we’ll be revamping the Conflict talk that was given some time ago and putting it in a written, living form. We’ll add this to the onboarding process, clearly laying out the expectations for how to disagree and handle conflict, even for those uncomfortable entering conflict in the first place.
It’s also important to note that anyone can push back on decisions to anyone else. If someone ever feels uncomfortable pushing back directly to someone who has made a decision, they can seek help from outside their normal org structure in resolving the situation or raising any flags.
Off-hours slack pings set the expectation of working during off-hours
Our hours are very flexible. In some cases, this means our teams work outside of the normal 9-5 working hours. In most cases this isn’t an issue, but when the power dynamics of leadership enter the conversation, it becomes more complex.
We need to be explicitly clear: nobody is ever expected to work outside their stated hours. On call rotations exist and modify those hours, but otherwise, a ping on a weekend does not mean you need to respond on that weekend. We maintain strong boundaries around when we are at work, and we do not want to breach those boundaries. Many members of our leadership team have different working hours due to travel, meetings, or other responsibilities. When someone from the leadership team reaches out, it is always OK to respond during your next work hours. Oftentimes, weekend pings are simply a result of those people having no other available time to send that message.
The leadership team will also aim to make sure we’re using the right communication methods for the level of urgency of any given event. As laid out in our communication guidelines, we have escalation paths at a higher priority than Slack if immediate attention is needed.
Flags that should be raised are not being raised
Our goal is to ensure that everyone at Banno, including the leadership team, wants feedback. Our ideal situation is to hear from anyone and everyone if there is a concern about any decisions we are making. In the example given, there were a lot of good reasons the feature had fallen behind. Some had been communicated, some had not. We want to make it explicitly clear that we want to hear any pushback and any red flags that could get in the way of goals we’ve set or suggestions we make.
This should also be bi-directional. If a leader needs information about flags being raised, there can be additional pressure in soliciting it from the entire team. We need to make it a goal to first ask the right people the right questions before pinging a larger group. In the example we had earlier, this might mean communicating with the team lead first, as they should have all the information about projects their team is working on.
This is important to note especially, as this brings our customers into focus. When flags are raised early and often, we can better set expectations with customers who are waiting for projects to complete or features to launch. Ultimately, raising flags is less about leadership keeping all of the variables in their head than it is about ensuring we’re being transparent with our customers.
All of these items are made more complex by a lack of documentation around our organizational structure, our roles, and our responsibilities. This is something we have to remedy in the near future. We’ve done a lot of good work over the last few years in organizing and defining these roles, now we just need to make sure that work is all written down and widely available.
These conversations led us to an assertion that hero culture is an issue at Banno. This was not universally accepted, and the ensuing discussion occupied the rest of the retro.
The conversation over hero culture ranged pretty wide, and was partially complicated by the fact that we were working with multiple different definitions of what exactly hero culture is. Again, for ease of consumption, we’ll document the output of that conversation rather than the entire conversation.
There are a few ways members of the team defined hero culture. One is to view it as someone who takes on extra responsibilities, sometimes doing harder sprints to get items across the line. One takes that a bit farther, as people take on too many responsibilities and either become a bottleneck or risk burnout. Another viewpoint was that we should enable everyone to become “heroes,” giving every team member the ability and autonomy to take on jobs and tasks that they feel confident in without needing to check back in for approval.
All of these can be right, and some of them can be an issue. We will likely always have people who take on extra tasks and do sprints to get important items across the line. Generally, these will be the people who end up in leadership positions. However, we must clearly define what this kind of short term push entails, and we have to ensure that those who do them are given the time to recover after. Within the leadership team, it’s not uncommon to work a long week and to immediately schedule several days off to recover. The goal is to minimize how often this needs to happen, and to do it responsibly and sustainably when it must happen.
One of the main ways to do this is to become better at delegating. While we have gotten better at this over the last several years, there is still room to improve. We have a few tools we can use to help. First, at the leadership level, we’ll simply be making delegation a part of our performance appraisal goals. We are going to keep it at the top of our review process to ensure we are not taking our roles as a reason to grab more responsibility than we are able to handle.
We can also do this by helping our teams grow. We need to help raise the capacity of our teams and empower them to take on tasks we would otherwise try to handle on our own. This means training, mentorship, and sometimes, giving people tasks that push their limits.
Finally, we need to set boundaries for when we take on extra work. We need to define when we cease taking on that load, when we delegate, or when we slow down. This goes hand in hand with our other goals, but requires being explicit and thoughtful when we do take on an extra load.
With that, we wrapped up December’s Leadership Retro. We’ll be continuing parts of this conversation over the next month as we generate some written content to solidify some of what we discussed. If you have any feedback, or just want to let the team know how you’re doing, don’t forget to fill out The Happiness Door! Have a wonderful week, all!