Let's talk
You may have noticed many companies failed or didn’t achieve their goals despite the best specialists hired, managers and world-class consultants implementing custom processes, optimizing operations and using the world’s best practices. How come that it isn’t working?
It has been a long time since I joined the IT industry. I changed many positions, roles and, of course, companies. I was an infrastructure engineer, tested software and even did the development. I have grown up from the regular employee to senior manager. I’ve got experience of running the teams and organizations as well as starting the new companies, either successfully or rarely not. To share the gained knowledge and experience I conducted trainings and lectures. All these involvements helped me to meet a lot of people and work with many as well.
The most important thing that I have learned over the years is that the work attitude that people have does matter. Some people just do their work, and in most cases they do it well. Some of them hate their work, always blaming their assignment, project, management or the whole company. Luckily, there were not so many of them in my experience. And a few people I know did the outstanding work or built the career quite fast. What I really missed, while observing how people do their job, is the right attitude.
It is not easy to catch this by working inside the group or even a bigger structure. In The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMarco you could find the experiment: two teams are working on the same project applying different approaches. It’s nice to read this story, but how it goes in a real world? Working for large scale companies, I got the chance to observe how similar organizational structures operate and, what is more interesting, how different are the ways they can behave and why the outcomes may vary. Same policies, processes, organizational structures. Why having that in place results in dissimilar ways? Let’s have a look on what I have learned.
In spite of the way employees do the job they rarely associate themselves with the company they work for.
Acknowledging that in a proper manner would definitely reduce the quantity of unwanted behavior. The position or role actually doesn’t matter there. Employees should realize that outcomes they produce define the prosperity of the company and thus their welfare and success as well. This will change the way they are getting involved, their contribution and, of course, motivation.
It is not a matter of being entrepreneurial, it’s just enough to treat the company like their own.
Even being a small part of the big mechanism, employees should understand that their contribution to the company’s success is crucial.
This will help them feel valuable all the time.
Of course, that attitude shall be consistent all over the organization and supported by company management too. It should be promoted, recognized and rewarded respectively to spread the right approach widely in the company. In my opinion, that is the way every team, unit or the whole organizations shall operate to achieve the success.
