They always get in our way.
Original image was found here
You work at a company, trying to do your job and they keep getting in your way. Putting obstacles, making your life hard while all we want is to do our job and do good for the company.
It is always them - they seem to work for every company - they are soulless and nameless. Perhaps they have a Union too - an evil one.
Working with our enterprise customers I often hear the same complaints:
"The IT department won't let me configure this machine"
"Operations won't reconfigure the firewall"And even at our little start-up I hear:
"Product Management changed the specs after we already started implementation"
"Management doesn't allow us to do X"And one of my favorites:
"We're not allowed to deploy to production after 10 am"In the last example, "they" don't even appear in the sentence. We're not allowed to deploy by some mysterious entity.
We're caged and we're hindered by these rules and there is no one to talk to about it.
What's the problem?
There are several big issues with using titles, tags and labels when talking about others. It may not seem like a big issue but labels and groupings can become a fundamental problem for a company.
They Vs. Us
Using labels creates separation. It is "they" vs. "us". "They" implies separate groups with possibly conflicting priorities.
Finality & Despair
When directives arrive from "them" or even worse, when directives just exist then there is a doomsday feeling, there is no way to argue against the directives. No way to question them or influence them.
Department stores sometimes will put a sign "No discounts". A sales representatives can just point his hand at the sign and tell a customer - "ahh, I wish I could help but you see the sign - It says no discounts."
This kind of finality discourages change and improvements and instead creates a feeling of defeatism and despair. If you think this is a bit too dark ask any friend who works in a big company about their feeling regarding rules set by Human Resources (HR) or IT.
Why is a name so important?
Demystify! A name means a person - it means someone we can talk to, it means someone we can identify with and someone with whom we can create a relationship. A name allows us to see that a decision is not done by some anonymous collective or higher power but by individuals and often just a single individual. We see these individuals as people, we know they have weaknesses and strengths and we realize that perhaps we can help them make better decisions and perhaps they can even teach us a thing or two.
One of the examples I like, and mentioned above, is a rule that was in place at a time I joined an engineering group. The rule said, no promoting/pushing changes to production systems during business hours. One day, we had a bug that was important to fix, and we asked the developers why is no one fixing it. The answer was "we're not allowed to push". Is this a company bylaw? Was the board mandating it? After some asking around, it came down to a decision a senior engineer made a while back. Let's call him Joe. After talking to Joe, he clarified the reasons behind the initial decision - Developers break production too often leading to failed business demos for the sales people. Notice another "they" here - "Developers". We discussed this and decided that instead of disallowing changes to all developers, we'll start tracking success/fail rate of push to production and also see who (names) is breaking production and why. In some cases, we saw that junior developers didn't get proper coaching. In other cases, we had unstable build scripts. After resolving several issues, our success rate of pushes to production went up to almost 100%.
So, by removing anonymous barriers, we empowered our engineers which made them feel better. We were able to improve our processes and tools and we were able to improve our product quality. And, along the way we made our rule book a little shorter. We now push to production around the clock.
World Peace
There are definite cases of bad work environments. There are cases of bad individuals and negative company culture. We may find that the person behind the anonymous "they" can actually be a pain in the butt. However, there are many cases in which the creation of personal relationship will lead to a better work environment, improved business results and happier employees.
As managers, leaders and individuals, we may want to continually seek to know more people on a first name basis, especially from other groups. We can grab coffee together. We can use a common love for a dog, or one-off project as an excuse to get to know each other. One on one meetings are a lot more powerful for connection building than social group events such as company meetings and can happen regularly.
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