How “Clarity” helps achieve cooperation at IT companies..

Intro

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Achieving cooperation and delivery is a priority for IT companies.

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As part of this blog series, we look at “systematic” concepts that help achieve cooperation. We’ve looked at …

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Today we talk about …

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Clarity

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What are the boundaries of acceptable behavior ?

What are the penalties of cheating ?

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An employee might …

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Either way, the boundaries of acceptable behavior should be clear. So should the consequences of cheating.

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The VP at an org hired new employees saying … “The project should be delivered in 1 year, else you are not needed”. The result ?

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The team became efficient and high function. Each team member was clear about the consequences of what came next.

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The most important part of the demand was that – Expectations were crystal clear.

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The idea seems simple enough. Is it though ?

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Calculated risks

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Pankaj is a troublemaking engineer. He does the work, but loves to try out new things. As with anything else, some of his experiments do not end well.

Should he be reprimanded or encouraged ? Clarity once again becomes important.

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How would you clarify the limits of acceptable behaviour for Pankaj ? What risks are okay ??

Is it okay to mess in a …

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The above scenarios make it complicated to figure out limits of acceptable behavior. Therefore these are NOT good standards.

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Complexity makes it easy to cheat AND let good behavior go undetected.

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In other words, boundaries of acceptable behavior need to be simple, for them to be Clear.

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Surprises

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Surprises are stress tests for clarity.

Certain surprises ( due to lack of clarity ), bring up interesting situations. This is best described with real examples. So, here we go …

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A sudden penalty killed the most productive organs of a team.

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Work the weekend :

We were working on a deadline, a difficult project and all. Days were long and weekends passed without rest.

There were few who contributed NOT ONLY to their own work but also to others’. Helping others meant, sometimes missing our deadlines. Overall deliverables were high, even though some work was delayed. This was because we believed …

Team deliverables are MORE important than personal deliverables.

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We were helping the organization and there wasn’t a disincentive.

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Suddenly – we received an email from a department head. The people with delayed deliveries couldn’t take any leaves ( weekends, holidays etc. ).

It was a punishment of sorts. The result ?

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The top 10% stopped helping others. We now focussed only on our work. Helping others, at the cost of our time, became a disincentive.

Personal deliverables became MORE important than team deliverables.

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Some deliverables became timely ( from us 10% ). But, the overall deliverables of the organization sank.

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What was more important ? Individual deliverables OR Team deliverables ? I believe both are important. But the point is … leadership lacked clarity.

This lack of clarity killed the most productive organs in the team. (and further delayed work).

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I let the leader know that his decision had a side effect. But stubbornness is a leadership virtue. Had our friend read a bit of Game Theory, he would’ve understood the idea.

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Also, surprises have undercurrents.

During this crisis, the biggest cheaters worked hard and got (justifiably) rewarded. But created discontent among the best performers.

Such disharmony is never good for team camaraderie..

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Wrap up

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Clarity is important to achieving cooperation at IT companies.

Limits of acceptable behavior and consequences of cheating, need to be clear to a team member.

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With muddying factors like …

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Techies need to be clear on what could result in a reward/ penalty.

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Excerpts from: The Art of Strategy

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Next, we look at the Certainty of a reward/ penalty.