Joel’s apparently done some learning on middle management. While Rick Chapman may be right in that a middle management layer is inevitable, the glaring line that jumped out at me in Joel’s article was…

“Michael is our president, and he and I are 50-50 partners, so whenever there was something really important to talk about, you had to get both of us together in a room. But everyone else was a Member of Technical Staff.”

Joel goes on to explain how his people are concerned about career paths and compensation. While I do NOT know all the details, and can only speak to the information in that article, it sounds to me that there’s a glaring mismatch between the structure fogcreek wants and it’s compensation model. He’s created a culture where people are empowered to do what needs to be done for the business to succeed, however, the fruits of that success land in the laps of 2 individuals. Now the people are left having to ask to share in those fruits they feel they were a part of. That sounds like a nightmare for all. I’m pretty sure people will not work their hands for the bone if they aren’t sharing in the rewards the resulting business is generating in a fair fashion.

Middle management may be where we all have to land eventually, however, I’d say it’s also a simple, common answer to a complex problem. There are very few companies alive who’ve strayed from this path. Joel has a history of crafting bold solutions to complex problems instead of taking the worn path. Here, not so much.

Sure I’m relying on business press here but one company that comes to mind is Gore Associates who claim to be a business without bosses. How are they doing it? They work to “get big by staying small” keeping small plants that accentuate a close knit and interpersonal atmosphere. They created a very successful sponsor program aimed at assisting “new people to get started and to follow their progress”.

There are three kinds of sponsorship at Gore:

“1. The sponsor who helps a new associate get started on the job or helps an associate get started on a new job (starting sponsor)
2. The sponsor who sees to it that the associate being sponsored gets credit and recognition for contributions and accomplishments (advocate sponsor)
3. The sponsor who sees to it that the associate being sponsored is fairly paid for his or her contributions to the success of the enterprise (compensation sponsor)
A single sponsor can perform any one or all three kinds of sponsorship”

Along with the sponsor program, their associates are asked to follow 4 principles:

“1. Try to be fair.
2. Use your freedom to grow.
3. Make your own commitments and keep them.
4. Consult with other associates prior to any action that may adversely affect the reputation of financial stability of the company.”

It looks to me like Gore is trying to solve the same problems Joel’s addressing in a different way. I agree there’s an issue that needs to be addressed. I agree adding a layer of management is one potential solution. I don’t agree that it’s the only one. I’m curious to see how it works out for Joel and the gang as I wish them only continued success.

At Business of Software I had a great discussion with Zakir from iLoveRewards about, of all things, rewards in the workplace. As well, Mark and Razor have had some chats lately.

First, I’m going to be an ass. Some names, Jeffrey Pfeffer, Douglas McGregor, Abraham Maslow, Joe Scanlon, Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto. If you don’t know of, and have read, at least three of these guys then start there. Why? If you don’t even know those names then we’re going to spend all our time on the basics like incentives in modern schooling, hierachy of needs, theory x versus theory y, etc and fail to get into the fun stuff.

So technically no, I’m not all that into extrinsic rewards in general, however, the stuff iLoveRewards is up to is still light years ahead of the average companies compensation policies. They’ve managed to fix a lot of the caveman policies like centrally controlled distribution. In the end though, it’s built on the flawed premise that you can motivate people over the long term. As my friend John asked a college teacher who’d offered the reward of beer for submitting an assignment, “I have a fridge full of beer at home so I can skip this one?” I do, however, believe greatly in the rewards a business can produce as a whole and focusing everyone in your company on achieving those rewards. Most companies don’t even have a common goal little on actually ensuring everyone in the company understands it.

Here’s my pitch for a rewards plan….Get at least the executives together. Possibly some investors, clients, maybe your entire company? The more open and transparent you can be with all steps, the better. Spend an afternoon choosing a milestone that would excite you all as a business if you hit it in a few months time. Take some time and talk this through, dig deep and keep working until you hit a clear, meaningful milestone. Something like “We have 1000 users signed up” or “We’re earning x in revenue which covers our current burn”.

Now pick a reward. This is tricky because you can only pick one and it’s the same reward for everyone. If you think you can pull it off, get everyone involved in this so your people choose the reward. Some examples that come to mind, Aeron chairs, spa days, gym memberships, better computers.

After that it’s simple. Spend a day with your team where you talk through the goal. Find out what tools and information your team needs to deliver on this goal and let them loose. The ‘executives’ job should be primarily to support by providing those tools and information required not making decisions and plotting course.

While it’s not perfect, this approach work towards a culture of interdependence by uniting your team on a common goal instead of forcing them to compete against each other for a bag of treats. Can you eventually work your way off the reward part? Yes and you should, Scanlon was doing it over 50 years ago so you have little excuses.

I was part of a working session here at BOS where the topic was ‘hiring and keeping great developers’. The topic of testing in interviews came up. The majority of people agreed that testing was important, however, they acknowledged fundamental flaws in that people could be nervous, feel rushed, etc.

So what’s the problem with tests? The test environment is completely unlike the real work environment. Maybe I’m naive but isn’t the simple fix to strive to make your test environments as much like the real work environment you need that person to perform in?

Do you need to hire someone who can stand up in front of a room full of strangers and write software on a whiteboard with no outside resources?

Do you need someone who can sit in a room alone with pen and paper and write pseudo-code?

I doubt it but if you do, you’re in luck. Most of the existing testing environments are perfect for your company. If, however, you need to hire a developer who can make use of all the resources they can find, work both alone and with a team, and produce creative solutions to stated requirements then keep tweaking your test environment to get as close to that setting as you can.

Cooper design has been doing this for years with their interaction design exercise. Recently we started using simple developer tests for both brainpark and boc meant to put the candidate in a truly work-like environment.

How? Find a simple tutorial publicly available on the net that’s technically related to your work. The tutorial should take the average person 1 to 3 hours to complete and should end in a functioning application. With brainpark we use the django tutorial. We have the candidate go through the tutorial on their own time with their own resources and then submit the code when complete. You could provide clear directions such as satisfying a requirement not in the tutorial or just leave it open ended.

Then sit down with them and their resulting application, run it and walk through the code. We now have the opportunity to discuss real code…why did you extend that class? would that method be difficult to maintain? Why doesn’t your application start?

The goal is to give candidates an opportunity to shine and truly show you what they’re really capable of.

Oh man, now there’s a title for you. Sure, I’m going to define the topic of leadership right here and now for you all. You best move on to smarter places like here, here or here if that’s your expectation.

I’ve been in a few common positions in relation to leadership, possibly in chronological order:

• Bottom of the food chain wishing someone would bestow a leadership role on me.
• A ‘manager’ supposedly leading teams.
• An ‘owner’ working to build leaders within teams.

Those experiences have given me some entry level insight into what leadership is all about. So what do I know today about leadership? Here’s my completely made up on the spot list:

1. Assigning, or being assigned, leadership almost never works.
2. Leadership isn’t a role or title.
3. Good leaders are natural leaders.
4. Natural leaders don’t wrestle, hoard, or covet leadership roles. They see voids in leadership and naturally gravitate towards them.
5. People won’t become leaders until they’re ready, which is different than crap like leaders are born, etc. Tomorrow’s leader is today’s plain old team member.
6. Good leaders are most excited about seeing plain old team members become tomorrow’s leaders.
7. Leadership isn’t a destination.
8. Leading is NEVER about making big decisions.
9. In fact, good leaders make as little big decisions as possible.
10. Natural leaders work themselves out of their roles. They see themselves as training wheels to help teams move forward until they’re no longer needed.
11. Good leaders allow acceptable voids in leadership.

So good leaders gravitate towards voids in leadership naturally, when they’re comfortable. As a leader, the ideal way to find leaders is to allow this natural progression by opening up tolerable voids in leadership within your teams. This is in contrast to creating roles and assigning them. Have I created roles and assigned them on teams? Yep and I will again, however, I view those occasions as failings on my part. Have I been on every side of every fence I describe above? Pretty much.

If you’re a plain old team member who wants to become tomorrow’s leader then my advice is to watch closely for those voids in leadership on your team. Don’t clutch and grab at them. Identify them and work with your entire team to help them move forward on those issues. When you see these voids, the worst you can do is sit back, bitch and moan about the terrible job you’re current managers are doing.

If you’re a leader trying to grow your next crop of leaders. Strive not to assign leadership roles. Think about these voids and try opening some up on your teams and see who naturally steps in. When you see someone stepping in then do everything you can to support, encourage, and make them successful. Oh, and grow a thick skin and be prepared that some people may see these voids as failings on your part.

I like this quote from Jeff Bezos, found link from Mark:

“Communication is terrible.
When Jeff Bezos’s people said they needed to communicate more within the company, he shocked them by shooting back: ‘No, communication is terrible.’ To promote his decentralized vision of the company, he created ‘two-pizza teams’: highly autonomous task forces with five to seven people — no more than can be fed with two pizzas — who innovate and test new features.”

The key for me is the “highly autonomous” part and I’ve seen that overlooked a lot when this approach is tried. Almost every company I’ve worked for has tried some form of 2 pizza teams, however, none have stuck with allowing them to be truly been autonomous. I’d hazard to guess that a highly autonomous 6 pizza team is still better than lipservice autonomous 2 pizza teams.

Chip Wilson, founder of lululemon was on The Hour last night. He made a comment about doing great things. He said that mediocrity fears great things and therefore people doing mediocre things will always attack people doing great things.

While the scales are significantly reduced, my experience tells me Chip’s bang on. I’ve witnessed this over and over again in my limited circles. People who aren’t skeered will look at someone attempting great things and think ‘how can I help? how can I be a part of that?’

So if you’re truly attempting great things then expect attacks and don’t be deterred. Keep an eye out for people who support and rally around you and don’t stress the rest. Hey, maybe you should just say thanks to an attack and take it as a compliment? Look at it as a sign that you’re doing something great?

Back to not doing what you know is right, I’ve managed to drift back into email hell. My intent is to gain back control which means I’ll be working my way back to checking email twice a day and once (maybe) over the weekends. That means that your best way to reach me, if you need immediate responses, is this little device we call the teleeefun.

It’s amazing how some deadlines and the need to be aggressively productive can quickly expose email for what it is, a massive waste of time. The point being I’m not doing this to be a recluse prick, although I can’t say that’s a ‘negative’ side effect, but instead to get better and more intentional at what I decide I need to do.

Quick primer. At boc we have no formal process for hiring. Some may wrongly assume that’s because we’re small, immature, and haven’t locked things down yet. While all those things are true, don’t mistake our lack of formal process as being unintentional.

Okay, we don’t have any rules but we do have a history:

• We’ve never hired someone from a resume.
• We’ve only ever hired people who’ve been referred to us by someone on our team.
• Since I’ve been involved, I have yet to seriously read someone’s resume. Man I love that! I wasted too much of a previous life reading resumes.
• We don’t consider someone to be a full-on boc’er until they’ve attended one of our retreats. At a retreat they’ll have no choice but to meet most of us, cook and eat food with us, talk about work and non work, roll an ankle or blow a knee etc.

Anytime I attempt to explain how we hire to someone with more traditional ideals I always feel like a hippy flake. Look, the bottom line is that we literally hire like cavemen, err cave people? New people must gain acceptance by our established group and it’s more about admitting members to our tribe than hiring new recruits. Is that crazy?

Ummm…no. These tribal leanings have a much deeper history than any new HR policy created last week. We hire in a time tested, tribal fashion. What’s crazy to me is companies that leave hiring decisions to a small group in HR, provide limited exposure to the people who must accept and help make these newbies succeed. The most I’ve ever had in my experience of hiring, or being hired, is a quick lunch with a select member or two of the team. I’ll stick with our caveman ways thanks….

Years ago, during the first dot com boom, I worked at a little web company in Toronto. That company made the decision to bring in some old school boys to run things. Some guys who know how to efficiently operate a growing organization. Is there a ‘tongue in cheek’ emoticon? That particular experience didn’t exactly inspire my confidence in the old guard. I butted heads more than the opposite.

One case that came to mind was office layout. With a few new hires coming in the door, we’d outgrown the layout of one of our floors. There was some heated discussions with some people having strong opinions about how things should be laid out, where their “office” should be, who should sit near who, etc, etc, blah, bored, blah…

So the part that really blew my socks off? Our man in charge at the time took it upon himself to stay late that evening and draw up the new office layout with no real consultation with the people involved. The next day he handed the new office layout over to the office manager for implementation.

Occurrences like this drove me bonkers and I generally got nothing but cow-eyes when I’d raise my concerns with the ‘powers that be’. Stereotypical managers actually view this kind of useless crap to be their job. At this time, this guy would have been one our highest paid people and he’s being paid to write seating plans for grown ups?

In this case my only question for ‘the man’ was “how old are your children? Does their teacher issue them a seating plan at school or does she trust those 6 year olds to figure it out themselves?”

I recently read something from Ricardo Semler, speaking about exactly this issue. Obviously he has pretty much the polar opposite take on it…

“Sure, I’m the main shareholder, so I always have a loaded gun in a drawer and the right to fire it, but understanding the benefits of our system is my self-restraint. I know that there’s only one bullet in the gun, and if I fire it off in a fit of pique, I’ll only get one shot at overriding a popular decision, after which I’ll be disarmed. At that point, I’d lose everything I’ve worked for..”.

If you’ve only got ONE bullet, do you really want to use it on a seating plan issue??

Ricardo Semler, writing about what’s left once you reach the realization that mission statements and credos are bullshit:

“Quite a lot, starting with what we stand for, the way we do things, the facts on the ground, the we are perceived, and the satisfaction and success of those involved. In other words, judge us by what we do, rather than what we say we do. Judge us by standards drawn from a peaceful, civilized, cooperative, and humane society of equals..”

I wish I’d written that and like to think that somewhat describes what we’re up to at boc. Sure it’s hi falootin stuff but so what?

PS, I have some istockphoto credits that are expiring hence the unrelated image. Check out that guy’s shadow, I think he’s Australian?