Decoding company direction: people, goals, and reality
Follow what leaders do to understand what matters
Managers often say that it's crucial to align your team with the direction of the company. The statement seems reasonable. The company is unlikely to succeed if teams are stepping on each other's toes or one team is undoing what the other team just built. The phrase "company's direction" is widely used, yet it's vague.
Searching on the internet for "company direction" gives links to respectful resources talking about vision, mission, strategy, and other buzzwords. Yes, the company's definition of success and a plan to get there are important. It's just words such as "vision", "mission", and "strategy" become widely popularized to the level where their meaning is lost. Such words give an impression of something important, but they are so abstract, that they don't tell much about where the company is actually going.
Not a single direction
Companies often get compared to ships. Large companies are represented as being cruise ships and startups to speedboats. It could be oversimplified to view a company as a ship that is following a course. Teams are incentivized to achieve certain results. Leaders of the organization emphasize what's important by creating incentives. The incentives make certain actions more likely to occur. Actions produce results. Results feed back to the incentives, the behaviors leading to desired outcomes are reinforced, the harming ones get discouraged.
For example, the main priority of the founders of an early-stage startup is to get the next round of funding. The pressure to get funds, naturally translates into the demand to deliver features. Leaders frown at actions that lead to waste of money, while supporting behaviors that enable delivering features on time. It's straightforward with just one layer of leadership.
As the organization gets bigger, things get messy. Each level of hierarchy might have its own goals that are locally defined. The executive team might be focused on growing the business by expanding to new regions. A specific department might be going through a cost-cutting exercise and prioritizes money savings. A specific team might be struggling with unreliable systems and getting constant attention from the leadership during yet another outage. All these together creates a mixed bag of incentives.
What is the "company direction" here? The team is supposed to build features to support new regions, but they are very cost conscious and spend a lot of time keeping the existing systems up and running. Multiple demands from the same area are quite common. Leaders, who put more work on the team, do not necessarily know the team's capacity. It seems free to ask for one more thing.
It's people who "set" direction
Without people, a company is just a legal entity with a set of laws, internal policies, and an organizational structure filled with titles. It's leaders who set the ball rolling. Every leader emphasizes different aspects of the work, depending on their goals, background, and leadership style.
A leader who has never been an engineer, but runs an organization primarily staffed with engineers, may emphasize delivery, but pay no attention to quality or developer productivity. Leaders on the every level of the hierarchy have their own agenda. Their priorities are influenced by those from higher up, but also by the context of their organization.
Additionally, people have personal interest which might or might not overlap with the company. Even in the companies with a strong culture and huge emphasis on delivery, there will be people chasing their own interest1.
It is difficult to predict how all this will play out in a company with 1,000 engineers and 5–7 levels of management.
I put the word "set" in quotes in the header of this section. Indeed, leaders can set a direction. They can sit and write a detailed plan for the next few years, communicate it to the organization and facilitate its execution. This is not the only way to provide a direction. Leaders signal what is important by being present where they think they should be. If a VP joins a postmortem for a recent outage, it indicates that postmortems are important. A director, dropping a comment on a bug that is open for three weeks, is sending a clear signal that they care about solving bugs on time.
It can also be a leader focused on well-polished documents, who nitpicks every presentation. Focus on good-looking slides also sends a message — form is more important than the content. Oh boy, it shapes a lot of what people in the organization do. "Leaders cast a long shadow", the saying goes. I think the quote has a second layer. Leaders signal the organization what is important by simply choosing to pay attention to certain aspects of the work.
It's also possible that leaders send conflicting signals. Do feature A. Then, one day later: "oh no, feature B is the priority". Another day later: "where are we with the feature A?" The term "seagull management"2 has many reasons to exist.
To understand the direction of the bigger organization, observe where the leaders are present. Find out what do they care about, and where they spend time on. Pay attention to how consistent they are.
Declared and real goals
Let's imagine I made a new year resolution to get into a good shape. Just making the resolution barely affected my lifestyle. Now let's run a thought experiment. A camera in my place records my actions during the day. We have one week of video me laying on a couch, eating snacks, doing chores. If I showed a time-lapse video to someone who doesn't know me and asked them, "What is the person on the video trying to do?" They would say, "He is definitely trying to get fit."
More likely, an external observed would say that this dude is just chilling and doing nothing. This is what I call "declared goals"—goals that were set, but there have been no evidence of working towards them. Neither is there a plan for how to accomplish such goals.
Similar things can happen on the company level. Leaders can assert various statements. It doesn't necessarily mean they're committed to everything they say. A company might say they value their talent, but at the same time lay off people and outsource software engineering to vendors.
It costs nothing to declare a goal. What shows the real goals is when people bear personal cost to pursue it. A CTO might talk at length about engineering productivity, building resilient systems, and the importance of quality. It costs nothing to give reassuring talks. But you see what really matters when time comes and the CTO has to decide whether to postpone a critical launch because of quality issues or launch anyway because the executive pressure is too high. In retrospect, we can see which path a leader actually takes. Pay attention to where leaders are investing their effort, especially when what they declare has a non-zero cost to them.
Aligning with a direction
It might be challenging to know the direction when different leaders declare different goals and multiple level of hierarchy blur priorities. One obvious tactic to navigate organizational complexity is simply to make your boss happy. We could pretend that the complexity does not exist, that the management chain is perfectly aligned, and that your boss truly knows what is best. Actually, is not a bad tactic. Most of the time it's a safe default. Assuming your boss is competent. Assuming they are not in conflict with their boss. Assuming you have trustful relationships with your boss. Then it's a genuinely good idea to do what your boss says.
You can also push for your own direction. Surely, you see things that can be improved. It could be about engineering, business, or operational efficiency. Whatever you decide to do, remember that it will take a long time and can be risky. The danger is that you might end up fighting to prove that your choice is the best one. Know the difference between fighting and winning. It's also a long path. You need to convince other people, understand the point of view of your peers, and evaluate how much support you have to make your idea happen. Moreover, pushing your direction requires discipline from you. No one else will be consistent about making progress if you are not consistent. It's a challenge, but it's fun. No great leader achieved exceptional results by following orders.
No matter your approach, gathering more information is always helpful. Understand how other people see your organization, talk to the leaders you can reach. Different people have different information, they also might interpret information differently. If you see someone acting in a way that doesn't make sense to you, think about what they know and how they interpret it.
Conclusion
A company might chase several directions at once, but they aren't always consistent. The leaders of different organizations provide their own direction. Understanding the dynamic of the company takes time and close attention. Words might conflict with actions, leaders might not be consistent about their priorities. It's your task as a leader to read the room and notice when the situation changes. Exercise your own judgement, gather information before you act. If the course of action were clear, there would be no need for you as manager. Do your best to support what the company is trying to achieve and set the direction for your team.