The invisible work of managers: crafting organizational alignment
Creating alignment is one of the most important aspects of the manager's job. Learn about different ways to streamline your organization.
Your role as a manager is to enable your organization to work to its full potential. It's a natural reaction to solve an efficiency problem by adding more: more people, launch more projects, do more. However, this line of thought misses a crucial point—Scaling an organization isn't free, and at some point it reaches a point of diminishing returns. Reducing friction, however, streamlines an organization without bloating costs.
A huge source of friction is the lack of alignment between stakeholders. Product managers push for new features while the engineering team is overloaded with operational work. Possibly, the engineering team is reworking architecture while there are business-critical projects to be delivered.
We can compare organizational alignment with a vector sum in mathematics. The length of the resulting vector, C, depends on not only the length of A and B, but also how the two vectors are aligned. Actually, the position of two vectors plays an even bigger role than their length. The length of A' and B' is equal to A and B, but the length of their sum, C', is twice as much as C. In other words, pushing hard doesn't make sense if another force pushes in the opposite direction. Your role as a leader is to create alignment in your organization. The vector analogy is pretty close to the dictionary definition of the word alignment.
An arrangement of groups or forces in relation to one another.
Aligning your organization might take different forms:
Resolving dependencies for key projects.
Agreeing on priorities with peers. Creating acceptable technical debt to deliver critical projects.
Escalating issues to reach a conclusion.
Doing what's best for the company, even if it's harming your team.
Resolving dependencies
It's the day-to-day job of a manager to make agreements with other teams about dependencies. To deliver a critical project, your team might need something from another team. It might be a change in API your team consumes; it might also be a legal approval or external review.
You, as a manager, need to know well the stakeholders of your project. You need to understand their priorities, roadmaps, and constraints. This part of the manager's job is least understood by individual contributors. From the outside, it might seem that managers just talk to random people in the company.
What actually happens is that managers invest in building relationships with key stakeholders. Let's imagine that your team needs a significant technical change for the project in the upstream service owned by another team. That team is fully busy working on their roadmap. It's unlikely to be a productive conversation if you just come demanding they deliver changes your team needs. Knowing your stakeholders and understanding their priorities is crucial for long-term success. If you build relationships with key stakeholders of your team before you need them, you're more likely to get a positive outcome.
Agreeing on priorities
Another form of creating alignment is overcoming internal friction. The most common example is tension between product and engineering functions. The most severe form of such friction is "us" versus "them". A strong indicator of tribalism is when a team has a product backlog owned by the product manager, but engineers also have a technical backlog. This effectively means that the team doesn't have clear priorities. You, being the manager, bridge that gap.
Don't try to pick your side. There is no "us" vs. "them". Your goal is to do what is best for the business.
Both engineering and product functions are needed for business success. Sometimes you help the PM understand why it's critical to address certain technical debt by showing how much time your team spent on maintenance. Other times, you accept technical debt to deliver a feature on time.
There is no playbook for how to decide one or another. To make decisions, you need to understand both product and tech. Work on building your understanding: learn about primary product metrics and factors that influence them. Also identify technical constraints that might limit the team's ability to deliver. A good way to reach internal alignment is to have a written set of quarterly objectives for your team with measurable outcomes. Not objectives specific for the engineering, but for the scope of the whole product. Once you have the objectives for your team, you can work backwards and define the roadmap to achieve these objectives.
Escalating issues to reach a conclusion
The word "escalation" often has a negative connotation, as if something bad happens when a matter is brought to senior managers. Escalation might seem like "airing your dirty laundry in public." However, I would argue against this metaphor.
It could happen, in a sufficiently big organization, that two teams depend on each other, but their roadmaps are not aligned. One team has to stop doing what they do and support another one. Each team has a manager who runs the planning process and is committed to specific objectives. Both teams acted in the best interest based on the information they had available at the moment of planning. The thing is, the information was incomplete. Now, none of the two managers have the decision-making power to make a call. In this scenario, escalation is the only reasonable tactic. Trying to win the argument will harm the reputation of another team and reduce their ability to deliver their commitments. Accommodating for changes and sacrificing your team's objectives will raise questions from your leadership. Learn to recognize situations where you don't have the decision-making power. Then work with your counterpart to identify people who have sufficient power to make the decision and brief them on the context around the issue.
Many escalations go wrong when the sides in disagreement escalate separately to their managers. In such situations, senior managers miss the other side's point of view. Make clear agreements with your counterpart about whom to escalate to. Write together a single document describing the problem and state clearly what decisions need to be made. Remember, the goal of the escalation is not to win the argument. The goal is to align what your team is doing with the company priorities.
Doing what's best for the company
Following up on the previous point, there are situations when your team has to sacrifice to achieve what's good for the company. Let's take a simple example. You have an opening in your team, and you're interviewing a candidate for this position. They absolutely nailed the interview. You send out an offer, and you're excited to have them on your team. A week later, a director comes to you and tells you that another team is under pressure; they are suffering from attrition. They say it's absolutely necessary to send your candidate to that team. They also mention that it will be better for the candidates' experience if you have a call and explain to the candidate these changes.
That's unfair, you could say. You could be mad at your director. There might be strong emotions about that decision. Yet, the right thing to do is to professionally inform your director what's going to happen if you don't fill a position on time. Then listen to their arguments, and then help them execute whatever they have decided. It's called disagree and commit. This phrase has been popularized by Amazon leadership principles, but the saying originated in the 80s. You're free to try to influence factors outside of your control, but you execute the decision whether you like them or not, as your own decisions.
Conclusion
Creating alignment is a crucial part of a manager's job. It might take many forms. This type of work might not be visible and doesn't pay off immediately. Yet, this is the type of work that compounds over time and leads to a well-functioning organization.