I have become increasingly vocal about how long-held practices we perform at work are obsolete and damaging to progress. In my effort to make my voice heard, I’m not sure that there is enough air time left for me to not only criticize current practices, but also give an alternative. In other words, If I were king - which I definitely am not - what would I do differently? Since I often fail to get my view of the world heard where it matters at work, I’m going to attempt to put it in this blog - where it definitely doesn’t get heard where it matters.

First, reviews. In my world of aerospace, the use of review gates has proliferated to a very unhealthy degree People can find jobs where they are responsible for nothing but sitting on review boards and assigning actions to teams. They have no responsibility for the work after they leave the review. Getting an outside view of work is critical, but it should be done differently. Anyone who assigns actions must also have responsibility on the project. I know of no other way to balance the conflicting needs of mitigating risk, and making progress. That is not to say that outside voices should not be brought in to offer their strong opinions on what should be actions, but someone in the program needs to decide whether it merits being an action. Some would argue that putting someone on the program responsible for assigning actions puts conflicting demands on this person that shouldn’t be there. I don’t agree with this. Balancing conflicting demands is leadership. That’s why the leader gets paid the proverbial big bucks. If a company can’t trust someone to balance the progress of a program versus the risk of the program, that company has a leadership problem, not a review problem. Note also then that the leader of the program cannot be a leader in the GE/Boeing/HBS mold who has no other leadership credentials other than they are “leader-like”. The review leader needs to have proven themselves in both leadership and kept their technical abilities sharp1.

More needs to be said on reviewers as well. When I voice my opinions at work that the power of professional reviewers to assign work should be neutered, I have been accused of thinking I am smarter than the reviewer or closed to outside opinion. No, I am not necessarily smarter than the reviewer, but I am also not necessarily dumber either. It is insulting to think that someone who parachutes in for an hour or two can digest the complexity and challenges of program and proscribe a course of action more appropriate than the team who is living and dying the program on a daily basis. This is a further argument of why the person who ultimately assigns actions must be on the program.

Reviews are still necessary to check that the big picture approach of a program, but we need to dispel with the notion that reviews are the right place to check the technical details of work. Reviewers cannot look at Power Point slides and catch many of the lurking errors. To find errors we need to maximize the opportunities to catch mistakes on a near daily basis. How do we do this? I think this is an area that requires more thought, but here is one. Exchanging datasets. Just like everywhere else in life, we are generating more and more data. Team members need to constantly find ways to use their teammates data.

The next major area I would change is how information is disseminated within a team. This idea borrows heavily from Stanley McChrystal’s Team of Teams that I read some time ago. General McChrystal’s posited that in complex environments where traditional organizations struggle to keep up, it is the leaders job to distribute information to their team more than receive information from their team. Teams are faster when the leader provides information for people (or teams of teams) to make their own decisions based on the data and shared goals. I’m inclined to buy into this idea for some of the same reasons that I argued against design reviews. The average intelligence between the people doing the work and the “leaders” isn’t nearly as much as leaders tend to think. If that is true, then the leader, or the common node in a team, time is better served helping all of the other nodes make the best decisions they can on their own in pursuit of a common goal. This approach is all the more critical in a world where many of your nodes are working in their pajamas in their living room rather than at the office. It has become much harder to keep close tabs on what everyone is doing in the new, seemingly permanent work from home world. Teams that are comfortable working physically apart from each other have an advantage.

I liked McCrystal’s ideas at the time, but I’ve had time to try them and have found another major benefit. When I was a people manager, I did not want to be in meetings that I was not actively participating in. Paradoxically though, I also didn’t want to interfere in meetings that my people were leading. Given these two conflicting goals, how could I stay on top of progress or problems? I found that outside of sitting quietly in meetings, an alternative to staying on top of programs was actively gathering and sharing data on them. Budget, schedule, meeting notes, all can be gathered and distributed. In the process, you learn what questions to ask rather than request others always tell you what you need to know.

So for now, those are two ways my world would be different if I were King. Reviews would be far less frequent. No one would have a job whose main purpose was to chair reviews. Reviews are for big picture views of work, not details. Instead, we focus on creating the maximum number of checks on peoples work on a daily basis. Further, I would dispel with people being paraded in front of leaders to present their status against milestones and where “help is needed”. Instead the leader would constantly be working to keep everyone else aware of the bigger picture so that they can make quick decisions in this context.

  1. One does not keep technically sharp, by reviewing. One keeps technically sharp by doing. ↩