This is a story of a small IT service company in India with a capacity of 80-100 people. The key USP of the company was its focus on flat hierarchy, extreme programming culture, getting great people onboard, technology innovation, thought-leadership and encourage people to become authority in their respective field.
Flat hierarchy for the simple reason — it could be one of the biggest blocker for empowerment, innovation and decision-making in a startup. So it was quite common to see a senior developer pair programming with a newbie.
By having flat roles you can build a self-organized and autonomous team, which then could take its own decisions.
Here are some of the snapshots of what we were looking for.
Employees were encouraged to consider organisation like a clean slate. They could write on it whatever they want as long as it gelled with company’s values, brought improvement in status quo and a group of colleagues were convinced about the idea.
If anybody felt uncomfortable the way things worked in the organization, she could initiate a discussion in the company around the change and if idea makes sense, it would get implemented.
Considering all mentioned above, it was not a surprise anymore to see a big focus on the following mantra in the company.
Scratch your own itch. If it’s itching you hard, fix it.
The essence is — people were encouraged to come up with solutions instead of just coming up with list of problems. Everybody in the company was considered an equal partner in improving things.
The result was — anybody could start any initiative, which he/she thinks to be beneficial for the organization. Senior management helped in shaping the ideas. However people themselves had to sell their ideas to fellow colleagues and garner support.
Bringing this kind of cultural change was a huge challenge considering inherent hierarchical culture and existing industry environment. A person joining the company used to get a huge cultural shock in the beginning.
To provide some impetus and catalyst to these cultural changes, we started promoting some activities like blog writing, record technical videos and publish them, shaping communities of practice around various emerging Software technologies, participating as speakers in various technical and Agile conferences.
The medium of the communication of these exchanges was through email groups and face to face interactions. People were encouraged to come forward and lead these initiatives.
There were some lighter initiatives too like guitar, LAN games etc which were necessary to break the monotony of the work-place.
That gave a wholesome feeling to people, as they stopped looking office as just a workplace. People could give shape to their passion or interests there.
Initially everything worked as expected. However after some time, to my surprise, steam began to die down. Many people backed out when it came to do some work, though they expressed their keen interest initially.
Another important fact was — only few selected people were participating in most of the activities. Just 5–10 out of 70-80 people was not an encouraging number.
That brought a bit of frustration as it was difficult to understand what went wrong. Though I tried understanding things like what exactly motivate people and experimented with those ideas but again that didn’t bring any significant result.
One fine day, I was talking to a colleague whom I thought could bring a lot on the table. However surprisingly, he wasn’t participating in any org level initiative.
While having conversation with him, I expressed my frustrations and asked for his opinion. I said, “Rajesh, what are your views on current initiatives going on in the organization. Also what do think why people are not responding to them?”
In response whatever he told, surprised me.
He said, “Why do you expect people to respond? There are many people who are not that outgoing in nature and feel shy to come out of their shell. Also many may not be interested in the initiatives you are talking about but may be interested in others which don’t exist as of now. Why don’t you talk to the people and understand what really motivates them instead of just focusing on what’s important to the organization?”
Honestly I never thought about it before and it opened my eyes. In order to implement this new revelation I changed the approach completely.
For the moment I completely set aside the organizational goals. The focus now was to understand people and their passions.
The idea was great but honestly it I had absolutely no clue how to execute.
It’s comparatively simpler to find what people want. However other bit — what exactly people would be interested in doing is not that simple to understand. That might relate to their passions.
However, many a times, even people themselves are not aware what they are passionate about. They may tell you things based on context or who is sitting in front of them but in that process they might fake the reality.
Also in many cases, passion may not directly translate into achievements. In those cases, people try to downplay those aspects of their personality.
On experimental basis, I started having open-ended informal conversations with people on individual basis. The idea was to know a little bit more than just their professional persona. Also, it was important to make people comfortable in their own space.
Those conversations had hidden goals and focused on to identify:
- Their strengths
- Limitations
- Subjects they are passionate about. Things they really enjoy doing. Things they would like to do again and again.
While having these conversations, I realized one has to make conscious effort in discovering people’s passions as they may not be aware about them.
That’s why conversations were full of questions related to their personal and social life, their interests, things they like and dislike. Some questions were also related to their college or school life, a time when most of the people do what interests them the most.
During those conversations, I found that many people had lost their vigor and zeal in maintaining their interests because of changed priorities in their life. But rediscovering those lost interests in itself was very enriching experience.
For instance, one of the colleagues did a research software project to transform the voice of a person into someone else’s. He also created a software project, which could convert a human skull into some recognizable human face.
Yet when I looked back, I realized he never got any right opportunity during his last 1 year in the company. Also nobody ever knew about his hidden talents.
Similarly another colleague was very interested in organizing events in college and had already organized mammoth college event single-handedly. Yet another colleague was an editor of college magazine and was very good at writing.
Based on these conversations, I discovered people with many sorts of interests.
All it required was to synergize their passions and energies into bigger organization level goals.
Organization is like a soccer team
One of the biggest mistakes for any organization is their focus on only creating heroes – players who could play at the front and score goals.
In many companies, management also encourages people to become heroes.
However the truth and the reality are way different.
You get fruit from a tree having a solid foundation. Similarly a 100-stories building can’t sustain without having strong foundation.
Organisation is like a soccer team. In soccer, win is not only dependent on scored goals but also on the saved goals. Soccer or any team game is incomplete without the collaboration of forwards, midfielders and defenders.
Scoring a goal is also a team-effort, which unfortunately is perceived as just forward’s effort in many organizations.
The reality is – defenders and midfielders lay the foundation based on which forwards score goals.
In an organization, it’s useless to push everybody to become forwards or heroes (key innovators, conference speakers etc) as everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses.
Pushing people to do something towards perceived organizational goals may not always work.
This was one of the key ideas we tried to introduce in the company culture through the exercise of identifying or discovering passions.
Passion Driven Work and Organizational Goals
The exercise of identifying passions in many ways was to recognize a great self-organized energy pool.
People generally love to do stuff they are passionate about.
Leadership and people can now collaborate in marrying the passions to the right opportunities org wide.
Organization needs everyone. Not only forwards but midfielders and defenders as well.
That’s the basic foundation of Passion driven work.
Results
Based on received inputs from colleagues, we started aligning their interests towards the long-term organizational goals. After some time we started getting sustainable and dramatic results.
At one point, people writing on corporate technical blog were around 5–10% of total number of people. That changed to around 50–60% people in the organization.
Initially that happened because of the interest shown by truly interested people about it and then because of healthy competition among the colleagues.
We started finding the involvement of people in various activities like hiring improvement initiative, building technology guilds, multimedia and marketing, software design competition, organizing events, innovation and speaking in conferences.