I’m sure busy calendars open vast opportunities to choose one things over the others.
The more people in our department, the busier our calendar, the more valuable we are in terms of power to the company. It’s inappropriate if anyone can see our free calendar and book a meeting for us to discuss something urgent. 15 minutes on Tuesday at 7:45 p.m. in two weeks sounds fine.
It’s easier to add more processes. When there is no slack time, it’s much easier to conduct meetings without agendas and facilitate the decision-making process to continue in two weeks. Remember, there is no space in the current week because of meetings. We are also late to one meeting because of the others, and there is no time for lunch. It’s tough work!
We don’t need to think about the overall system. We might react to existing issues, disregarding their importance, profit/loss, and cost of delay. When we see any unclarity in execution, we must adopt the OKR framework and make teams report.
We don’t need to think about people growing. We grew without any mentorship, and it was fine. Only the strongest should survive! If someone catches us and insists on feedback, give just a random annoying thing after much time without the context. Remember our excuse, sorry, I must run to the next meeting!
We repeated the same things many times because the first time, we were in a hurry, and the second and third. Lack of context it’s the Agile way! In the end, we must do much work ourselves because employees are not so motivated and qualified.
We don’t need to manage work. We can manage people directly by assigning tasks and controlling them. Again, this is because they are unmotivated to do their jobs and don’t think of the next steps for the businesses.
We should not forget to compare daily team reports to find differences and insights. Soon, we should add statistics measuring the individual productivity of each person per task. This would be significant information for individual performance review promotion.
We might spend more time hiring new people to fill the visible gaps instead of optimizing existing processes. We don’t need to ask questions about how we work or which activities build our work. It’s a ridiculous question: We have plenty of tasks and just work, no questions about how.
Hope this advice serves you well! Oh, sorry, I’m late for the meeting.
Comments & email subscription
wholesystems.substack.com
I’m Alex, a software engineer with technical and engineering management experience from startups to middle-sized and big-tech companies. Loves to make effective and friendly team processes.
You can freely drop a message to [email protected] or linkedin.com/in/aptakhin to greet and ask questions about any topic.
I’m also mentoring pro bono at meander.so/m/aptakhin