Edition #8: What the hell I am doing here?

Hi, a wonderful creature! You are reading the eighth monthly edition of my newsletter. These newsletters are in the format of thought of the time + digest of articles about leadership in engineering teams and interviews with experienced engineers and leaders. Happy reading, watching, and listening ??!

This time I will talk about my experience of helping teams find the meaning of work and aligning on goals.

How do you develop leaders in your team?

In 2021 I completed a 6 months long leadership training course "Leaders ABC". As a token of high appraisal, I was gifted a book "The Future Leaders" by Jacob Morgan . While I was learning lot of new things, most of it I was already applying daily as a head of the engineering department responsible for the manufacturing of electronic boards.

One of those things was about finding impact and purpose, and answering to people in my team a simple but mind-provoking question - What the hell I am doing here?

It is not that they were coming to me and asking directly this question. But there was a lack of enthusiasm and it was obvious that people were mainly coming to make money and socialize at smoking corners, over lunch, or just during any break time. The work felt like a routine which has been there for many years and nothing else was changing except for organizational structures and department names.

From the first day I assumed that position, my goal as a leader became to develop other leaders in my team and motivate them to grow intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. How could I do that?

Well, I needed first to answer myself and then explain to others the answer to the question "What the hell I am doing here?".

Why? Because life is all about motivation and initiative. Your primary motivation is just to survive. When you are a student or fresh graduate, your motivation is just to get any experience regardless of salary. Once you get more experience, you start asking for more salary and ideally, more challenges. Later, at some point, you start getting used to things and there are fewer and fewer sparks in your eyes.

What I have just described is nicely illustrated by Abraham Maslow's pyramid.

What I could impact as a leader was Esteem and Self-actualization. The key was to answer to question "What the hell we are doing here?".

In the search for an answer

At that time I worked in a company which employed about 100K people around the globe. It was easy to feel there as a small cog. Victorious announcements from programme and project managers that we delivered in time several thousand products and beat our competitors did not have much meaning to me and I am sure to many others. Because it was only about achieving business goals - fast time to market and more revenue. I did not feel I was saving someone's life by making a timely delivery of radio electronic boards.

So, one day I decided I would start reading company news and press releases to try to understand better about impact of my work. And voila! There I saw the news about how our products help with remote surgeries, improve access to education and help companies like 奥迪 and Mercedes-Benz AG to manufacture efficiently, and then it clicked - oh, that's why I am here. But then, initial excitement faded and I thought, yeah, but is it me contributing to it or it is some other people from the 100K workforce?

The problem here was that these news were meant for the potential customers, investors and media, but there was nothing or very few like that communicated internally to employees.

So, I decided I would translate those news for my team.

This week we are working on...

At the beginning of each week, I started posting into my department's channel in MS Teams posts titled "This week we are working on...". Then I added different use cases. So, one week my team got a message that we are working this week on delivering products to Audi to help them with this and that. Another week, I shared with my team that we were working on delivering products to schools in Africa. Another week, I shared with my team that we were delivering products to Indian train companies to improve their safety.

So, what I did was make it specific to my team, by telling them that things were happening on that particular week and that they were directly contributing to it. And it worked. Maybe not for everyone, but most in my department started to understand why the hell they were there, and it boosted their motivation to grow and change.

In one of the face-to-face meetings, one employee told me that he did not know there was so much impact from his work and that it made his life much more meaningful.

NB! It is important to keep talking about purpose, impact and meaning regularly and frequently.

Why OKRs do not work for so many

Objective and Key Results (OKRs) coined at 英特尔 and popularized by 谷歌 through John Doerr 's book "Measure What Matters" is a goal-setting approach. It became popular due to the success of companies who adopted it. However, soon, it turned into a struggle and confusion for many big companies. It is much easier to implement it when you are a small startup and so was Google when John Doerr came and introduced it to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1999.

Lack of big picture: purpose, meaning and impact

Why? Because in startups everyone knows why the hell they are there thanks to immediate alignment and transparency. In most big companies, there is a problem with transparency and thus alignment. I have seen this first-hand in the company I mentioned previously. I was there on the OKR Advisory Board.

There were lots of departments that started setting their OKRs and pushing their employees to execute. They did not succeed. Because no one bothered to explain the bigger picture and answer the question "Why the hell I am here". So, motivation was on the level, "If you do not do it, I will fire you".

Yeah... that is exactly what I want!

But that is not all. What many are missing is the art of phrasing Objectives. For instance, I saw objectives phrased like "Improve quality", "Improve efficiency", "Improve time to market" and etc. . Objectives must be phrased so that they truly inspire. For that they must contain answers to the question "Why the hell I am here" and they must sound catchy and mind-provoking.

Story about Google Chrome

To win competition in the internet browser market, Google had to differentiate itself. The key, at that time in 2008, was speed. So, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, according to Sundar Pichai in "Measure What Matters" book, came up with the following Objective:

“We should make the web as fast as flipping through a magazine.”

Now this objective was simple but catchy and inspirational. It also explained well to people working at Google why the hell they were there. Besides, that was the mission of Google to make their web solutions faster.

My approach to formulating OKRs on a company level

1. Write down what future and why you want to achieve it. It is easier to think of the long-term future first because if you start planning by quarters first, you will miss the big picture and OKRs will be disconnected. And remember, Objectives are not very specific, they are more like a general vision.
2. After that invite your team, give them to read what you wrote and explain further. If they also think it is important to attain this future, then you can proceed further. If not, then you need to modify your vision of the future or think about how to explain better to make sure that everyone in the team shares the same vision.
3. Start brainstorming objectives. Let each write down one objective phrase per sticky note and then let everyone vote for the best one. Repeat this process until it is refined and there is full alignment. Remember, how you phrase your objective will impact in which direction the organization is moving. Also, you need to phrase your objective in the present time as if it has already happened. For example, for an educational platform, it can be "Digital lessons on our platform are as captivating as a journey through space". For healthcare providers, it could be "Waiting at our clinic is as outdated as dial-up internet"Do not use verbs for objectives because then you will make it look like your goal is endless action and confuse people about the difference between objectives and key results.
4. Once you have set your long-term objective, then it is much easier to connect different key results. Yes, that is right. You need only one objective for the whole organization. Why would some department have their objectives even if it is supposedly connected to the whole organization? So, one objective only for the whole organization and 1-3 key results per department/team.
5. And key results are easy. They are just your temporary or permanent KPIs. And here you definitely should use action verbs like Increase, Decrease, Reach and etc.. And you can stretch target numbers in your KPIs to make them look like moonshots. But that is not necessary always to make moonshots as you do not want your team to die from too much stress and overworking.

That's it!

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Thank you! Share with me your reflections on the topics I discussed in this newsletter - I would love to learn your perspective.

Yours not your,

Nodirkhon aka Nodir