The multiplier effect

I recently re-read this HBR article that talks about company culture and how it fosters innovation. It starts with a fantastic question - how did companies that were known for their culture of innovation such as Nokia and Blackberry just suddenly ceased to exist because they were out-innovated by someone else.?

Safi Bahcall, the author, goes on to say this -

“In organizations, the competing forces can be described as “stake in outcome” versus “perks of rank.” When employees feel they have more to gain from the group’s collective output, that’s where they invest their energy. When they feel their greatest rewards come from moving up the corporate ladder, they stop taking chances on risky new ideas whose failure could harm their careers.”

Reading this article just blew my mind (both the first and the second time I read it).?

When building organizations, a key term that we often hear is ‘culture’. It’s far easier to talk about it than actually create one. For example some questions that haunt me all the time are:

• When everyone around you is smart and is doing a great job, do you still need a performance curve??
• If there are no incentives to push oneself to be better, what will motivate individuals to really go above and beyond?
• If results are achieved by the team and not individuals, should every person on that team get the same rewards?
• How do you create a culture that does not incentivize peacocking but truly rewards performance?
• As a remote office (not HQ) how do you get ‘visibility’ without peacocking?

No, I haven’t really figured it all out (yet!) :) I think this one will take a ton of experimenting and learning on my part to come up with answers to all the above. There is one conclusion however, that I have come to - nothing beats intrinsic motivation.?

It began with this team that was working on a platform redesign. This initiative had been going on for almost 9 months when we had a new hire join that team. The team’s charter was to move to the new platform. The first phase would not really do anything except offer feature parity. All the goodness came after. With the new architecture, we would be able to move much faster with launching new features. 9 months in, the team was still at it and had very little to show for it. I had to keep the project funded for months with a significant number of people. The pitch always was - ‘This is what we need to be efficient and do more with less’ and a bunch of examples of how much time it would take today to do X vs. on the new platform. The key result we were signing up for was just a - yes, feature parity achieved (and that too not in the same OKR cycle). Those that know me, can vouch for the fact that I hate anything that does not have an impact metric. This one was tough - for me and for the team.

Then comes engineer John Doe. It might just be that the team needed a fresh pair of eyes or that he was not dealing with the 9 month fatigue others did, but he just brought this energy with him. The first thing he did - made a list of the examples I had been using to demonstrate how the new platform will make us more efficient. He internalized it to an extent where every single design decision or ERD (engineering requirement document) he wrote, would be explained with how one of these use cases would work on the new platform. It wasn’t that we were shipping the features themselves. He derived motivation from knowing that he shipped value and this led to motivating the team as well. The outcome wasn’t that the project moved any faster, or that we designed a better solution, it was just that the team felt more cohesive and way more driven to deliver.?

Now, this wasn’t something that would get him a promotion. There was no engineering competency which he was checking the box for. He was doing this because he needed to understand how the work he did fits in the bigger picture. He wasn’t the best engineer in the team but he sure as hell contributed towards the team’s success.?

As with this project, I have observed through the years that people that are intrinsically motivated and have the need to find their purpose, and make an impact irrespective of the promotions and the money, will always be the people who will take the team, the products they build and the company to the next level.?

As managers and as organizations, we still need to figure out how to reward these people who play the role of multipliers. I cannot even begin to understand how much attrition he prevented or how long the project could have been delayed if not for him doing what he did.