A Failing of Corporate Culture

Corporate Culture is an amorphous concept.  It is hard to correctly identify, hard to change, impossible to pinpoint, and yet permeates everything we do as an organization.  In fact, it is one of the most important factors of success or failure.  Create a successful corporate culture and often the world is your oyster.  Corporate Culture is not the sole key to success, but it is definitely a pillar on which much depends.

I am employed at a spectacular place to work, but with a terrible corporate culture.  That may sounds like a strange thing to say so let me explain.  I believe in the people I work with.  They are nice, talented, and hard working.  The technologies are world class, tried and true.  So what is the problem?  Originally I thought it was a methodology.  Then I thought it was lack of clearly defined roles and responsibilities.  Then it was a lack of trust.  However, I realized it was all of these things and more.  We have a very poor corporate culture.  

So what is “Corporate Culture”?

Corporate Culture describes and governs the ways a company's owners, managers and employees think, feel and act.  Wow, that is a pretty basic statement, but it has profound implications.  It has always been my belief that the success of an organization is ultimately determined by the type of culture and environment in which employees work.  I am pretty sure that everyone wants to succeed, so if a corporate culture is so important to achieve success why do we find ourselves in such negative corporate cultures?  In one word:  Management.

“Business success is generated from the bottom up; Corporate culture is created from the top down.”  - Bob MacDonald

The Role of Management

There are a lot of things that go into creating a positive corporate culture, but the single most important thing is people.  Executives, upper managers, middle managers, workers, etc.  We all play a role in creating a culture good or bad.  However, it is only the strata of managers that can define a culture, the rest of the organization must live in it.  

The standing joke in my office is that “beatings will continue, until morale improves”.  This is said in jest, but the underpinnings are not.  People here are not motivated, nor are they valued as individuals.  Things get even worse when you insert the bureaucracy, standard operating procedures, and antiquated methodologies employed.  Employees are not empowered to make decisions and have been conditioned to become automatons.  Dissatisfaction and apathy is rampant.  Management, often focuses only upward in order to appease their supervisors instead of focusing on the people that report to them.  This compounds the issue, as the lowest level workers, affectionately “where the rubber meets the road” feel helpless to change anything.  What are these employees, arguably, the most valuable employees in the organization, to do?  Well the most common guidance is to leave and find employment elsewhere taking their intimate knowledge of the product and process with them.  Whats worse, is it is often the more talented and experienced people that leave first.  This leaves a void of top talent.  Those that stay are either those that are completely apathetic, not performing up to their potential, or worse, fall into the self-explanatory phenomenon known as “quit and stay”.  

The corporate culture is falling quickly into a downward death spiral.  Even as new employees are brought on, the culture saps the motivation out of them.  They quickly either jump ship for greener pastures or they concede and fall in-line with the culture.  Both of these outcomes are detrimental to the organization as a whole.

How to right the Sinking Ship?

Well, this is the big question.  I have been looking for advice on the internet which has lead me to a lot of different articles, blogs, stories and the like.  Most often the solution is to fire everyone in management and start over.  Fortunately, that is not good option option nor should it be.  Cleaning house doesn’t necessarily guarantee a better corporate culture.  That doesn’t mean that letting some individuals go isn’t part of an overall solution, but the wholesale liquidation of management often will hurt more than working to change an organization’s culture.  

I think there are three keys to creating a successful corporate culture.  

1.  Know what you want to be.

2.  Trust the people that work for you

3.  Constantly reevaluate and course correct

The next parts of this blog will follow the process of self discovery and how a non-manager tries to solicit change within an organization that is both set in its ways and is in the downward spiral.  With some significant changes, the company can bounce back, employees regain the passion that is so critical to success and a positive corporate culture can flourish.  The challenges are great and I cannot promise that I will be successful or even that I will not throw the towel in. However, as things stand right now, I see too much potential in both the people and products that I work with to let the apathy reign.  I guess I am new enough that I still care.

Technologists Second

A common mistake I see a lot is letting business analysts drive the technology.  Business analysts, should identify the problems of the business.  That is the role’s basic function.  However, what I often see instead are the business analysts driving the technology choices and direction.  What is worse, is the technical leadership often defers to them when the corporate culture is not in balance.  

Let me explain.  The process of developing software is part manual labor/logical in nature and part art form.  This cliche is quite accurate and is often what drives people to software development.  There is a logical direction and yet a very creative outlet as well.  There is art to providing solutions that are usable, scalable, maintainable, and perform.  In fact, each of these areas can be disciplines unto themselves.  A corporate entity that has hired or developed domain expertise in these areas would be silly not to leverage them.  Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when a Product Manager or Business Analysts tells the technical staff how a problem should be solved.  This has huge repercussions later as the product becomes difficult to maintain, support, and extend.  What is worse, these problem are technical in nature and rarely bubble back out to the business departments that created them in the first place by driving the technical direction of the product.     

So how does this happen?  How do the product managers and business analysts become the driving force in a product.  Well, lets first start by looking at what makes a technology company successful.  Technology Businesses don’t succeed or fail on the technology alone.  There are a lot of moving parts within a business: sales, product, marketing, support, development, accounting, human-resources, etc.  Each of these parts makes up an important part of the business.  Balancing these to achieve the greater goal of the company is no easy feat and often one or more of these business areas becomes more influential than the others.  

One of the most common imbalances is when the product group controls the “what”, “when”, “why”, and “how”.  The product group is an important player within the business as it often sits right in the middle of everything.  Product Management, works directly with Sales, Marketing, and Technology.  They are knowledgeable in most aspects of the company, but really masters of none.  Product Management analyzes the business landscape, identifying areas of weakness within the marketplace that the product could and should take advantage.  Product Managers role in the simplest terms should be the identifiers of problems that need to be solved.  They are the “what” and “why” people.  They should not be the solver of those problems as that level of detail is outside the realm of Product Management and there are other groups that are more prepared to handle that level of detail.  Product Management must fully understand the problem that is being solved and will be invaluable when armed with that knowledge but the design, implementation, and integration of the solution must be driven by those best prepared to achieve success.  .  

If Product Management is able to keep their hands out of this “cookie jar” and let the domain experts work at solving the technology problem, everyone benefits.  In fact, they should try to stay out of the kitchen all together except to answer questions about the business problem that is trying to be solved.  This means, no proof-of-concepts or demo-ware from Product Management as these often lead to a false narrative on what the actual solution will be.  The product design, development, deployment and delivery, support, marketing, sales, etc. should be left to the various roles and responsibilities.  Product Managers should however be part of the process.  They should be included in the review of the design, implementation, and deployment.  This gives them ample time for input into the solution and ensures that the solution actually solves the problem.    

Another problem arising out of the Product Management imbalance is setting the product priorities of the company.  When the priority is always new features and never or very rarely maintenance on the product it leads to disastrous effects on software.  We have already read how non-technical drivers of technology can lead to poor software design.  However, when the corporate culture supports this methodology they almost always also support the feature only mentality.  The product becomes so mismanaged technically, that you have a patchwork product that works so poorly that customers are not happy.  Even if it has every feature under the sun, it is almost guaranteed  to be extremely difficult to work with, perform poorly, and be very buggy.        

There is a very simple solution to combat the Product Management imbalance:  clearly defined roles and responsibilities and trust in your people.  Companies that adhere to these principles will often be well on their way to a balanced work environment.  It is these balanced work environments where people are valued that promote effective Corporate Culture.