Start with who(at work)
Structure of strategies
Simon Sinek’s start with why book and speech are immensely successful because he uncovered a blindspot when many of us try to innovate or solve a hard problem: they start with what or how while they should have started with why.
As you guessed from the title, this post will uncover another blindspot in similar structure. Starting with why/how/what when we should have started with who is a common flaw we encounter at work. Many failed to further develop their career success due to this ignorance.
Before diving into the methodology, it is worth pointing out that consciously thinking about whether it’s a who/what/how/why problem is a good principle before any planning. There are other ways to categorize and decompose a complex challenge, but I find this way is most cost effective. Lastly, not all problems should start with who or why. Clearly defined and simple tasks are fine to start with how/what, like fixing a running toilet.
When to ‘start with who’
In a nutshell, ‘start with who’ is a human (relation)-first mindset. Below are several common scenarios to apply it.
Who is the person to work on this project?
This should be the first question to ask before beginning any work. Strong leaders radically delegate so as to invest their limited attention to highest leverage activities. In my current job, I used to feel very exhausted. I’m constantly overwhelmed by requests that come up from random people and ad-hoc situations. One day I realized working on those has very limited contribution to my career. Besides, I can easily delegate them to other people, as long as I begin to think about who. Doing made my work much easier and focused.
Asking who is the right owner also prevents us from stepping on others’ toes. The so-called ‘scope of ownership’ is respected in most environments. Years ago, I’ve made such mistakes when I was still very passionate about machine learning technology. Being eager to apply my new learnings in our product, I called meetings with data scientists to present my ‘advanced’ solution to problems they are working on. I was confused why they sound very mean in such meetings.
Who has the ultimate power?
There are seven steps towards a successful execution of a project.
- Holistic understanding of the facts
- Isolate the problems to solve
- Design a solution
- Influence the leadership to get endorsement
- Influence the peers to reach consensus
- Influence the subordinates to win support
- Drive the implementation of 3)
All are critical but interestingly many failed to do 4) to 6). I’m constantly surprised by how many people ignore 4) and expect to be successful.
To do 4), one need to understand
- Who is the eventual decision maker, hence having the ultimate power?
- How does the decision maker think about the problem?
Many projects fail because the project owners either don’t know who has the ultimate power to dictate the project’s path or don’t have healthy iteration cycles with the authority. Instead, at the end stage of each cycle, they try to impress the authority by the best solution in their own minds. After all, who wouldn’t like their elegant designs, so beautifully presented? Well, everyone except themselves. Just like you won’t buy ideas you are not familiar, thus comfortable with, the authorities will be defensive if they haven’t bought your narrative in the very beginning. Failure to listen enough is a fatal error in any collaboration, it’s suicidal not to listen to authorities.
Who is my sponsor in my current job?
When considering a new job, so many people make their decisions based on what the product will be, what technology they will learn. I think while the business itself is an important factor, the specific project or product domain is far less relevant for senior roles.
Far more critical is who will sponsor your success during my tenure. Majority of us ignore this and depend on company structure to grow. This strategy is as good as getting rich by lottery.
I would urge anyone serious about career development to find a sponsor who is equally serious about your career as you do. Together, you should have a well documented and closely tracked, detailed plan about when to do what at each step. Like you do for each engineering project. This sponsor is usually the direct manager.
As a principle, most challenging goals are achieved by a key strategy that makes them unchallenging. Finding a strong sponsor at work is one such strategy for suffcessful career.
Anti-patterns
The mistakes about who is usually very expensive at personal level, while the mistakes about why are usually costly for business. I will illustrate the anti-pattern of ‘who’ with two examples.
Not answering who
Andrew prepared a very detailed proposal for applying technology X to scale a current solution on problem A. The sides are carefully made. He has solid data to back his conclusions. He is prepared for challenges from every detailed level.
In the 45 minutes meeting, after the background slide, a senior manager began to ask why A needs to be solved. This encouraged questions like instead of improving solutions for A, what are other options to achieve the same goal, whether the goal should be supported by other organizations, who will own the scaling of A, etc. In the end, many people try to self-promote themselves in the meeting while proposal on X is barely covered, let alone all the beautiful data Andrew prepared.
Andrew made a serious mistake by not knowing who is the decision maker and how she thinks about the proposal before a review meeting. Such meetings usually end up being a brainstorm meeting where everyone tries to impress senior managers.
Before even scheduling a review meeting, Andrew should have figured out who is the eventual decision maker(the ultimate power) and how she formulated the problems. If such formulation is not reasonable to Andrew, there should be iterations to reach consensus before answering the questions.
Wrong answer for who
Billy is confident that he figured out how to get promoted fast in his company. His strategy is building a handsome package that will impress the promotion committee. After all, his manager and other partner teams can’t do much after giving him a good performance rating. So he prioritizes his package over anything else, even at the expense of hurting others. Billy assumes promotion packages are everyone’s ultimate motivation and sees cooperation as competition on raw materials for building packages. He constantly complains of others going too far in the scope war and the system is rigged against him.
After a few review cycles, Billy went nowhere due to negative feedback from leadership.
Obviously, Billy’s problems are not only about ‘who’. His whole valuation system needs a fix. But even in his promotion driven game, Billy made a terrible mistake when deciding who has what power. In the game, the manager’s strong support is insufficient but is necessary, the ignorance of which resulted in Billy’s failure.
