Comment by kevinconaway
8 years ago
The article is clearly targeted at managers and leaders, not your average individual contributor.
Often new leaders & managers start in an established team and want to change something to "make their mark" or have an impact as soon as possible, often with disastrous results (because they don't yet have the context to make informed decisions).
The advice is to spend time with your team to learn the ropes, figure out the internal politics, hear the common pain points and _then_ start addressing things, hopefully with some quick wins (like canceling a wasteful meeting or appropriating a larger conference room) that due to organizational inertia, went unaddressed.
Yes. And I think the article is also good advice for coaches / consultants.
When I come to a new team, I always try to find out a lot of things during the coffee breaks. But the approach from the article is more structured.
So, I guess I will try a mix of the two approaches next time ;)
I agree that the OP seemed to miss who the article is targeted at (managers, leaders). However I think this is still very good advice for an IC, even someone straight out of school.
Does it mean they start taking on projects that don't align with their role? Probably not.[0] What it does do is enable them to get a fresh perspective on the org, team and work and perhaps contribute ideas in group settings/meetings/social situations that others may not have considered, by virtue of not having executed the algorithm in the article.
If nothing else it gives one a structured way to gain valuable information about the org and the work, regardless of where you sit in the 'food chain'. It's also a great way to build a network.
[0]Often companies allow for 'stretch' time where ICs can take on side projects. Running this algorithm could be a great way to surface ideas for those kinds of projects.
That isn’t clear to me at all, but then I don’t know the author.
This seems like excellent advice for individual contributors, of whatever seniority, if you can already kick ass at the work you’re assigned, maybe after the first month or two. Provided you have the diplomatic skills to broach process change ideas in a way that doesn’t leave you looking like an entitled asshole, of course. But then, maybe that’s what you meant by “leader”!
It could have been emphasized better, but the third sentence of the article does say that it's talking about "incoming leaders".