Challenge Everything

Happy Friday!

As people get promoted into leadership, they typically accept the status quo as a given. They're just pleased to be there. So decades pass, and the old accepted norms go unchallenged. But the way to build an exceptional engineering organization isn’t by making incremental tweaks to outdated assumptions. It’s by questioning and scrapping assumptions that others, especially competitors, don’t. Here are some easy examples of widely held assumptions worth questioning right now:

• Is the purpose of an engineering organization to do engineering work?
• Why do leaders exist in an engineering organization?
• Is there a correlation between the number of leaders and speed, agility, and employee engagement?
• If leaders are important, why aren’t they expected to have leadership skills?
• Are job titles a net positive or a quiet tax on clarity, speed, engagement, and profit?
• Why do consulting firms still sell hours instead of outcomes?
• Why do public agencies care more about the engineering cost than the total project cost?
• Why is the CEO at the top of the org chart? Are top-down org charts beneficial or detrimental?
• Why do organizations still hand out and manage cell phones like it’s 2008?
• Why do organizations still run most decisions through layers of approvals instead of defaulting to autonomy with clear accountability?
• Why do consulting firms broadcast their success as financial metrics rather than the value they create in the world?
• Why do organizations require specific degrees and years of experience for jobs that are largely learned by doing the work?
• Why do firms cannibalize their competitiveness by promoting the strongest technical engineers into managers?
• Why do the executives and managers who neither get nor do the work receive large bonuses and incentives, while the project managers who get and lead projects and are the business get less?

Punchline: The organizations that thrive in the next decade won’t be the ones clinging to outdated assumptions. They’ll be the ones most willing to scrap and replace them entirely. Good news and better outcomes are on the other side.

Have a terrrrrific weekend,

Dave

Feedback and blowback are always welcome: dave@goodnewsfriday.com

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