Saturday, August 8, 2009

The Artist Engineer and the Bottom Line [Courtney Behm]

I once worked for a software company where the developers were a tight, creative team so dedicated to the success of the product that many of them had been with the company for 8, 9, even 10 years…an unusual statistic in this era of 2 years here, 2 years there. Like many companies, it hit some tough times and there was a management change at the higher levels. This new group of managers believed that software developers were interchangeable -- that one was just as good as another; that they could be moved around from product area to product area, or replaced by offshore engineers; that this kind of movement would have no real impact on productivity or morale.

It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out what happened…the core group of engineers that developed the product were broken up, a few went to other product areas, most were laid off, and all future development was moved offshore at a vastly reduced cost. Bottom line, 1. Employees, 0.

I would like to say, as a great object lesson, that the company didn’t survive as a result, but it is still very much with us. What did happen, in the words of the remaining employees, was that the heart of the company went out of it. The extraordinary culture that inspired people to work long hours, to make themselves available at all times of the day and night, to collaborate and cooperate, and, most importantly, to trust their organization, evaporated. People put in only as much work as needed to meet minimum requirements. A culture that had been voted among the best places in Silicon Valley to work became a place where people punched a figurative clock, while they waited out the recession until they could find a more hospitable home. Pretty sad, I say.

To maintain the growth and vitality of our software industry, we need committed and talented software engineers. To retain their commitment and talent, we need to be aware that they are a special breed, with a quirky way of looking at the world, and an idiosyncratic strategy for solving the problems they are given and enabling the future most of us can’t imagine. They are artists of the mind, able to make magic happen with electronics, and they have profoundly changed our expectations of what is possible. They are not, as the company I highlighted believed, interchangeable, any more than you could walk into the Sistine Chapel one day and tell Michelangelo that you were replacing him with an art student. Failure to respect this unique contribution of innovative employees might not take a company down the first time, but eventually the air will leak out of the balloon, and you will have just another formerly great company with a “For Lease” sign on the corporate headquarters. I’ve been there more than once, and I expect you have too.

But there’s a dark side to allowing talent retention to drive business decisions. It’s possible to lean over too far to protect local talent. Pandering to the tyrannical demands of a software Nureyev can paint management into a corner, and make them dependent on one or two key employees to keep the company running. An organization needs balance to survive, and sometimes fresh air and tough love are necessary to free it from the cage into which it has locked itself in a vain attempt to keep key engineers from leaving and taking all that source code expertise with them.

Artists are not the easiest people to manage, and managing artist engineers asks a lot of us Engineering leaders. We need to acknowledge and value the uniqueness of their contribution without giving up our management discretion. We need to document and share the knowledge they have given us so that we are not held hostage to their expertise. We need to respect the necessity to turn a profit without throwing the wrong people out of the boat to achieve it. We need to remember the importance of culture as a motivator, and honor it as much as the situation allows. It won’t get easier, I’m sorry to say, so over time we will be challenged again and again, caught in the exquisite tension between profit and creativity. But we are learning organisms, so perhaps we will in our turn become, at least in small part, artist leaders, more and more flexible as we enable a future that only our artist engineers can make real.

___________________
Courtney Behm holds a B.A. and an M.A. in Performing Arts and Communication, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business. In her corporate career, she has worked for wildly successful companies, and those struggling to stay afloat in the ocean of change. Through her consulting company, Viewpoint Solutions (www.ViewpointSolutions.com), she has helped a diverse client base, including Sun Microsystems, Adobe Systems, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals and the San Jose/Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce, find creative solutions to classic business problems. An accomplished speaker, Courtney uses a combination of language, humor, insight and front-line experience to offer a fresh perspective on life in the fast lane. In 2006, she returned to the corporate world, and is currently Senior Project Manager at i365, A Seagate Company. She is writing a book on how to lead effectively in a time of constant change, and collaborating on a book on Personal Career Management.

2 comments:

David Skyberg said...

Hi Courtney,
Retaining engineers is not rocket science. But it's truly amazing how many companies get it wrong!

I don't think that the company you mention screwed up by having the goal of fungiable resources. That is always a good goal to strive for -- and even to develop processes to ensure fungiability.

No, the problem with the company that you mention is that they do not VALUE the talented engineers. Whether or not you decide to move individuals around from product to product, what really counts is the degree to which the employee can say "this company respects me and the work that I do." Along with that an engineer needs to know how his work is making a difference. An engineer can be quite happy to move to a new product, or back and forth between products, as long as the above holds true.

When an engineer starts to say "this company doesn't give a darn what I work on", dig a bit deeper to the real frustration. It's not what he is working on. It's how he and his work is valued.

Cheers,
=D=

Tanya Berezin said...

David,
I agree that a company needs flexibility in assigning engineers to areas and products. But, if it truly respects the engineers, it will avoid severing important relationships among people and attachments people have to their products.

In my group, we plan explicitly to achieve flexibility. We figure out what the company's needs are 3-6-12 months in the future. Managers work with engineers to help them figure out what they want to do 3-6-12 months in the future. And then managers play matchmakers - sell the need to the engineer who might be good at it and benefit from it. Yes, sometimes we ask people to "take one for the team" and work on something they aren't excited about, but we make sure they won't be stuck there for a long time.

In short, we achieve flexibility and keep your team humming by making sure that both the company and the employees benefit.