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I talked about the two most important cultures for a development organization, Goal Oriented and Innovation in my previous two posts. For a development organization to survive, it must satisfy the goals of the business it belongs to. It must align all its activities with the business goals and strive to achieve those goals. If the development organization would like to play a more important role in the business than just providing “commodity” technical services, it must continuously innovate in technologies and processes, in development process as well as the business processes.
But how can a development organization achieves its preset goals and how can it innovate? What’s the ultimate strength of a development organization? Not the thousands of computers it possessed and managed, not the technologies it embraced, not products or services it delivered, or the intellectual properties it possessed. I can be one hundred percent sure to say that the core competitive advantage a development organization has is its people. People are the most important resource that a development organization can draw upon to meet any ambitious goals it may have. Innovations are like springs, flowing freely to all directions. But, if we seek its origin, we will always find one or several highly educated, talented and engaged persons. Thus comes our third ideal culture:
Ideal Culture Number Three: Humanism
In my previous post, I mentioned the reasons why I would like to write down the ideal culture in my opinion and explained the most important culture for a development organization, “Goal-Oriented”. It’s deeply embedded with the purpose of the existence of the development organizations.
If the purpose of a development organization is to help the business serve the customers, to grow the revenue and to improve the margin by cutting cost, how can it achieve that goal? The answer is sound and clear, through innovation. Thus the second ideal culture:
Ideal Culture Number Two: Innovation
I thought a lot about the ideal culture for a research and development organization recently. Since I graduated from school, I have been in different development organizations. In each organization, there was something I like and others I dislike. Well, life is always like that. You almost have to swallow the sweetness along with the bitterness because they come together.
Although any organization has its pros and cons, there is nothing preventing me from imagining a perfect organization which has the ideal culture, with my own standards. It can serve two purposes for myself.
First of all, it can serve as a benchmark for me to evaluate any organization I am part of or will be part of. Since, in my opinion, the culture is the most important factor that affects one’s effectiveness in an organization, everyone should seriously consider the culture if he or she considers job satisfaction and career achievements important in his or her life.
And even better, I can carry the culture with me. No organization is perfect. But, at least I can change myself to follow the principles that I deeply believe. Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the World”. By practicing the culture I desire, I am able to create a environment/atmosphere around myself anywhere I go. After all, it should be we change the environment, not the environment changes us.
After working 7 years in one organization, I finally made the move and joined another team. I am still working for the same company, but different location, totally different project and different colleagues. It’s like a new company to me.
It’s always hard to move into a new environment and start to work with new team mates. I need to learn the new project, new technologies and new ways of doing things. The worst part may be that I have to rebuild my reputation. I need to earn my credit again as well as make new friends in the new organization. In the first several days, I really missed my old work place and my old friends.
However, after I thought it over, I considered the current situation a new challenge for me. As we all know, only challenges make one grow. If one always stays at the familiar spot and never goes out to the adventure land, he/she will never grow. It’s the response to the challenges that brings the best out us!
I started to work for a new manager last year. The first thing my new boss asked me to do is to buy this book, “StrengthsFinder 2.0“, and take the test online. He assured me I would like that. Obviously, he took the test himself before and it has been tremendously helpful to his own career growth.
I bought the book, certainly. The introduction section explained why they think people should focus on their strengths instead of their weaknesses.
Their reasons are simple:
- No one is perfect. We are all naturally good at something and fall short on other things.
- It’s our talents and strength that makes out standout, in a good way. Not the shortcomings.
- We are more engaged and happy when working with our strengths than working with our shortcomings.
- It’s more efficient to develop our strengths than to remedy our shortcomings.
By the way, they are a group of psychologists working for Gallup, holding Ph.D and Master degrees in Psychology.
In the summer of 2002, I was promoted from a senior developer to a manager leading a four person team. I was thrilled.
As other technical managers, my thinking was really natural. Since I was promoted, that means my way of doing things was the right way. Now, I just needed to require everybody to behave like myself and my team would be the best!
I failed in no time. It’s impossible to require everybody to behave like myself. I was young and single. Just got my master degree of computer science from a good university. I can adapt to new technologies easily. I can work 12 hours everyday including weekend. All my team mates were married and have family to take care of. They were much older than me. They couldn’t frequently spend their after work time working over time and learning new technologies. And they had their own ways of doing things and learning.
Fine. I would take all the work. Whenever they didn’t know how to do the job, I took over. Gradually, I found this wouldn’t work either since I barely have any free time left. The output of the team was not satisfactory.
I was very strict on every one’s job, maintaining a very high standard. I constantly criticized my team mate’s work and asked them to redo it multiple times. Eventually, I found that they started to ask me for very specific instructions and wouldn’t start the work until they get the instructions. I felt I was exhausted and couldn’t handle it anymore.
Why didn’t they listen to me? Why couldn’t they do the good jobs as I did? Why did they keep asking questions? Why cannot they work independently by themselves?
At my darkest moment as a new manager, I started to question myself. Maybe it’s because ME? Maybe I am not a good manager?
I recommend a good book about dealing with the change. You may already read this little interesting book. Only takes 1 hour to finish, “Who Moved My Cheese“.
Here are some of the concepts it talks about:
Three stages of change:
- Prepare for change
- Gain change skills
- Achieve a change
Change Skills:
- Anticipate change
- Take new actions now
- Move beyond fear
- Imagine real success
Hope it can help us to survive the constant changes and achieve greater success in our life!
My life is fundamentally changed after I read Dr. Stephen Covey’s awesome book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“. A lot of positive things happened. I feel happy in life and more important, I feel I am in charge of my own life. Nothing feels better than that!
One of the concept I learned from the book is if one really wants to learn the materials and would like to apply them to achieve good results in life, the best way is to teach the materials to other people. From my past experience, I know that’s absolutely true.
“Knowing, but not doing, is not knowing”. Another concept learned. So, here is my action. I prepared a series presentations to help me teaching other people, “7 Habits”. I will post them here in a series of posts.
Here is the first one in the serie: 7 Habits Session 1: Problem and Solutions
It starts from talking about the problems we are facing and how to solve them by changing the way we see the problems.
I will love to share the experiences of applying 7 habits with any one who is interested in fundamental life changes.
Now, Enjoy!
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