No One Comes To Work To Do Bad Things
No one comes in to work and deliberately tries to make your day bad. Actually, let me amend that slightly - very, very few people come in to work and deliberately try to make your day bad. There is a very small percentage of people who are vindictive, hateful, small minded, petty people (or just plain old psychopaths) who will deliberately come in to work and delight in spreading misery and pain wherever they go. Whether it's to make everyone else feel as miserable as them, or whether it's because they get joy from other's misery, whatever the reason, these people are few and far between. We are not concerned with them.
What we are concerned with are the other 99.99% of the population who aren't raving psychopaths. Who are genuinely nice people, who care about others and would never dream of inflicting pain and suffering; but who proceed to come in to work and make your day rotten anyway. Why would they do that? What turns normal, caring, decent people into mobile misery factories? What makes them hinder, block and frustrate us at every turn?
The answer is, as usual, both very simple and very complex at the same time. The simple answer is - "the system”. As Deming said many years ago:
A bad system will beat a good person every time.
People don't make your life hard. People working in a bad system make your life hard. Bad systems force people to work in ways that hinder, obstruct and frustrate others. Not only that, but bad systems make people work in ways that make themselves miserable as well.
That's the simple answer - bad systems. Not all systems. Just bad systems. Some systems work really well and help people to achieve great things. Pretty much everything we do can be described in terms of systems, so we can't just get rid of systems altogether. That would be impossible. What we need to do is change the bad systems into good systems. So what is it about some systems that makes them bad?
There are many things that can turn a system bad. I'm going to focus on the three that I see most often -
conflicting objectives;
inflexible process;
measuring the wrong things.
Probably the most common cause of frustration in systems occurs when people in the system have conflicting objectives. People will naturally try to maximise their objectives, after all, that's what their pay depends on. The problem arises when me maximising my objective prevents you from maximising yours, or worse, actively decreases your ability to meet your objective. The development team that has an objective to deliver and the finance team that has an objective to minimise headcount costs is a classic example. The dev team needs more people to meet their objective. The finance team needs less people to maximise theirs. There is an automatic win/lose situation being set up here that will cause anger and frustration on both sides.
The solution here is to introduce the concept of trade off objectives - minimise headcount costs while maximising delivery. There are many potential solutions to that trade off and all of them will need the two groups to come together to discover them rather than fighting a win/lose battle.
Inflexibility in systems is another major cause of frustration. We have all experienced the frustration of trying to get something slightly out of the ordinary done in an inflexible system. The system just wasn't built to handle whatever it is you are trying to do and therefore it can't possibly be done. No matter how important it is that it gets done. Eventually the system will become so inflexible that nothing can get done at all. Inflexible, bureaucratic systems are no one's friend, as anyone who has tried to contact a government department has no doubt found out. The world has changed and people's needs have changed along with it, but the systems that deal with that world have not. They remain rigid and inflexible. This frustrates people trying to access the system because they can't get their needs met, and frustrates the people working in the system because they can't meet the needs of the people they are trying to serve.
Systems must grow and change as the needs of those in the system change. Needs are never static. The system must optimise around the current needs, rather than the needs that were current when the system was started years ago. Flexibility must be built into a system from the start and the focus must always be on the outcomes the system is trying to achieve (not on the system itself). Systems that focus internally almost always become inflexible.
Measuring the wrong things is another really common cause of system dysfunctions. Things get measured because they are easy, rather than because they are the right things to measure. This drives people to optimise the wrong things and consequently drives bad outcomes. A system that focuses on measuring velocity, for example, will tend to drive behaviours that game velocity, rather than behaviours that maximise results. The worst example I saw was a organisation where project managers were measured on the dollar value of the projects they managed - the higher the better. Above a certain threshold and you could be promoted to senior PM . This drove them to maximise the size of every project they touched, which in turn drove up costs and made project failure much more likely. Or back when I was a developer, being measured on how many thousands of lines of code we wrote, caused us to bloat the code.
The solution here is to make sure that measurements are tied to desirable outcomes rather than measurement because it's easy. Measure cycle time to production, not velocity, because it's measuring real outcomes rather than some internal number that can be gamed. Measure project success not project size. Measure delivery of real features, not thousands of lines of code.
If you find yourself frustrated by someone at work, don’t blame them, blame the system that they work in. Even better than that, try to change the system to remove the cause of frustration. Call out competing objectives and if you can't get a trade off objective in place, at least get someone to make a clear call on which objective is more important - then remove the other one. Review your system against the needs of those accessing it and working inside it. If those needs have changed, change the system. Make sure you are measuring the right things - real outcomes.
A bad system will beat a good person every time, but a good system can empower good people to deliver better. Fix your systems. And if that person at work is still frustrating you? Maybe they really are a jerk.