I was recently approached by a previous employer to go back to them. All very flattering, though I’m not sure that it’s for me. But it got me thinking about why I left. Like most job changes I suspect, in loose (or polite) terms this one was driven by “philosophical differences with management”.
What that came down to in this instance was goal setting. Goals at this company were set very aggressively – during the time I was there I don’t think we ever hit all the goals of a project, and reading between the lines of annual reports since I’ve left, it looks like that record has been maintained. There are a lot of reasons why that might happen, but in the case of this company I think it’s because the CEO is a believer in the maxim “ask the impossible to achieve the best possible”.
That’s not something I buy into. To me, overly aggressive goal-setting is counterproductive. It leads to rushed work, poor decision-making, and an inevitable descent into firefighting and resource shortages. Products get launched half developed, which leads to poor sales growth, reputation damage, and still more rework. If developers don’t buy in to the possibility of management’s goals, they ignore them and start to set their own, which makes it that much harder for management to maintain staff morale (and to maintain their own credibility: from personal experience, trying to persuade people that something that both you and they know is a dumb idea is actually a good one is no fun) . Stress and the repeated sense of failure when goals aren’t met (even if the project turns out to be a success from a long-term business perspective) kill motivation, and lead to burnout and staff turnover, thus exacerbating the resource shortage problem. Resource shortages lead to the low-priority infrastructure and forward research jobs never getting done, which in time reduces the organization’s innovative capacity enough that even just keeping up with the competition is a stretch, never mind getting ahead.
You can get away with setting big hairy audacious goals every so often (though it’s worth noting that the original BHAG was supposed to be a vision statement – something so long term that the question of actually achieving it never really arises), and goal setting needs to be aggressive enough to avoid gold-plating and the student syndrome, but going for the big win as a matter of routine doesn’t work.
