The Company's Dinosaur
The Pros and Cons of becoming part of the office's furniture
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach out to me and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
In a previous article, I covered the challenges and advantages of hopping from job to job. In that view, there is value in having short-term projects and constantly being exposed to different contexts and realities. However, everything comes with a price, and that price could be the possibility of career progression. The article can be found below.
It Start With Trust
For leadership positions, building trust is key. During a conversation over some beers, I was talking with a very good consultant (the true kind, the ones who are freelancers and are indeed jumping from client to client) and sharing my view on how difficult it is for a Project Manager to become a freelancer. My view is that we are in the “building trust” market, and it may require some time to fully build connections where information flows freely and we have the connections and the context to assess the quality of that information.
Giving a small example: If a Developer provides me with an estimation that I need to accommodate in the planning, I need to understand how much of that estimation is a “fear factor”. If the PM and the Developer have a bridge of trust, the “fear inflation” is managed by the PM as it should be. The Dev should give their honest opinion about the effort and leave any padding to the PM if required. For this to happen, trust must exist between both parties.
Leaders coming from the Agile world would argue that estimations should be peer-reviewed, which is true. However, these peer reviews are not always possible depending on the context, especially while we are setting up new structures inside the organization and rely on a “one-person army” for the initial heavy lifting. This trust is immensely challenging to achieve in a short span of months. Trial by fire is still the number one way of strengthening trust within a team.
The Value of Relationships
You know where I am coming from with this, right? It’s difficult to build high levels of trust if the most meaningful parts of the team keep rotating within a year. For all the good and bad, there is value in interpersonal relationships between the more established members. Projects can potentially be done more cheaply, with a high awareness of the risks, within a team dynamic that's already established. This allows for a deeper understanding of the product, project, and industry overall.
This understanding can become crucial and highly valuable with key or flagship projects. If a Manager needs feedback from the company’s architect, there is a higher degree of certainty in the solutions provided if the Architect has been with the company for several years. Of course, new architects bring knowledge and experience from outside, but they might lack the understanding of how to navigate the company’s processes and constraints. There is no point in offering a solution that cannot be implemented because John of IT Security will never approve, right?
Politically speaking, it is important to understand how to navigate a company’s red tape and who would be a good ally for a specific set of requirements. If a newcomer arrives as a PM, the entirety of the company’s bureaucracy and methods are new. This can hinder the project from moving forward at a good pace. Having insight and deep knowledge is immensely valuable.
The Asteroid Of This Conversation
However, being a "dinosaur" has its risks. The major one is parking one’s skill improvement in the "Nevermore" parking lot. With the risk of stopping learning new areas or becoming too specialized in solutions that aren’t used anywhere else in the market. While the employee could become an incredible asset to the organization, the risk of becoming outdated is high. If you fall into the risk of staying in the same company for a long time, I would strongly advise you to move around within the company, in the sense of changing departments, technologies, and different kinds of projects. This can be done easily in big organizations and can prevent the risk of having outdated skills. Changing is always good, and in my professional experience, the sweet spot is around 3 years. (Unless someone is working today in Cobol and has been told to work on a dying technology for half a century. That strategy served only to increase the pay grade of all those Mainframe "dinos").
The higher you go on the corporate ladder the the more advantageous it is to have a dinosaur in the lead. Leaving here a small news piece and a note on how important is to secure and respect your company’s dinos.
According to the Gartner study, businesses whose average senior executive tenure is five years or more posted higher results in revenue, customer experience, and other key metrics than those with less experienced leadership. For those reasons, the value of their work—and potential loss of their knowledge—represents a significant medium-term drawback for their employers.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message.
Cheers,
Artur