Re:Managers, Stop Distracting Your Employees
by crazygringo on Sunday April 02, 2023 @06:47PM
(#35416102)
But alignment and legibility are productivity.
10 employees working fully aligned will achieve much more of what is valuable to the company than 10 employees working just as hard but on things that don't sync up right.
And legibility is needed in order to achieve alignment. A manager needs to make sure all the parts of a project come together by the deadline, and so tracking progress allows them to quickly say OK let's drop that feature or I need to unblock you on this so I'll reach out to the other team's manager.
Productivity isn't a scalar quantity produced by employees that simply adds together. Think of it as something more multiplicative, where a "zero" from a key employee tanks a project altogether. (E.g. your team of nine back-end engineers and one front-end engineer achieves zero productive output if the front-end engineer doesn't deliver anything workable. Or the back-end database engineer fails at their tasks.)
So alignment and legibility aren't detrimental to achieving objectives -- they're critical.
10 employees working fully aligned will achieve much more of what is valuable to the company than 10 employees working just as hard but on things that don't sync up right.
And legibility is needed in order to achieve alignment. A manager needs to make sure all the parts of a project come together by the deadline, and so tracking progress allows them to quickly say OK let's drop that feature or I need to unblock you on this so I'll reach out to the other team's manager.
Productivity isn't a scalar quantity produced by employees that simply adds together. Think of it as something more multiplicative, where a "zero" from a key employee tanks a project altogether. (E.g. your team of nine back-end engineers and one front-end engineer achieves zero productive output if the front-end engineer doesn't deliver anything workable. Or the back-end database engineer fails at their tasks.)
So alignment and legibility aren't detrimental to achieving objectives -- they're critical.