Psychology VS Strong management#

21.08.2023 | 9-11 min. reading

Introduction#

All of you know, I guess, since the collective and cooperative work in society has become sort of an instrument of reaching and achieving something, people recognized some regularity in it, controlling, "management" we should say. But it always has been a problem with mixing up emotions, psychology and that control in a one process. So today we have a situation, as I see it, when in all industries the management mass separated in two general fields anyhow, or not evenly, they are so to say:

"We are about to reflect the feelings of others, be emotional and be in an active gaming society"
"We are strongly focused on our goals and results, people are people, but what we do is more important, we don't like to be distracted"

So I think 90% of the society is in this fork, clearly, either on one or the other edge, while most part of people are in first type, as we could see it in our lives, businesses, politics, collectives.

So why be that, why general part of people in industry, and I'm talking in this sense of IT, are about "team coupling" and "psychological relations" rather than in "business relationship" and "defined relationships" ?

Thoughts#

"Strong management" here is the way of throwing out everything unnecessary, a stricter attitude towards employees and the formalization of processes, the absence of rose-colored glasses and the acceptance of coolness based on people's ego.

Psychological management here is all the other way around comparing to the previous one, with team buildings, with Scrums, developing a team first, the product second.

I believe people are exited more of belonging to an abstract whole and joyful, prioritizing itself rather than even though be real people with morals and contradictions, but stay focused on their goals, results, because it requires more power, energy, time, discipline, self work etc. And more than that, very likely, this common area of such people from first group would ignore or dislike you, since you are "against them", "not with them", let's say as a fact - more professional and disciplined, and so on…

How it shows up in IT specifically#

Let's take a quick look at what it means for our effectiveness, achievements, experience as specialists. When a developer works in a company which primarily rely on social relationship between employees, trying to mostly build team skills - yes, it works (relatively).

A team would have some person as a leader, because hi's already in the senior, maybe, status, some other guys would be around him and close, others are middles and juniors, who has trained on some courses by their company, get job-security, calmness and harmony (as company hopes) with colleagues. And maybe a company is good enough to embed some metrics and analysis for provisioning of product dynamics, corporate strength. (my example here is not about really large companies, even though they have this ill too sometimes)

But when we would look at their pure metrics, what was their 8hs/day time spend for, what is the quality of a product, code, corporate processes, etc. We will see a picture (at best) of the middle line of the progress of the project and the team, where the complete type guide reigns - "Let's chat or call in slack, zoom, somewhere else, and I'll explain everything to you".

So when the team building and corporate culture is going more at that direction, the first barricade that crashes is programmers, who might have a better choice and opportunities to come up with something really cool, solid and qualified.

Instead, we have these cons:

The product has support of a team, that at some point would be no longer available, because give them 2-3 years and half of the team is gone, went to work on another company who pays more
It's boring for them to stay here; but this current company tries to hold them as strong as they can, because it's risk-free, they rely on them, only them know what is actually in this project and how it works, but corporate culture is a pleasure for them
The complexity of the code reigns such that it is better for newcomers not to interfere
Quality control is more of a nice bonus than the goal itself
Real workers do not get their job valued fair and pure
Low level of transparency and clarity for job vertical promotion, quality improvement, tracking dynamics and statistics
Management is aimed towards personalities, not the product, motivation system, methodology and metric analysis

Although here are some pros (for most, relatively, in some way around they are cons too):

Every month paid crystal clear salary
Company, system, managers not so hard on you while working - it's easier
Be in the processes good and more possible to have long-term stability and possibilities inside the company for something new and interesting
Easier for newcomers to hop up in the train, because of created pipelines, interviews, less gateway plank
It's global, so everywhere is presented in the same way and processes are clear for all

That's how I think are the cons of this approach, but… Nevertheless, it has its own pros - such as a fact that no large business would go after this path if it won't be profitable and affordable, team do their job, a product works, newcomers see this "lovely history" inside the collective and buy it.

Another approach is, as I mentioned above - work on metrics, build quality gates, rely not on managers but on the product maintainability, high plank of professionalism, no distraction for corporate sociality at radical and payments per result, not the time. Because it's easier to spend time working not so well and get your x-000$, not get fired and do what's just needs to do, as the ticket says.

The pros of last way are:

Developers (and others) become much faster better professionals
Product is solid maintainable, results and metrics show what is the dynamic
No feelings to colleagues cause a gape while working, the actual work itself measuring it as hours/day becomes less
No extra fees to managers/scrum masters/courses for employees/zillion time spend on helping some guy to do what he needs to do…
The whole work is formalized and documented in some knowledge base system/tickets/issues. No chats and calls that are gone, but only 2 or some more people now know how it works and what to do, because they caused it, so it happens often.

Now, the cons of this approach in global IT market and economics are here for you too:

Workers at most are not ready for this type of work, they're used to the first approach.
Customers at most are not ready for this type of communication and processing steps of developing the product, they're used to talking and if company's credo isn't about corporate culture as globally represented, they feel bad.
Current market chokes these types of approaches with job-security and high fees
Only professional workers may stay satisfied
Expenses and income for business are more unpredictable because widespread practice for many years was forming its economic strategies and patterns.
It's difficult to create such a system and really pump it up

About a "team-spirit"#

Some individuals may say here about morals: "Why be so robotic, no love and respect for people" i.e. it's not a "joyful camp" Yeah, it may look like this for someone, but I personally get the second approach as a huge boost for me as real professional in the future, I see here automated system, where there's no need for useless expenses for business, where a product would much more have chances to be kept on going and developing.

Respect for people is still here, but people who work like this already understand what the essentials of relationship are here compared to the most established. Of course people would work more convenient, hard, "eye on the goal" - and it's good. This type of work is the acceleration for all, and no need to love each other and hug, if you don't want it, your actual valuable skills much more important

Conclusion#

This article is my first one here, so maybe somewhere it was not super readable or clear for understanding, but I hope, you've got what I meant.

I'm right now on the stage of reorganizing my workflow since faced this concept and thought about it. I try to constantly improve myself at what metrics do I use personally, what I suggest to my team at work, by the way it's structured more hybrid of these two approaches, but payment scheme is time/money, and corporate culture is privileged value, so I balance in a good way, I think.

My advice is in this scenario - just try to create borders of what really makes you professional, what is not so important, what makes you feel happy and satisfied in/at work, are you ready for changes and see thing in IT through the prism of efficiency and purity.