Learn Servant Leadership From the Tech Industry

This week in work news - deluded bosses and their “productivity paranoia” as denounced by Microsoft. The discrepancy in perception is striking indeed. They think we’re slacking, we think we’re overwhelmed and overworked. Beyond the devastating effects, this has on any semblance of ability to feel valued, we know this is happening because of the extreme breakdown in trust between employees and command and control aficionados.

That said, I don’t think this applies in the same measure to us reading this. I’m willing to bet that, should the results have been reduced to the technology industry, the figures would have been significantly better as the situation is simply never this dire.

This is for several different reasons and I think we ought to be grateful for all of them.

First of all, productivity and performance, while perhaps not well defined, genuinely and routinely disputed or rigorously measured, are at least not the dirty words and taboo topics they are outside of the technology realm. So there’s little place for paranoia. Process efficiency is what Jeff Sutherland and other Scrum pundits advocate but in its absence, any consideration will do. Whether silly or not velocity is a consideration everywhere. Whether optimal or not, throughput is on everyone’s wish list.

Visibility is inbuilt in everyone’s process. Flow, value stream mapping, process efficiency - perhaps none done “right” but still all on the table enough that no one can worry whether developers are simply sitting home executing on cheese-gathering-missions to the fridge in lieu of ever writing code.