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I’ve written a bit about managing situations in corporate life. Whether managing up, down, or all around, everyone in the corporate machine has to face changes, renegotiate their responsibilities, make a plan, and act. For some this is as natural as breathing, for others it is a huge and recurrent struggle against character. An insidious thing about corporate life and the salaried job… it’s not a simple exchange of hours for dollars. You bring your whole self to this work, especially as a manager, and if your whole self thrives on drama, you’re going to have a rough time. If you find yourself always pushing back and always managing conflict, if you’re always on the outside looking in, if battle royale is the norm instead of an exception, maybe you need a change. And if that experience is following you from job to job, maybe you’re the common denominator that needs to change. Here are some tips for helping yourself to have a smoother ride in the corporate sphere.

It’s more useful to reduce drama than increase it

Very few organizations exist purely to act as a self-licking ice cream cone, though many aspire to that grandiose level of monopoly or at least oligarchy. Instead, organizations exist to do tasks, make things, provide services, and so forth. While all organizations face change from the outside environment, few find benefit in disrupting themselves. Rather, they find benefit in increasing the efficiency and decreasing the cost of doing the whatever. As a person who thrives on drama, it’s easy to convince yourself that the drama you’re thinking of fomenting is in the organization’s best interest. Few of us have enough visibility to state if that is objectively true for any given move, but that is why organizations are structured as hierarchies. If changing the company is truly called for, it’s probably going to be the kind of existential struggle that everyone works on together. Executive staff will be leading the charge, and teams will work together to make the thing happen. A jeremiad from one middle manager or senior developer against the rest of the organization? That’s less likely to be high utility or successful. So, when faced with a choice, it’s almost always better to select the lower drama option.

Most dramatic situations come from assumptions and misunderstandings

All the way back to the earliest examples of written fiction, we find the tropes of mistaken identity, assumed motivations, and misunderstood language. Something’s got to make this plot move forward, so… what’s a writer to do. That’s all fine in entertainment, but in the corporate organization we’re messing with real people’s real livelihoods. Even if it’s a boom economy and jobs are easy to come by, having to make a jump comes with downsides in these modern United States. Instead of feeding the drama, it is better to find out. Ask more questions, ask for time with the people you’re making assumptions about, and get on the same page about what’s being planned and how the future should look. It’s also worth remembering that a lot of people in this world think with their mouths: they say things to hear how those things sound, and then reevaluate their position. This is why regular, recurrent contact with everyone who affects your project or team’s future is important. You don’t really know what a team member of that sort is thinking until you’ve heard the same thing in repeated sessions, and they don’t really know what you think until you’ve been able to respond. It’s better (read, less dramatic) to have this communication ahead of any actions being taken.

Wait before acting

Similarly, there are few actual deadlines in corporate life, particularly in the R&D “making software” side. While we all strive for efficiency and therefore faster actions, there’s rarely an actual external need to turn the thing on right now instead of after you’ve double-checked. Much like Bezos’ one-way and two-way doors, we need to evaluate our actions on the basis of “must this happen immediately, or can it wait for clarification”. If you’re not sure what needs to happen, then ask in a public forum relevant to the task. If you are sure, announce what you’re going to do in that forum and give it a little time for cooler heads to respond.

Act to calm instead of inflame

When you do act, especially as a product manager or engineering leader, your most likely action might be a communication. Perhaps you are giving orders, asking questions, presenting a plan, clarifying facts, summarizing status, announcing all-clear, or running an after-action meeting. Every word matters in this communication. Your goal is to state the facts clearly and reduce the likelihood of dramatic results, which is a skill you will want to practice. Prevent misunderstandings by re-reading and removing emotional words from your writing. If you have to give this material in speech, you should write it out first and practice to be sure you are communicating only what you intend. Emotionally persuasive speech (AKA rhetoric) is a tool; using it without intention can have unintended consequences.
Similar guidance holds for the actions that involve typing and clicks: making changes to the software, service, or organization may be part of your remit, and a given situation might demand that change. Should you discipline or fire a member of your team? Should you ask that the developer behind a disrupting change be removed from the commit group? Should you push for a vendor to be dropped if their software failed you? There are times when those drastic actions are required, but it’s worth noting that they’re all repercussive. Maybe not exactly a one-way door in all cases, but certainly impactful on the trust level in the organization. To be clear, there is also a trust breaching issue in not taking those actions when they are needed: a manager who does not manage tough situations isn’t doing the job. I’m not saying “do not act”, but rather “do not act heedlessly.”

Reserve judgement until you have hard facts

In the heat of the moment, it is difficult to make a fair decision. Take your time, and keep your mouth shut until you know. Speculation about the behavior of software components might be helpful, but speculation about people’s motives and actions is almost certainly going to produce needless drama instead of anything useful. Deciding what to do and then doing it will probably go a lot smoother if you only work with things that you know instead of things that you think you know.

Caveats

I’m writing from a position of privilege: I’m a straight white male working in the home of the tech industry. Unfairness absolutely exists and the table is slanted against a lot of folks. Furthermore, that’s not the only source of illogical behavior: pressures get applied to our organizations for all sorts of reasons, and lots of them make no damned sense. Reasonable, logical, and calm management of the sort I describe is not going to make your organization a utopia of diversity, equity, and inclusion, nor will it make the correct decisions happen all of the time. All that this set of recommendations can do is set a baseline for managing your own emotional resources and political capital so that you can be more effective over the long haul.