haruki zaemon

(via Ray Grasso)

In a recent post I talked about my personal experience with the effort and discomfort required to lead people and teams. Creating alignment can feel inefficient.

I especially appreciate Jessica’s distinction between alignment and collaboration. I value collaboration over (not instead of) individual contribution, and the nuance here is not that collaboration is bad, rather “We can’t collaborate with everyone, so it’s alignment that can give us the trigger and authority to communicate when we need to.”

Jessica Kerr:

How can we do our work well, together, as we get bigger?

1. Accept coordination overhead. Document shared plans in a shared place (we use Asana). Coordination is for asynchronous work, and we can do a lot of the coordination asynchronously too.
2. Collaboration is expensive. Replace it with coordination when you can, by decoupling. When you need collaboration, go all in. Get people in the same room if that’s a thing, or talking every day in Slack & Zoom. Build relationships to make communication smooth. Read Team Topologies.
3. Do not skimp on alignment.

Alignment is not expensive, compared to collaboration. But it feels disposable, it’s easy to let slip. Alignment comes from leadership in our all-hands and all-teams meetings. It comes in 1:1s with our managers, and between our managers. It comes in documented company values and positions.

Alignment gives us the context to make good decisions in our scope. It also lets us question decisions outside our scope, constructively, because we can notice when we learn something inconsistent with our expectations. That catches discrepancies early, and gets us back on track together.

In a small enough company, alignment is mostly free. It happens in conversation, and via collaboration. As our company grows, our founders are more and more deliberate about reproducing it.

1. #decision-making
2. #leadership
3. #management
4. #performance