The Spin Cycle

Anyone with children has heard of the telephone game: line up 30 people, the first person whispers something to the next, and so on down the line until the last person says what they were told aloud.  It’s funny because the message changes as it moves down the line.  In business, this effect isn’t funny; it’s dangerous, wasteful, and frustrating.

Most companies do an employee satisfaction survey at least once per year.  I have seen at least 10 of these surveys and in every single one, the top employee concern was “communications.”  The telephone game is bad, but when you observe that effect in two directions (executive level down, individual contributor level up) you get what I am calling the spin cycle – because you can spin for weeks on end just to get everyone agreeing before work on a project even begins.

“Go do’s” and Executive Fiat

Ideally, a Product Manager has the time to do research, write requirements, and bring products to market that meets the needs of customers.  Conditions on the ground rarely allow this process to happen cleanly.  In larger companies, there is the concept of the “go do.”  “Go do” means that for whatever reason, the executive team needs you to execute a tactical task.  A go do could be implementing a certain feature, choosing a certain partner, or attacking a certain market segment.  Usually go do’s are influenced by big picture concerns such as existing lines of business, strategic partners, or even keeping the board happy by interacting with another part of their investment portfolio.

A CEO I used to work with called mandates from management “ruling by Executive fiat.”  That is a great phrase, and reflected his desire to avoid Executive fiat unless completely necessary.  Sometimes you need to get in and break a tie on the team, but in most cases the right answer should be obvious.

Go do’s and ruling by fiat are dangerous because they remove decision making from lower levels of an organization.  Most go do’s come without explanation – it’s just “go do this.”  In the absence of reasoning behind a “go do” decision, teams project reasoning through their own world view.  The development team thinks management’s directive to choose a specific partner is a mandate to use .NET over Java.  The marketing team believes that implementation of a certain feature represents a new strategic direction for the company or product and aligns marcomm efforts accordingly.  The downstream effects of a fiat decision can be disastrous.

Sources of frustration

Management resorts to “go do” orders for several reasons:

• Trust – they don’t believe in their team to do the analysis and come to the right decision, so they co-opt the thinking
• Sensitive Information – they have access to sensitive information, such as M&A, that for business reasons can’t be made available to the team
• Scope – they have line-of-sight to other lines of business that their segment is not concerned with addressing
• Speed – they perceive the team and their decision making process as too slow, and want to short circuit process and jump straight to the “right” result

Employees get frustrated with mandates because they don’t understand the thought process behind the decision making process.  As a Product Manager it is possible that a mandate will be in direct conflict with the goals and roadmap of your product!  Reconciling this gap is a key communications hurdle that Product Management must step up and own.

The worst consequence of the spin cycle happens when employees take a go do and immediately start to execute based on their understanding of management’s ask.  They go off for weeks or months, working on a solution, bring the result back to management who says “wait…THAT’s not what I wanted!”  The communications cycle has broken down completely in both directions, fostering more mistrust between management and employee.  Since the employees didn’t “get it right,” management’s perception of employees as do-ers and not thinkers is reinforced, resulting in more and more mandates.  Employees  become jaded, stop asking “why,” and mumble about how management doesn’t know what they want.

Breaking the Spin Cycle

Product Management and Marketing sit in the unique position between the executive and employee layers, and are positioned to facilitate better communications across the entire business.  High performing teams are built on trust,

To truly break the spin cycle, first control the conversation.  When you are asked by management to “go do” a feature or partnership – ask “why?”  Some executives are insecure and take this as an affront to their power or management style, but good management will provide you with the reasoning behind the decision.  If they balk, explain that you will need to communicate this decision across the organization, including the deprioritization of other work in order to get this project done, and that being able to effectively explain the decision will help speed up the work.

Next, illustrate the impacts of a mandate.  Executive teams are notorious for “forgetting” about all the work in-progress, expecting new work to get tossed on the pile and not change the scope or dates on ongoing work.  Show how stopping current project, and starting something new will change release dates for everything.

Finally, be able to show strategic impacts of the decision.  If the executives want to mandate the usage of a specific partner, you need to understand that partner’s capabilities and  how that decision will change your roadmap.

How do you address this issue?  Please reply in comments!

Tagged as: CEO, communications, decision making, employee, Executives, fiat, management, process, Product Management, Product Marketing, spin, strategy, Tactics