Category: Uncategorized

“We have governance, so we’re secure. But we can’t work.”

I heard this from a client a while ago, and it stayed with me. They had a business need that required prompt action, but the request was stuck, and the internal approval was the part they could see. Naturally, it got the blame.

My honest first reaction was that they were right. They needed something from one of the services I manage, and we couldn’t deliver it. That mattered to me more than defending the process. But to improve the service and make sure it didn’t happen again, I first had to understand what was really slowing it down.

So I traced the request. A user needed an additional capability on a platform I manage. From the outside, it looked like something I could simply switch on. In reality, it depended on two separate things: an internal validation process, and a change to our contract with the external provider.

Both required time. But only one was visible to the business asking. Even if we’d waived the internal validation that afternoon, nothing would have changed until the contract did.

That was the moment the problem changed shape for me.

The obstacle you see first

“An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage,” wrote Eliyahu Goldratt in The Goal (1984), a book about improving a factory.

An office is not a production line, and I don’t want to stretch the comparison too far. But the question works well in almost any setting: would removing that step enable the outcome to happen sooner? If yes, then that step is contributing to the delay, and we should look at it further. If no, then we are about to invest a lot of energy in fixing something that is not actually stopping us.

As for me, my answer was somewhere in between. The internal validation was slow, and I knew it, as I’ll come back to. However, removing it alone would have changed nothing.

What governance is supposed to do

It’s easy to reduce governance to approvals. COBIT, ISACA’s governance framework for enterprise IT, describes it differently: creating value by balancing benefits, risk, and resources. Not all governance is about control.

Reading that, I started to think that one of the most useful things governance can do is help us locate the real constraint, whether it sits in an approval, a contract, a supplier, or someone’s capacity. A request can stall on several at once.

A second point here: while an internal exception could have been approved quickly, the external dependency in question would not have been influenced by such approval. Having the authority to say “yes” is not the same as having the ability to make something happen. Thus, before escalating, I try to establish whether what we are dealing with is something we can control, something we can only influence, or something we can only make visible.

When an improvement waits

This was not the first time I had been asked to go around the same process, but the third. So I proposed a faster route for urgent requests, as the recurring requests showed the standard process wasn’t always matching the speed the business needed. The decision was to leave it for now. There were other priorities, and with limited resources, someone has to make that call. It was a reasonable one.

However, deprioritizing an improvement does not make the limitation disappear. Every prioritization decision has a quieter side: the things we have decided not to fix yet. The next time someone needs to bypass the process, all the frustration will once again be blamed on the process, not on the decision that was made to leave it as it is.

Risk management is also worth a mention here. The ISO 31000 standard recognizes retaining a risk by an informed decision as one of the risk treatment options. And retaining a limitation is perfectly reasonable, as long as it is conscious and visible.

When we decide to live with a constraint, then, I’d like to be able to ask and answer: What are we accepting? Why? Who owns the decision? What are the costs and trade-offs? And, importantly, when are we going to review it?

So I don’t think the answer is to argue harder for the improvement itself. What I would ask for is something smaller: that we record the limitation we are choosing to keep, why we accept it, and when we will review it.

What slips out of view

Looking back, two things had slipped out of view. The real constraint sat behind a more visible obstacle, so the frustration landed there. And the earlier decision to continue with the slower process had disappeared from the conversation, so each new request felt like a new problem rather than the consequence of a trade-off already made.

My takeaway is that governance is neither good nor bad. It earns its keep when it helps us identify what really determines an outcome, and when it keeps our trade-offs visible long after we have made them.

I think these are the two questions worth trying to work out:

When something is blocked, have we found the real block or just the most obvious one?

And of the limitations we live with, which ones did we actually choose?

References

Goldratt, E. M., & Cox, J. (1984). The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement. North River Press.

ISACA. (2018). COBIT 2019 Framework: Introduction and Methodology. ISACA. https://www.isaca.org/resources/cobit

International Organization for Standardization. (2018). ISO 31000:2018 Risk management — Guidelines (clause 6.5.2, Selection of risk treatment options). ISO. https://www.iso.org/standard/65694.html

On autonomy, feedback, and finding an effective style of our own

Professional development is supposed to make us grow. We take feedback, adapt to different personalities, and get exposed to different ways of working.

But sometimes feedback is just the method the person giving it would have chosen. Of course, this is one way we can learn.

But when does adapting turn into conforming?

Feedback is necessary, and leaders should set expectations and challenge behavior. But sometimes I ask myself whether this particular feedback leaves someone more capable, or just more similar to the person developing them.

The discomfort that comes with growth

While researching, I found out about Herminia Ibarra’s work on the authenticity paradox. Authenticity, she argues, is often used as a reason to stay exactly as we are.

New responsibilities do require new behavior, and it usually feels wrong at first. You might have to be more assertive than is comfortable, or more diplomatic, or slower to decide than you’d like. Ibarra’s point is that the discomfort isn’t proof of inauthenticity. Often it’s just proof of being new at something.

I found her advice interesting:

“Growth necessarily involves some form of imitation, but don’t copy just one person’s leadership style. Borrow selectively from various people to create your own collage.”

If you borrow from many people, what you get is yours. If you borrow from just one person, it belongs to them.

That’s the version of growth I recognize. Trying a new approach gives us one more thing we can do. It doesn’t have to cost us the thing we could already do.

Adding options instead of replacing them

A meta-analysis by Gavin Slemp and colleagues pooled 72 studies covering 32,870 people. Where leaders supported their team’s independence, motivation came more from within. That support showed no clear link to the kind of motivation that comes from feeling pressured. The authors describe the controlling version of leadership as “prescriptive, inflexible, and rigid,” pressuring employees to think, feel, or behave in particular ways.

Autonomy doesn’t mean the absence of standards, which is how it’s often misread. An organization can define what needs to be achieved. A manager can give hard feedback, set boundaries, and hold people to account. None of that requires everyone to do things the same way.

For instance, two colleagues can go into the same supplier discussion to negotiate and not sound the same: one can be direct, the other more diplomatic and indirect, and both come out with terms worth signing. What they had in common was the preparation and knowing where we would stop.

So, I see a difference between helping someone improve and making them do things my way. I believe that feedback that helps someone understand their impact gives them more choices. However, feedback that suggests there is only one acceptable way to communicate limits their options.

For me, this kind of development can look like conformity. In that case, a person keeps up a style that doesn’t fit their personality, their values, or how they see themselves.

I couldn’t find research that tests directly whether managers develop people in their own image. The studies show what happens when people are pressured into prescribed behavior. The step from one to the other is my own reading.

Outcomes and routes

Gallup is useful on the practical side. It describes micromanagement as controlling individual decisions instead of defining outcomes and supporting people in reaching them. It also finds that employees are 43% less likely to experience high levels of burnout when they can choose what tasks they do, when they do them, and how much time they spend on them.

Its older work on management puts it more bluntly: “The best managers tell us they define the right outcomes first, and then let each person find his or her own route toward those outcomes.”

But that doesn’t mean autonomy is always the answer. Path-goal theory has been around since the 1970s, and it suggests that clear direction helps most when roles are unclear, tasks aren’t well defined, and people aren’t yet sure what success looks like. Some tasks need to be standardized because mistakes can be costly.

I believe it’s crucial to ask ourselves why we provide specific directions and consider whether we are safeguarding a result or simply expressing how we would have done it.

Standards and preferences

Janelle Wells and Doreen MacAulay wrote about “invisible mending”. This was a really interesting read for me as it highlighted a lot of the “work” that people do to fit within a workplace and also what we may be missing by trying to fit within certain expectations or shapes of work.

While I acknowledge the need for standards, there are two things that tend to get confused: A standard is what good work requires, and a preference is how one person likes to see something done.

When we get them confused, though, all of a person’s development efforts can shift from trying to make them effective at their work to trying to make them recognizable while doing good work at it.

A better outcome

The optimal result isn’t imitation, but selection; having a variety of means of communicating, deciding and responding, and leaving sufficient room for a person to work out which of these actually belong to them.

The difference is that one type of development leaves a person with more ways of working than they had before, while the other leaves them with less.

It’s possible that the best result won’t be someone who becomes more and more like the person who is developing them, but it might instead be someone who has acquired a greater number of ways of being effective, while at the same time developing a style that remains clearly their own.

Sources

Ibarra, H. (2015). “The Authenticity Paradox.” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2015. https://hbr.org/2015/01/the-authenticity-paradox

Slemp, G. R., Kern, M. L., Patrick, K. J. & Ryan, R. M. (2018). “Leader autonomy support in the workplace: A meta-analytic review.” Motivation and Emotion, 42(5), 706–724. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-018-9698-y

Gallup. “How to Prevent Employee Burnout.” https://www.gallup.com/workplace/313160/preventing-and-dealing-with-employee-burnout.aspx

Gallup Business Journal (March 22, 1999). “Item 1: Knowing What’s Expected.” https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/499/item-knowing-whats-expected.aspx

House, R. J. (1971). “A Path Goal Theory of Leader Effectiveness.” Administrative Science Quarterly, 16(3), 321–339.

Wells, J. E. & MacAulay, D. (August 2024). “Invisible Mending: The Silent Struggle of Conforming at Work.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/our-invisible-work/202408/invisible-mending-the-silent-struggle-of-conforming-at-work

Projects rarely stall because someone decided to stop them; momentum tends to fade slowly, mainly due to delays, dependencies, unanswered questions, or waiting.

I got an early taste of this when I led one of the largest application lifecycle projects in our portfolio. It was extremely complex, with limited resources, no clear ownership, and many dependent parties. Progress was slow. I discussed the project goals, timeline, and risks with some senior colleagues, and the conclusion was sobering: we no longer believed we could meet the deadline. There were technical uncertainties, and there were numerous dependencies that we could not control. For these reasons, the project was slowly losing momentum.

I brought these concerns up with my manager, who encouraged me to continue.

So I kept going, focusing on what could still move despite the uncertainty.

Every day, I looked over the project, asking myself where we were, what still had to be done, what we were waiting for, and what I could do. One question was the most useful of all:

What can still move today?

When I realized that one item had been blocked, I checked to see what else could still go ahead in parallel, for example, another dependency, a decision, or the next meeting.

From Responsibility to Outcome

A common scenario was that we couldn’t move forward because we were waiting for the supplier. Although this might have been true from an operational point of view, the business team did not experience the project through its separate tasks and dependencies. They experienced the result.

That changed the question I was asking myself; rather than simply asking, “Who is responsible for doing this?”, I began to ask:

What can we still do to move the project forward?

Sometimes that meant escalating, following up, using internal resources, discussing what to do next, or moving on to the next part of the project while one dependency was still blocked.

Was It Actually Only Persistence?

For a long time, I thought of this refusal to let things stall as persistence. Then I started to wonder whether there is something deeper to it. I discovered the paper “Making Things Happen: A Model of Proactive Motivation” by Sharon Parker, Uta Bindl, and Karoline Strauss.

The authors define proactivity as a goal-directed process: deciding on the future you want to bring about, then acting to make it happen. What struck me was the gap between knowing the future you want and continuing to act towards it, even when it seems out of reach. In my case, the goal was clear, but making progress towards it had been hard.

This made me rethink the word persistence. Perhaps some of it should be viewed as proactivity, not only reacting to situations, but acting to change them in order to reach a desired result.

While I was looking into this more closely, I also came across Karl E. Weick’s paper, Small Wins: Redefining the Scale of Social Problems. His idea of tackling large, complex problems by breaking them into smaller, achievable steps closely matched what I’d seen myself. Most often, I made progress by pushing one task, one decision, or one dependency forward at a time. Individually, each step seemed insignificant. Combined, they built real momentum.

Protecting Momentum

We finally finished the project, even though it was later than originally planned. We didn’t get there by one huge push, but by countless small actions.

Of course, some constraints are real, and there may be moments to wait or stop. What strikes me is how readily projects end up waiting, even when useful actions could still be taken.

I realized that moving a project forward takes more than making a plan and assigning responsibilities. I also had to pay close attention to what was hindering progress and take the next step to help things move again.

Maybe that’s part of getting things done: not having all the answers, not taking on everyone else’s work, not pushing for the sake of pushing, but focusing on the outcome and building enough momentum to reach the next decision, action, or solution.

What can still move today?