Thread by @andybudd

There are two types of workplace success.

I want the company/ product/ team I support to be a success and if that happens I expect to benefit as a result.

I want to personally be successful, irrespective of (and sometimes at the cost of) the company / product / team I support

The former attitude is the idea attitude for your team to have. However sadly people with this attitude often get overlooked.

Instead the latter attitude often dominates. It’s typified by politics and self interest, and is often a zero sum game.

The fact that the best performing people are often kept in those roles for longer weirdly benefits the more ambitious but less capable people as they will often claim the work of others as their own.

It also weirdly benefits the company (in the short term at least) as they keep good people in high functioning delivery roles for longer, while move the more personally ambitions but probably worse performing people into management roles.

The above cycle is the very epitome of the Peter Principle, where people are “promoted to the level of their own incompetence”.

Often “Peter Principle” leaders will point at the market salary for their roles when negotiating pay rises, rather than the their personal performance or the positive impact they’ve had on the company, product or team.

It’s obviously important not to pay people under their market value. However their market value should be set based in their contribution rather than their titles.

People who really care about the contribution they are making generally don care about titles as they fee hollow and unrelated to their value and impact. Ironically this leads to those same people being underpaid, because of the above cycle.

A lot of ambitious people will start by negotiating a more important sounding title, irrespective of whether they have the ability or impact that comes with said title. Once you have the title it’s easy to claim you’re being underpaid in comparison to peers with said title.

As an aside, as long as design leaders report into product leaders, our ability to influence will be limited. We run the risk of being a tool ambitious product leaders use to increase their influence (my team did this), and an excuse when things go wrong (design did that).

Just a reminder that whenever you give somebody on your team a promotion the rest of the team will evaluate whether the promotion was based on merit or politics, and act accordingly.

If you clearly promote on merit, it will ideally encourage others to follow said behaviour.

However did people see promotions happening based on politics, their performance will drop, and they may either choose to leave or start playing politics themselves.

This is one of the reasons why progression frameworks are so useful as they clearly demonstrate the behaviours the organisation expects in order to promote people. Just be aware of people optimising solely around these behaviours and nothing else, as people can game the system.

I’ll also add that nothing demotivates a team faster than realising that all the hard work they’re putting in is simply going to advance the prospects of their boss, rather than having a tangible improvement on the company, product or team.

As such, under performing teams (full of great people) are often the result of managers who are more interested in playing politics and self promotion than delivering results. Sadly these sorts of managers will frequently blame their teams for this lack of performance.

People with the wrong sort of ambition will attempt to claim personal credit in interviews while laying poor performance on other people shoulders. Frustratingly this tactic plays well in an interview setting.

Conversely people with the right sort of ambition will give complex nuanced answers here. They’ll share successes around the team while explaining failures in a way where they’ll take some culpability.

As such, interviews tend to vastly benefit individual players versus team players. If you’re a recruitment manager, make sure you watch for this sort of bias.