Hollywood, Truth & Management

Hollywood meets silicon valley

A long time ago in a company far away I noticed a large new poster when I came in. [Company name] = Hollywood meets Silicon Valley, it read.

I looked around the rundown office: Ancient PCs under the desks, peeling paint, coffee stains in the carpet. It’s a decent place to work, I thought, but it is not: Hollywood meets Silicon valley.

I cycle to work after bringing the kids to school so I generally arrive at the office at a time most developers think of as midnight. Gradually my team started coming in. One by one they passed the new poster and said and did … nothing. That’s weird, I thought. What had happened here?

Workers of all nations unite

The Czech dissident Vaclav Havel describes in one of his books how he sees a sign in a grocery store window with the Marxist slogan: Workers of all nations unite! Does this shopkeeper living under communism have a deep desire for workers of all nations to unite, he wonders, or is there something else going on? He concludes that totalitarian regimes create a false reality of messages that are repeated without conviction.

The company I worked for was not run by the Czech Communist Party. It was a fun place run by well meaning people. But the root of the problem seemed similar.

Hairy knees

When we manage people sooner or later we learn that when we speak as managers our words carry an additional meaning that we’ll have to get used to.

Years ago, when someone from my team asked if he could wear shorts to work I answered that I did not want to see hairy knees in the office. A joke. And not one in good taste.

When that same person left the company a year or so later he told me that, even though he’d enjoyed his time with us, he did not agree with my dress policy. Huh? I thought.

Crowd watching

As the team grows it becomes harder to know how a message lands and if we acquire a fancy job title our voice is weirdly amplified. When we are not careful, ideas and preferences become rules and policy, without us being aware of it. So we have to learn to be deliberate about what we say.

With time it becomes habit to tune our tone of voice, to prepare talking points for a speech, to let someone review our presentation. And with that we risk that the public message we send drifts away from people’s personal reality.

Inside of a parallel universe

The developers passing the inspirational poster without frown or comment had already accepted that in this company a reality existed that did not relate to their own. That did not require their involvement. Now that‘s a problem.

Most people will try to improve the world around them, but why would they care to make improvements in a parallel reality that they are not part of? When leaders create a world of their own that is where they will be: On their own.

To avoid this, the connection between what is publicly acceptable and privately recognizable needs to be carefully maintained.

So let your speech be reviewed by someone outside of your usual cycle. Skip some levels for a chat. Run an anonymous survey. Jump in a different meeting. Cherish that annoying person that never agrees with you and ask them for feedback.

Show your doubts and share your failures.

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These views are my own and do not represent the views of my employer.

Steven van Rappard — March 2024