What Middle Managers and Soviet Commissars have in common

Or how to spot bad company culture before you join it

My grandfather spent 3 years on the frontline of WWII as a Telecommunications Officer. He had enough medals to make his jacket sag under their weight and plenty of shrapnel still left in his body to send airport metal detectors ringing. The airport incidents usually followed by apologies and a collective salute from the security staff as soon as they realized what triggered the detectors.

He once told me a dark story about a Soviet Commissar and his platoon. Those Commissars were political cronies, staunched communists known for sending soldiers to imminent death. They would rather kill their own people than allow them to retreat. Their defining features were impatience, incompetence and refusal to think. I always wondered what they looked like until I met one recently in a very unexpected place - a growing e-commerce company.

You are joining a rocket ship ...

Some 15 years after my last conversation with my grandfather I was asked to help with improving a customer service centre for an e-commerce company. They were growing 30% year-on-year heading for $100M+ in turnover in 2020 and had some efficiency problems. It looked like a dream contract - a fast-growing company with "growth pains"!

As Sheryl Sandberg said,

If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask what seat! Just get on.

And so I did, no questions asked, which was, on reflection, too rushed. I should have paused and asked some questions ...

Calculate the ship's trajectory: are they heading for a win?

My first assignment was to look into their customer communications. They were spread across LiveChat, email and AWS Connect. The metrics looked bad, if they even existed. I started asking questions:

• What is the key metric for the business, a.k.a. The North Star?
• What are the key metrics for the Customer Service?
• Is the Customer Service a cost center or a revenue generator?

It turned out no one had asked them those questions before 🚩. The General Manager (we'll call him GM) gave me his view:

• Metrics in the order of priority: sales, customer satisfaction, efficiency 🚩
• Customer service metrics: none 🚩
• Customer service is a cost center 🚩

That doesn't sound like a winning formula to me, but what do I know?

Check the ship's mechanics: what's under the hood?

If you are an engineer, like me, you are probably a sucker for a problem that needs solving. It may be very tempting to join a company with a lot of challenging problems. At first, you may feel like a kid in the toy store - anywhere you poke there is a big problem 🚩 and you have an opportunity to solve it.

Are these problems actually "growth pains" or something much deeper and systemic? How did they come about and who created them?

People did. People that were there before you and some of them may still be around. 🚩

Meet the crew: do you fit in?

Two factors stand out for me in teams and organizations most: how they communicate and how they make decisions.

None of the two factors was particularly promising with my new client. You get your tasks assigned to you by the GM via email or zoom in a quite non-specific manner. Your deadline is always now and if you haven't finished the previous task it's not the GM's problem. Just do something. 🚩

Apart from that, I'd like to know how the company operates on the inside:

How much freedom do teams have in the decision making? Is there a clear and transparent framework of values to make delegation possible?

Some companies have "manifestos" or "values", but all companies have "culture". It doesn't matter what the manifesto says - the daily habits and practices, which what culture is, trump it. Ignore what the GM and the HR tell you during the interview. Look at their issue tracking, Git commit messages and code comments.

One middle-manager described their culture to me as "we used to have pizza on Fridays". 🚩

Look for evidence of culture of excellence, innovation, quality or customer focus. My e-commerce client had a culture of urgency and incompetence. That, funny enough, doesn't affect their rocket ship status, which is all about growth.

The company culture: where does it come from?

Simply put, it comes from the very top.

A couple of founders hire their first programmer, who becomes the team lead when they hire 5 more. The founders instill the culture in the first few hires when everyone is hands-on and busy cutting code. They do it by example. It is not what they say - it is what they do and what they reward.

Those first few hires become managers as the company grows. An incompetent GM who makes inappropriate remarks about others or threatens to fire someone in a group email is a clear sign that the problems you will be dealing with are systemic, not the growth pains you hoped for. 🚩 They will go all the way up (someone hired that GM) and all the way down (people the GM hired or people trapped in their jobs).

If there are red flags there will be commissars

I managed to fix the phone system running on AWS Connect. The call volumes went from 300 to 1,200 per day because ¾ of the callers could not get through the previous set up. Most of the calls were warranty and shipment enquiries that should be dealt with by LiveChat, email or even SMS.

What did the GM say to that? He demanded that everyone, including the programmers, accountants and even the warehouse workers should start answering phone calls. 🚩🚩🚩

• LiveChat was abandoned, which lead to even more calls
• Quality of call handling by untrained staff dropped through the floor
• No one had the time to address the root cause any more

And that was the moment when I remembered my grandfather and his story about the Soviet Commissar - impatient, incompetent and refusing to listen to what his team was telling him.

Let's not blame the Commissars for being Commissars. They are what they are. We can only blame ourselves for submitting to them. And if we do submit, we gradually become those dull apathetic people who write bad code and "jump" when the GM says "jump".

I fixed what I could, uncovered some glaring security and code quality issues and bailed after 5 weeks. Life's too short to spend it in the company of Commissars, even on a rocket ship.

What I learned

Ask plenty of questions to reveal the true colours of the management and the company culture before you commit to joining them.

---