My experience as a senior IC in very large and in smaller companies is that it’s NOT impossible to drive this change as an IC, any more than it is as a manager. It IS impossible to do alone. “Friends with the CEO” is useful, but only required if it’s shorthand for “talk to everyone and be verbose about your intent, including occasional skip-skip level 1:1s with the SVP/CEO”. My successes at large-scale changes in a company (or division of a very large company) have been when I understand and agree with the strategy (sometimes because I helped develop it), and I can get it reverberating up and down management chains. It doesn’t work if it’s only top-down or only bottom-up. It has to get reinforced from all directions.
My failures or more challenging changes have come when the change is too complicated or too far removed from current expectations for it to resonate among the middle layers of ICs and managers who do the actual work.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I remember you describing your experience in a little more depth some time ago and it makes me doubt my experience. Perhaps I’ve been in less healthy orgs. But more likely there are knobs/patterns I can’t see, so org change work like this feels out of reach for me. I’ve got some thinking to do.
It’s definitely the case that I’ve gotten lucky with the orgs I’ve worked in, because I’ve found the levers for change more often than I’ve missed them (well, more often than I’ve found none; I still miss a lot). You may have gotten unlucky and the levers just don’t exist for you. But also, it matters a LOT what changes you’re looking to make. It’s hard-mode to start with performance reviews or other non-technical topics; only look at those after you’ve had some success in other areas and built up a lot of credibility. Be willing to try different domains where you can improve things AND exercise the influence muscles.
Look for things like code-review practices or deployment/change management behaviors where you can add or improve structure that makes both employee and customer lives a bit better. These topics are both easier to convince people, AND usually easier for you to know what is important about the changes, and what’s OK to bend on as you discuss and convince people.
My experience as a senior IC in very large and in smaller companies is that it’s NOT impossible to drive this change as an IC, any more than it is as a manager. It IS impossible to do alone. “Friends with the CEO” is useful, but only required if it’s shorthand for “talk to everyone and be verbose about your intent, including occasional skip-skip level 1:1s with the SVP/CEO”. My successes at large-scale changes in a company (or division of a very large company) have been when I understand and agree with the strategy (sometimes because I helped develop it), and I can get it reverberating up and down management chains. It doesn’t work if it’s only top-down or only bottom-up. It has to get reinforced from all directions.
My failures or more challenging changes have come when the change is too complicated or too far removed from current expectations for it to resonate among the middle layers of ICs and managers who do the actual work.
Thanks for sharing your perspective. I remember you describing your experience in a little more depth some time ago and it makes me doubt my experience. Perhaps I’ve been in less healthy orgs. But more likely there are knobs/patterns I can’t see, so org change work like this feels out of reach for me. I’ve got some thinking to do.
It’s definitely the case that I’ve gotten lucky with the orgs I’ve worked in, because I’ve found the levers for change more often than I’ve missed them (well, more often than I’ve found none; I still miss a lot). You may have gotten unlucky and the levers just don’t exist for you. But also, it matters a LOT what changes you’re looking to make. It’s hard-mode to start with performance reviews or other non-technical topics; only look at those after you’ve had some success in other areas and built up a lot of credibility. Be willing to try different domains where you can improve things AND exercise the influence muscles.
Look for things like code-review practices or deployment/change management behaviors where you can add or improve structure that makes both employee and customer lives a bit better. These topics are both easier to convince people, AND usually easier for you to know what is important about the changes, and what’s OK to bend on as you discuss and convince people.