Why "They" Are Always Screwing Up: A Guide to Removing Enemies
Everyone should intend to be a leader in their career. You can only lead "us", you can't lead "them".
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice. My intention is that 95% of my articles are evergreen, which means that their content should be relevant forever. However, as my writing style / length / skills / details change over time, my satisfaction level with past articles tends to drop. This article was one of my favorite topics, yet the content had room for improvement. The original article was written in June 2018. I’ve re-written it for my peace of mind, and your entertainment and education.
This article started as an email I sent back in 2018. At the time, I was leading a fairly large organization at Amazon through some complex and time sensitive projects. That performance pressure began to cause rifts within the various teams in our business. To say it in less fancy terms, our organization had numerous people complaining about each other.
We were butting heads repeatedly, and it was challenging to figure out a path forward. Every positive interaction was treated as a one-off lucky event, and every bad interaction was viewed as yet more proof that the other team or person was working at counter purpose to our organization.
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For context, at this time I ran the technology teams for FreeTime / FreeTime Unlimited (now called Amazon Kids), Amazon’s kids digital subscription product. When I refer to “mechanisms” and “good intentions” phrasing below, there’s a fantastic internal Amazon video of Jeff Bezos talking about why good intentions don’t work, mechanisms work. It’s very convincing, and I wish I could share the link with all of you. You’ll notice that I repeatedly reference mechanisms in many of my articles.
What the video beats into your head is that you need to assume that we all want the right thing to happen. It’s our implementation of the right thing, which we should work on together. If after a failure we say, “I’m going to try hard to fix it”, it’s not helpful because you likely already tried hard last time. Instead, we should be saying, “I will try something different” because that’s how you address problems. Through mechanisms.
I sent the below email to my team. I’ve made a few small tweaks for readability and privacy.
The email I sent to my team
Team,
If you are thinking about a team or co-worker or group as ‘them’ inside FreeTime instead of ‘us’, that’s a negative pattern. We need to work together to stop it. We’re all intelligent people and we all have great intentions.
The QA team wants to launch things fast. The dev team wants to build a high-quality product. The PM team wants to give well-defined stories. Managers want to give clear feedback. Designers want to provide clear designs so they can be implemented. We all have expectations of what we want others to do, and when they don’t meet our expectations, it causes problems.
If it is your trusted friend who differs from your expectations, you’d say “Hey there, I really needed that thing today.. what’s up?” and you’d work it out. Because you know they meant well and are trying their hardest.
If it’s ‘them’ who dropped the ball, you go and complain to your co-workers, or your manager, or your skip manager, or your peers, or you snipe at them in a meeting, or you throw them under a bus in an email, or perhaps you just bottle it up inside and start to dislike them.
If your trusted friend asks why you didn’t finish your work, you would say “Oh, shoot, I really meant to, sorry, it was just more complex than I thought. I’ll get it out by tomorrow, is that ok?”
If ‘them’ asks why you didn’t finish your work, you would say, “Because you made it harder. I would have totally had it done it if it weren’t for what you did earlier!”
We all need to actively work to eliminate ‘them’ from communications in our group. We cast blame more often on ‘them’. We act more defensively with ‘them’. With trusted friends, we act like we’re on the same team, and we’re all trying to get the same things done. Life and Work is much more fun with trusted friends.
Without simply tossing best intentions out there, I propose a simple mechanism.
Mechanism: If you begin to feel the glimmer of ‘them’ in relation to another leader/team, please schedule a morale event with ‘them’. Take that other person out for drinks after work. Head to Cinerama and watch a movie. Take your team out with the other team for bowling. Every dollar spent in connecting people/teams from ‘them’ into ‘us’ is money well spent. Amazon will be thrilled to spend money to connect people together so that problems are worked out more smoothly, and we can all be more honest & transparent regarding our schedule / complexity / blockers / etc.