CEOs, is your culture sabotaging software quality?

(Before you read further, I’d suggest taking a look at my previous blog on ‘What CEOs misunderstand about quality and speed in software development’).

CEOs observe spurts of output from their product development teams, loud failures resulting in noise from customers and the customer service teams and long periods where they disappear to work on technical things with vague promises of things improving some time in the future.

This blog does not absolve those in product development of their role in these issues. Its focus is on the role of a CEO. As CEO – someone who can have an outsized influence on the company culture – it’s crucial to recognise your role in shaping the culture that influences your product development team’s pace and effectiveness.

How might you be contributing to this situation?

How does your organisation’s culture shape the pace and effectiveness of value delivery?

It’s important to remember that mismatches of expectations and sources of friction between product development and the rest of the organisation are common across industries and company maturity levels. It doesn’t need to be this way, but for most, it is because maintaining environments conducive to producing quality is complicated and needs to be maintained. Why this goes wrong in many companies varies but almost always intersects with the company culture.

The critical question for you, the CEO, is what may be within your control that can help improve the situation. The answer? More than you may realise.

Some questions to consider when assessing factors that may contribute to the issues:

• What are the expectations you are setting for the team?
• What context do they have for the decisions they are making?
• What behaviours are being encouraged?
• How are your actions being interpreted by the organisation?
• What lessons are they learning on how to act and how work gets done in your organisation?
• What is the balance between short and long-term investment of effort?
• What is being incentivised?

Let’s explore the different organisational culture traits and their effects on software development.

How can the organisational culture affect software product quality and delivery?

Culture starts with leadership, so let’s look at how leadership can accentuate or detract from a culture that nurtures an environment where high quality and performance are possible.

Hubris

A common fault in leadership ranks that can be corrosive to a high-quality culture is hubris. That is to believe the strength of conviction in an idea is enough to overcome reality. In a business context, this is to become immune to contradictory evidence that an idea is succeeding in the marketplace.

This is not always an intentional or malicious choice. More often, it’s a trap that people fall into when trying to manage other risks, such as maintaining stakeholder buy-in. The desire to appear confident can create an environment where an honest appraisal of what is working and what is not feels unwelcome. Important information that should alter the path being taken may not be forthcoming because there is a sense it may not be listened to or welcomed.

This behaviour can permeate the organisation as it is seen as the accepted way of working and the only path for individuals to succeed. Why should they waste energy highlighting potential potholes in the road if leadership doesn’t appear to care or may punish them for adding uncertainty?

Discomfort with uncertainty

Closely related to hubris is discomfort with uncertainty. It’s not uncommon for people to be logically aware that uncertainty exists, but to worry that acknowledging it will weaken support for a direction or initiative. Instead, they create an air of false confidence and shoot down questions or concerns that may introduce consideration of any uncertainty. Such behaviour quickly erodes people’s psychological safety when raising concerns, leading to concerns being swept under the rug or ignored. Again, this can soon permeate all parts of an organisation, resulting in efforts to address issues being invested in other areas instead.

In a recent post, Roger Martin listed a CEO who ‘recognizes business is probabilistic not deterministic’ as one of the five signs of a good CEO.

“Because employees generally understand that life is probabilistic, if the CEO insists on acting deterministically, employees will put huge buffers into all their activities. For example, they will set any plan to produce an outcome at the extreme low of the probabilistic range. The CEO will wonder why the company has become so conservatively bureaucratic — and never figure out that the root cause is the CEO's own deterministic mindset.”

Absence of a culture of feedback

Another aspect of culture that can contribute to quality issues is the lack of a culture of feedback. Behaviours contributing to quality issues don’t feel like they can be raised. This results in employees perceiving the potential for social conflict when raising issues as they worry they may be received as personal criticism. This happens when the competencies for giving and receiving feedback are not part of the usual work practices and add friction that contributes to fewer issues surfacing and more left to fester. As CEO, what are you doing to encourage or discourage feedback between colleagues?

Information hoarding

Companies are naturally protective of their strategies and strategic plans; an organisation that has become political can move to even more severe information hoarding and formation of information silos.

Software quality strongly correlates with how much contextual information teams have for making decisions. The wider the gap between understanding what is to be achieved and why, the worse the decisions relating to quality and meeting user’s needs, which translates to worse products.

Competition instead of collaboration

Collaboration and openness to change must be present to identify and remove unnecessary delays in the development flow. Organisations are known to encourage ‘healthy competition’ in an attempt to increase performance. Unfortunately, this generally only translates to local optimisation, where some teams may achieve more at the expense of the overall organisation.

Teams may need to reach agreements, for example, between security and development teams, to find efficient ways to deliver safe solutions. Instead, they fight for a winner-takes-all outcome, compromising security or efficiency. Where a solution needs to be a combination of these, an environment that supports collaboration is essential.

Fear of failure

When it becomes unsafe to fail within a company, we incentivise failure to be hidden. When failures do not quickly surface, the pace at which we can correct them and learn how to prevent failures in the future slows.

How an organisation reacts to failure can determine whether failure is embraced as a learning opportunity where the frequency and magnitude of failures reduce over time or whether fear of failure encourages very safe decisions being made, which limit companies from reaching any level of excellence because options that appear to have any uncertainty attached to them become options that no-one is willing to stake their reputation on.

Uncertainty is an attribute that any untried idea can start with and is reduced by people’s willingness to try and safely fail. The companies that others aspire to emulate are those comfortable with experimentation and seeking to discover new and better ways to solve problems.

Blame culture

When things go wrong, it can feel logical for many to want to find out who was responsible and point the finger at the guilty party. Like many engineering disciplines, software development is a complex environment where behaviours are shaped by the environment and system within which they occur. Blame only increases the likelihood of people seeking to cover up their mistakes, even when it’s more likely those mistakes resulted from a more systemic issue.

Blame cultures can naturally form without an active effort to create an alternative culture. Experienced CTOs are often well-versed in cultivating blame-free cultures, but these efforts can be undermined by other executives who wish to see ‘heads roll’ when there are issues.

Hero culture

A typical pattern as companies graduate from startups to scale up and beyond is that of a hero culture. When companies are smaller – such as start-ups – and people are wearing many hats and doing whatever it takes to survive and win, it’s natural for some hero status to form. The downside is that hero culture is not sustainable and does not scale. If quality is only the result of the heroics of the few, it is extremely brittle and hard to repeat as the company grows.

It’s also easy to unwittingly reinforce the hero culture as the CEO. What behaviours are we rewarding? What examples are we highlighting?

Adding new functionality is easy to announce and easy to congratulate. The effort to mitigate risk or to address quality issues before they impact customers is less visible and often exemplified by the persistent absence of something. As a result, most organisations are incentivised to encourage one and lack an incentive for the other.

Perpetuating the hub and spoke model of interactions

Even among experienced CEOs, I have observed a pervasive engagement model that can hinder the interactions needed for good software development flow and quality. The mode of engaging your executive team can establish patterns that are replicated across your organisation. If you rely too heavily on the hub-and-spoke model of engaging with your team, it can reinforce siloed interactions within and between their teams.

By ‘hub and spoke’, I refer to when CEOs engage each functional head individually and set and agree on objectives with each independently. This seems sensible to many leaders as each area of responsibility can operate differently and independently. The reality of most organisations is that where functions separate is more based on the nature of skill sets rather than aligning to what contributes to the value organisations provide their customers. Often, shared objectives require cooperation and applying a wide range of skills to deliver value. Demonstrating alternate collaboration models from the leadership level sets examples that can be modelled and imprinted throughout the organisation.

The downward spiral of distrust

As the disconnect grows between the issues observed across the organisation and the lack of adequately addressed problems, distrust and frustration ensue. People feel there is no realistic way to improve and solve quality issues. Many issues are accepted as unavoidable, and the standards are lowered further.

With a culture of trust, people can be confident that feedback is focused on the work, not the individual. They can also be open to learning and discovering what needs improvement.

Trust is hard to gain and easily lost. What actions are you taking to engender trust among your team? What actions might be undermining trust?

What can CEOs do to encourage a high-performance, high-quality culture?

We learned that feedback loops are essential to achieving high-quality software and that quality and the pace of delivery have a different relationship than is often assumed. We also learned that software development flow is correlated with the frequency of feedback loops and that unnecessary stops delay learning and increase the cost of achieving the desired level of quality.

Many of the barriers to effective feedback loops and ensuring a continuous flow of value in software development are social ones. Thus, the organisational culture is critical to how well this is working.

As CEO, you can set expectations for the values and desirable behaviours within the organisation and make choices about investing to support a culture that promotes high performance and quality. Considering the aspects of organisational culture that can interfere with a high-performance culture we covered earlier is a great place to start.

This might include adjusting how communication, rewards and recognition, learning and development, and other company-wide aspects are approached. The technology organisation may also need support from the executive team for the investment and commitment to change required to improve the product development flow.

As we established earlier, an improved flow of valuable work allows for more frequent feedback, which in turn allows for higher quality and the ability to meet the needs of your customers and their users.

Contact us to learn more about opportunities to support quality and flow in your organisation.