Tech Leadership is about clearing obstacles, so people can perform.
In my long and proud professional programming career, I’ve found that life often forces you to pause and reflect. I’ve been a hacker my whole life. I’ve seen ATAC shipped to Firebase on the cloud by Orion. But today it happened in the most ordinary places, the humble office bathroom.
I had been hurrying in between high-impact strategy sessions. I walked in, disappointed that the stalls were full. I glanced at the ready and willing urinal row. My creative mind burst with innovation. As I approached, one of the programmers in line stopped me. Calm, but firm:
“[Sir,] you can’t poop in the urinal. You’ll need to use a stall.”
So I stood there , waiting in line behind three other devs, each performing their bathroom ritual. By the time I was done, I had missed my call. This had a cascading effect on the rest of my day, to incalculable potential cost to the organization. For what? The performative exercise to ease the minds of a few subordinates. To add insult to injury, I was reminded to wash my hands for 20 seconds with soap, then dry.
Beurocracy with no ownership, no practicality and zero sense of urgency.
I don’t blame the engineers. They’ve been taught to think this way. Urinals for one thing, stalls for another, soap and dry after everything. Rules for safe, predictable operations. But safety and predictability are not the same as growth.
As an innovator, I ask myself one question: “Why can’t I just do whatever I want, wherever I want?” After all, programming has no real limitations, why should the real world?
Later in the day, I invited the engineer and the facility manager for a strategic session. While we talked and I took the chance to convince them. They admitted sheepishly: yes it’s technically possible to poop in a urinal. But when pushed, they couldn’t articulate convincingly why they felt so strongly against it. I was told to consult a never-ending chain of specialists: plumbing engineers, health and safety officers, architects, and more! Disappointed at this lack of ownership and initiative, I knew it was time to take executive action.
Arbitrary restrictions have no place in the modern tech world.
This porcelain dogma is one of many bureaucracies that organizations develop naturally and slow down growth. It is up to us, the innovators, to break through these callous obstacles and become the best at what we do. If the people you are surrounded with can’t think differently about how we poop and pee, how can they think differently about how we grow, compete and disrupt? This is what high-performance teams look like .
We are not all cut out to be different.
