We're On The Same Team

Anyone who has worked with me understands that I don't really play politics within an organization. Sure, I'm aware of them, I understand who the key players might be or what their strategy is, but ultimately I don't really care about or get involved in their political activities. I rationalize it thusly: if we both truly have the best interests of the organization in mind, we will naturally align through discourse alone; if one of us does not, there will be friction. Given that I align myself fully to the health, growth, and sustenance of an organization and its people (customers and workers alike) when I join it, I generally either encounter great success alongside it, or find myself ejected by political players who (rightly) view me as a threat to their agendas.

I find myself in such an organization at present, my boss acting more like an insular life raft for my positive improvements against the turbulent seas of politics. He and I are keenly aware of the dire threats facing our current employer - rising competition, a stagnant product, gaping security vulnerabilities, hostile partners - as well as the immediate opportunities in a shifting geopolitical landscape where there's never been a more pressing need for our specific product lines. He and I - and our supporters in leadership, few as they are - understand that this is our windfall to lose, if we don't get the house in order quickly enough to capitalize on it. In an organization where key stakeholders (and political players) are more concerned with maintaining the status quo until their looming retirement, a handful of us are scheming - again, with the consent, if not the total support of executive leadership - to implement thirty years of technology improvements into an organization still hostile to the concept of NAT.

As you might surmise, this has not been a healthy environment for me to reside in. Within my first two weeks, I had received an HR complaint from one such internal politician that I was not being "sociable", as I was working in a locked lab environment with limited access instead of in my cubicle where I could be accosted with unrelated drive-bys. My boss put the kibosh on it and placated my concerns, though the hostility by said politicians has continued since.

This has not deterred me, and my efforts continue to net us allies and supporters as we demonstrate through action what we're capable of, what our vision is capable of, instead of engaging with the politicians by yelling and arguing on calls. It's partly demonstrating capability gains - like using NAT to network multiples of our products together without requiring an architecture redesign, or shrinking a six-month bespoke imaging process into a fifteen minute Packer build - and partly malicious compliance to force the politicians into outing themselves as problematic. We succeed by doing actual work, adhering to structures, and creating deliverables.

Before I continue further, I suppose I should define what I mean when I say "politics", because the word has a lot of complexity behind it and subject to a myriad of interpretations. What I call "politics" are the activities, machinations, and systems solely supporting the personal goals and outcomes of individuals or smaller groups within a wider organization, especially when those activities harm the larger organization in the process. Using some examples, a public cloud manager sabotaging a private cloud manager's project to get more budget spend is political, in that they're advancing a personal goal at the expense of others. On the other hand, a public cloud manager creating a pipeline to move private cloud workloads into the public cloud is not political action, because such flexibility ultimately benefits the organization in times of crisis or change.

Put more simply: actions that advance personal success over societal or organizational success are political in nature. Otherwise they would be considered governance, at least by my definitions, as governance is how disparate groups of decision-makers reach quorum on how to best proceed in the face of a given problem given the data at hand. If you want to simplify it even further: politics helps the one at the expense of the many, while governance helps the many while reducing expense for all.

And before you ask, the act of helping many at the expense of the one is called charity, at least by my internal working definition.

Let us continue.

Friendly Fire

Prior to landing a job within a large technology company, I labored under the illusion that Big Tech had the politics issue sorted out and operated as a meritocracy. After all, this is the image they actively try and cultivate. To question the success of Larry Elison or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel is to question merit itself, suggesting that they didn't earn their untold wealth and immense power by being the most meritorious of all humanity. In America especially, there's this link between wealth and the American Dream, this self-reinforcing narrative that they're billionaires because they worked hard and earned it through legitimate means, and you can too if you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work hundred-hour weeks like they (allegedly) did.

After sufficient exposure to that culture, however, I learned two valuable lessons: there was no meritocracy, and that it was all just Darwinian-esque politics. I thought that objective data, extensive testing, and market conditions would naturally support my position and vindicate my decisions, only to find out that none of it matters when a politician demands arbitrary outcomes and collective sacrifice to support their personal narratives. At that point objectivity becomes a threat and constructive critique warps into dissent, and those individuals or teams are thrown to the wolves so the politician can hoard more power for themselves and their lieutenants.

In other words, these big companies could be just as toxic and political as the myriad of smaller firms I'd worked with before. Politicians will find and exploit a vacuum, and the laissez-faire attitude towards regulatory structures in modern organizations means there's ample vacuums for politicians to thrive within.

It was in the context of that realization that I was also in the midst of a leadership development course targeting underserved and underrepresented groups. Through its lessons and mentoring, I learned more about the kind of leader I am and the immense obstacles blocking me from achieving success as said leader. Specifically, I learned that I do not entertain political jockeying whatsoever in my decision-making process, and that this is antithetical to the Western-way of doing business or cultivating leadership. I'm such a stalwart in this position that I willingly capitulate to self-sacrifice for the betterment of the organization - if the org will be healthier without my work or person in it, then yes, you should get rid of me, I will find work elsewhere. By comparison, it was seemingly suggested (and then outright confirmed by others I've spoken with since) that to be a leader in western companies - especially American companies - you must be willing to burn the org down and everyone in it for personal rewards.

I was told I am too good-natured to be a leader.

Playing on Hard Mode

As a socially-introverted single gay dinosaur man in America who lacks the backing of familial wealth and has to wrangle OCD, I'm aware that statistical data suggests I'm playing on a sort of "hard mode" for life already, at least compared with my American peers. Despite this, my data analytics skills and risk-aversion have served me (and those I support) quite well in fostering a successful career in a large metropolitan area.

Even so, I am keenly aware that past outcomes do not dictate future success. I must continue learning and growing if I wish to remain relevant, and that's why I took the leadership development course, it's why I'm learning Linux and Kubernetes, it's why I've taken to writing far more code than I perform manual tasks. I am not some mythical 10x Engineer or star talent, I'm just a (self-evaluating) B-Tier technologist with a passion for IT who wants to grow in the field and lead others.

Political jockeying is an unnecessary hurdle to this, because it does not provide reward or value to me. I do not learn anything of tangible value from it, and my actively engaging in it ultimately harms the organization I'm trying to serve. It expends energy I could and should be using on improving the organization and its members. I focus on governance instead, and good governance - by design - will exclude political jockeying for the harmful slime that it is.

Consider a civil rights problem like gay marriage in that context. Politically, there are groups and individuals who seek to block its existence on thin and subjective pretexts, to benefit their own ends and agendas. Yet from a societal perspective, does it not make more sense to allow marriage to occur between any two consenting adults not already married? Expanding the class reduces paperwork, thins bureaucracy, and greases the wheels of society and business alike for everyone (more weddings = more ceremonies = more parties = more catering = more money spent = more economic growth = more services required exclusive of the wedding). Good governance would identify the benefit to the whole of increasing economic activity, promoting cohabitation (with its myriad of benefits), and building stronger communities; good politics views it as a wedge issue to divide and conquer for personal gain, as evidenced by the current American regime.

Governance seeks expansion, politics seeks consolidation.

My boss recently expressed great surprise and skepticism that I sought to become a leader someday, honestly telling me that I would have a difficult time in such a role and find no enjoyment from it given my lack of appetite for political maneuvering. I didn't have the vocabulary to rebut him in the moment, but I do now, and I'd like to take a stab at saying so here.

I look around at the nations and organizations of today, and I see dysfunction throughout precisely because nobody engages in matters of governance anymore, rather narrowly pursuing matters of politics in service of themselves and, sometimes, by chance, the greater whole. I choose to reject political brinksmanship because we have a glut of it already, and its dysfunction is what continues to harm the planet and its life. Complex matters of national aspirations and societal needs are distilled down to team colors absent broader agendas, bipartisanship is exploited as weak by those who seek personal reward and maximum harm, and power is sought to be consolidated rather than expanded. Politics has left us a broken planet, full of broken countries and broken companies, run by myopic tyrants standing on the shoulders of sycophants who themselves would just as soon backstab their leader and climb atop their corpse for power.

I do not - and will not - be a leader of or within such a system, because I will never condone such a system's existence. Rather, as I learned through the mentoring I've received and given over the years, I am a type of leader that more are sorely needed of - and whose numbers are gradually growing. I am a leader who thinks critically and acts objectively, who accepts fault and acknowledges mistakes. I am not perfect because a human cannot be perfect, because nothing a human creates by definition can ever be perfect. I make imperfect decisions and build flawed creations - the one thing I can control is my accountability for the decisions I make or things I build.

I say this because, as the article headline points out: we're all on the same team. We will have disagreements over the path forward, but we don't need politics to come to a consensus on governance. What's needed is patience, understanding, empathy, compassion, tolerance, and a focus on the long-term instead of tomorrow alone.

That's the leader I am, and that's the organization I will build someday, with like-minded leaders shoring up my weaknesses and bringing diverse perspectives to help us better navigate a chaotic and ever-changing universe.

We're all on the same team. Let's start acting like it.