I have a little row of Post-it Notes attached to my monitor for blog conversations. Most of the topics listed are pretty self explanatory. Today I made a note to write about “Push vs Pull”. I spent about two minutes staring at it this morning, trying to figure out what the hell I meant by that. As it came back to me, I realized that everyone is going to automatically assume this is some sort of spur-of-the-moment Twitter thing—except it isn’t. Let’s talk about Twitter for a few moments, and then we might come back to “Push vs Pull”, assuming I don’t get tired and want to go lie down.
I have helped to pivot a business in the past. It is brutally hard. It probably took a decade off of my life expectancy, too. I wish the people still collecting a paycheck at Twitter all the luck in the world because they are going to need it.
When we were pivoting hi5, we were also switching stacks. We were going from a site written mostly in Java running on open source operating systems, to C# and running on Microsoft Windows. If you intend to change your business direction, I want to tell you there are positives and negatives to changing your stack at the same time. One of the changes, positive or negative, is that you will have significant organization turnover—up to 100% of your engineering team.
Elon understands that he needs to enact radical change to get his business where it wants to be. There is considerable noise in The Media and in The Socials about how he is getting there from here. Given the size of the task he is attempting, we should not be surprised that he is going to make some mistakes. I do wish him luck with the endeavor. Whatever happens to Twitter in the next two years will make for great grist for MBA textbooks around the world.
The deep truth is the moment that Elon and his stupid sink entered the building, the majority of that team was at risk of de-Tweeps-ing. You are more than welcome to disagree, but if the majority of people were doing the right things, the business would be in a far different place than it is today.
So how do you “right-size” such a mammoth organization effectively, intelligently, and with grace? I do not know that you can. I do think that some of his pronouncements and processes for decreasing the burn were not graceful. Elon made a point of shoving people towards the exit doors quite forcefully. I appreciate his reasons for doing so even if it is massively dramatic and poorly executed.
I could dissect this further, but other people are going to do a far better job at it. At the very least I am thankful that it has taken “quiet quitting” out of the mainstream conversation. I am slightly disturbed that it gets more clicks than FTX stories, and I am also ashamed to say I do click on all those juicy Elon headlines. I am part of the problem here. The good news is that it has not made me tired yet and I can talk about what I originally planned to talk about: “Push vs Pull”.
You are seldom going to get 100% utility out of your engineering team. Your engineers might have health issues, they might be needing to replace a leaking tire the day they purchased new brakes, or there might be juicy stories about Elon Musk that are just breaking. Your goal as an engineering leader is to make sure to call people to attention enough times to make sure that you are meeting your deadlines and possibly improving the efficiency and quality of your work over time.
There are a lot of tools at your disposal to help your teams be more successful. You can push your teams, as demonstrated by the shoving example above, or you can pull them.
I originally expected to tell you all that pulling is by far the best way to get your teams to make your teams successful. On the spectrum of “I am leading people” to “I am managing people”, pulling is very much on the leadership side of things. Pushing your teams is also necessary, and yes, this is more on the management sides of things.
In an ideal world you do not have to push your teams. In some subset of ideal worlds you do not even have to pull your teams. There is some magical universe where everyone just perfectly does their work and even the product managers walk around the office smiling.
When things start going off of the rails is when you need to make decisions whether to push or pull. Your team definitely appreciates it more when you pull. Rallying people to get their work done, unblocking their issues, and even jumping into the trenches to assist them definitely scores major points.
At the risk of mixing up the metaphors too much, sometimes there might not be enough carrots to go around, and you are left with using the stick. I dislike pushing people because I dislike being pushed myself. I will grudgingly acknowledge the times I am being pushed, and I take that little bit of self awareness with me when I push people on my teams. I do my best to tell them I am pushing them, and there are times I am apologetic about it, and other times I am explaining why it is that I am pushing them. Sometimes I do both in equal measure.
I did not want to go back to Twitter for an example, but it is easy to do so. Elon is clearly pushing his engineering team. He is pushing them very hard to the point that it is a violent shoving exercise. While I may disagree with the exact tactics of the past few weeks, he is absolutely doing something that is aligned with his vision on how to fix the business. He cannot pull his way to victory with Twitter. He needed to push people. If the first week he arrived at the office he started gracefully offering packages to people and reviewing the overall business, it would take him six to nine months to bring the team down in size to where he wants it to be. That six to nine month process would be hideously expensive, on top of all the money he already paid. Like it or not, this was always going to happen from the moment that former Twitter leadership decided to sue Elon Musk to close the deal.
Remember that leadership is generally accountable to shareholders and not accountable to employees. The best leaders are accountable to their employees because that is how you build amazing teams. Given how little conversation there was about employees in the middle of extracting shareholder value through the Twitter sale to Elon Musk, I would be hard pressed to work for one of the former leaders of Twitter. I think they did their teams dirty. Before you cancel me on The Socials, I would be equally hard pressed to work for Elon Musk. I probably would have been looking for a job the day there was enough of an agreement present that it was an inevitability. While I believe in Elon Musk’s goals for humanity with electric cars and space travel, whatever he is doing at Twitter is an aberration and a distraction from those goals. He also practically walks around with a coffee mug that says “Remote work sucks” and expects people to work insane 2001 hours in 2022. It bears mentioning that most really rich people own a very fancy car and if you work really long hours and commit yourself to the business, then next year they might own two.
Okay I will stop. The important thing here is that you need to balance pushing your teams to be successful and pulling alongside them to make it happen. I apologize for talking too much about Twitter, even if some of what is happening is somewhat related to leading and managing, and the difference therein.
We are getting closer to my holiday poem… So why not make yourself comfortable by indulging yourself in a Clearly Labeled Amazon Affiliated Oversized Blanket? While Amazon’s Marketing Algorithms tell me I ought to be shamelessly plugging tech merchandise, I believe that you all want more creature comforts. You deserve it. Prove the machine wrong by purchasing one of these blankets for yourself or someone you care about today.
See you all next week!
