“Reduced page load time to 1 second”, “Reduced query execution time to 20 ms”, “Helped improve conversion by 1%”.
You can find such statements in the resumes of most engineers. My resume was no different. And, why not? Engineers love taking on something complex and optimizing it to be simpler. Faster. Cheaper.
Engineering rewards optimization. Hitting the optimization targets get exalted, but most of these statements miss the point of “at what cost?”, or “what trade-offs were considered for this optimization?”
Maybe the speed optimization came at the cost of higher compute expense. Maybe the optimization of making it cheaper came at the expense of reduced quality. Maybe the optimization of faster came at the expense of reduced rigor. All maybes.
Optimizing to a benchmark becomes the most talked about thing and the trade-offs rarely get the same air time. But, the situation changes in a leadership context. All of a sudden the trade-offs are also elevated to the same level as the outcome you are trying to optimize for. You begin to appreciate and discuss them more because leading an organization means being accountable for growth, profitability, CSAT, employee experience, innovation, quality, and the overall clock speed of the organization. The reality is that you can’t maximize all of these dimensions at the same time. This is where the concept of Pareto frontier becomes useful. It explains why such a thing is not possible. It describes a set of optimal outcomes where improving one dimension comes at the cost of another.
Leadership, I believe, operates on a Pareto frontier where focusing and improving one organization dimension comes at the expense of another.
Want more innovation? That’s great, what does that do to consistency?
Want more autonomy for everyone? What would that do to alignment?
Speed? Be prepared for a few broken things
Want leaders to groom more leaders? Be comfortable sacrificing short-term efficiency
Want astronomical growth? Be ready to embrace a degree of chaos
Want to invest heavily in consistent learning and development of your coworkers? Be ready for productivity to dip before it rises again
These are really thoughtful questions that deal with some real hard trade offs. It’s easy to think that these competing dimensions can be eliminated. We convince ourselves that with good enough effort there must be a way to move faster without sacrificing rigor. To create alignment without limiting autonomy. To increase growth without introducing chaos.
Often, there isn’t.
Because in such kind of situations, it isn’t a question of right vs. wrong. Both dimensions are worth pursuing. It just depends on the organization context and its constraints.
An organization trying to scale may choose speed over perfection.
Whereas a company recovering from operational failures may choose perfection over speed.
A team lacking experience may need more process rigor.
Whereas a mature team may benefit from more autonomy rather than process rigor
The same decision can be right in one situation and wrong in another. That’s why leadership more often than not feels like navigation. Engineers are trained to search for better answers. To get their systems to an optimized state where the trade-offs don’t get discussed, only the optimized variable. And, they are celebrated because of it.
Whereas leaders spend their time choosing among very worthy dimensions. The real challenge is understanding organization’s current reality and helping it navigate to a trade-off that makes sense. Knowing well that improving one dimension would have a negative impact on the other. And they would have to live and deal with its consequence every day. They would be praised for achieving a perfect score in one dimension and would also get criticized equally for neglecting the other.
The longer I lead, the more I believe organizations constantly move along a Pareto frontier. There is only a series of choices about what we value most right now, and what we are willing to trade away. And being comfortable with the path we choose. Unlike engineers who get to showcase the outcome of optimization, leaders have to live with the consequences of the trade-offs.