How to navigate when your team misaligns with the company’s goal?

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Situations:

• You lead a research team including researchers, but your company is not ready to invest in long-term research.
• You are PM’ing or EM’ing a team who develops technology X *which you believe will be important to the company in the long run, but you struggled to create short-term impacts and you’re pressured to align with the company’s current strategic initiatives.

There are two parallel tracks you need to operate in this case: long-term systemic resolution and short-term tactical approach.

[Long-term — Systemic Approach] Company Strategy >> Prod Strategy >> Organization Structure & Eng Career Ladders — this should be driven by an Engineering organization.

In a sustainable organization, the company strategy, product/eng strategy, organization structure, and career ladders need to exist and work in harmony. However, in reality, you find a lack of product or engineering strategy, or your organization structure doesn’t allow optimal execution against the product or engineering strategy. When these systemic problems and leadership gaps exist, you struggle all the time. You try hard, but continue to struggle. You spend too much energy to discover what needs to get done, connect to the right people, and convince them about what your team does. You struggle for resources and recognition. Engineers’ morale is low since they don’t understand the vision and how they play a part. They don’t have the same recognition that their peers might enjoy.

To solve this, you need to first diagnose to see:

• Which systemic problems you have?
• Who in the organization should own and drive this problem? Hint: usually needs manage-up skills
• How much time do you have to wait? What is the hardest one? Why is it stuck? Hint: usually, it takes quarters or years and the number one reason is the lack of leadership in your area (pending hiring an executive, pending re-org, etc.)

Once you identify which components are missing or causing problems (company strategy, eng/product strategy, org structure alignment, career ladders), you can start to find a way to manage up, talk to your peers to form bottom-up efforts. However, knowing that most of these things might even two or three layers above you and take time, you need to find a way to deal it and still continue with other tactical things and help your team navigate. Dropping the ball is not the right answer, at least until you try.

[Short-term] While waiting for the systemic problems to be resolved, you need to have a framework to work with your team. They are:

Story — Co-creation— Protection.

• Story: Explain the ‘Why’ (vision and mission) with your own takes and listen to your team’s thoughts. You need to layout the context, show them why/how they can be part of it, and ask what / how you can help. Without seeing the big picture, your engineers will think that your requests to them are busy work only. Without your honest interpretation of the vision, your team will consider it as an empty ‘big and hairy’ statement without meaning and can’t connect to it.
• Co-create: Next, you need to allow your team to co-create the team strategy and plan with you in the right way. Ask them to prioritize your backlog themselves is not the right way as they don’t know how/what to prioritize and will get lost. Instead, discuss with them the framework to construct your team’s portfolio and prioritization. Which are the strengths of the team to leverage? Which dimensions should your portfolio have (strategic vs tactical programs? time horizon-based approach?)? Which criteria should you prioritize your backlog against? What are the big ideas or big bets to try? While your team might be still disconnect from the big company due to org structure deficiency or the lack of a product/eng strategy, they will can connect with you as a leader and through you, create an impact to the company. To do that, they need to be engaged and be able to co-create the future with you.
• Protection: be the shit shield. Your team is struggling and the last thing they need is doing all different small projects separately. Due to org pressure, you might need to do that, but your team must feel that it’s a short-term to allow them to explore and to buy you time to build a team’s proper charter and runway. Any requests should be triaged through you, and don’t settle to let them execute on whatever comes your way. Be there when they need you to shield against the org pressure.

Note that the short-term approach and long-term resolution on the systemic issues need to happen in parallel. Otherwise, you will keep fire-fighting and will eventually burn out. You need to continue to hold your managers, skips, and peer groups (HR, PMs, Engs) accountable for their part of the systemic problem and help them see how you should work together as a leadership team.