The Snow Melts At The Periphery

How senior leaders can stay connected to the outside world

Writing as the CEO of Intel, in High Output Management, Andy Grove wrote that "the snow melts at the periphery first." He meant that the initial signs of trouble in an organization are not at the center where engineering or management are situated, but at the edges. This is because the people at the edges are the most exposed to the outside world.

The definition of the outside world could mean many things. It could mean the market, the competition, the customers, the users, the partners, the ecosystem, or the community. It's where bad reviews of your product are posted, where your customers are asking for help, and where social media complaints about unacceptable bugs are posted.

As you become more senior in an organization, it is easy to become isolated from the outside world. You exist with senior managers and individual contributors above, below, and by your side, and, with time, you often put more energy into fixing internal problems than you do into understanding the fundamentals. This is a dangerous place to be.

Forming An Alliance

As such, it is important that you make a concerted effort to be connected to the outside world. This is where your allies come in. An ally is someone who is not in your discipline, and also not necessarily anywhere near you in the org chart, but who you can rely on for opinions, insights, and perspectives that you may not have considered. They do not necessarily have to be as senior as you either: they could be a member of the support team, a junior engineer working closely with customers, or sales staff who closely advocate for the parts of the product that you look after. You can see a visual representation of this in the following diagram.

One of the reasons that start-up companies move so quickly is that they are small enough that everyone is building, selling, and talking to users. This superpower allows them to move quickly, make decisions, change their minds just as quickly, and see the true effect of the rubber hitting the road. Building connections with allies is one of the ways that you can retain this superpower no matter how large your organization gets.

Exercise: Well-mannered Snooping

Let’s go and find some people. One of the best ways to begin to build connections, especially if you are new to an organization, is to do some well-mannered snooping.

A wealth of open information exists in many different places: your company's chat system, internal wikis, email lists, and more.

Identify the different parts of the organization that are close to the periphery and read what they are talking about. Join their public email lists and chat channels. Dig into the projects that they are doing. You will learn a lot about what is going on, and you will identify key people involved in the work that you can reach out to.

Reciprocation: What are you giving back?

In identifying your allies, you should do your best to form a symbiotic relationship with them. Otherwise, they may feel they are being used for information and that you are not giving anything back. Without knowing, your senior role and job title may make them feel uncomfortable if you don't build trust and rapport first. Imagine what a new and inexperienced support agent might feel when the VP starts messaging them regularly: stressful!

As such, when building connections with folks at the periphery, you should consider reciprocating in the following ways:

• Give them useful, actionable information. You will know many things they don't because of your position in the org chart. This could range from details of the upcoming roadmap, to who else in the organization they can connect to for help on specific questions or problems, or better details about how to support and debug the product. Be proactive in sharing this information with them and offering up connections to others.

• Be available to talk to customers. Having a senior engineering presence on a customer call can be a huge boost for support or sales staff. It can help to build trust, resolve issues quickly, and show that your company cares. Be proactive in offering to join calls and be available for ad-hoc calls if needed. Sometimes just picking up the phone (or webcam) and talking to a customer can prevent weeks of back and forth and escalation without the necessary detail. Never be too busy or too afraid to do this. It is one of the most valuable uses of your time.

• Be a point of contact for unblocking issues. Sometimes, engineering organizations are structured in a way that makes it nearly impossible for small bugs, feature requests, or other issues to be raised and worked on. You can be a point of contact for these issues, and devise ways for them to not get lost in the ether. For example, you could set aside periods of time during the year where you work to prioritize, triage, and burn down stacks of these issues, and then communicate the results back to those that initially raised them. One of the best outcomes for a member of the customer-facing organization is to know that their issue has been heard, resolved, and shipped to production. They can then deliver the good news.

• Offer coaching and mentorship. For less experienced staff, your experience and perspective can be invaluable. You can offer to mentor them or coach them on a particular topic. Many staff may be interested in a potential route into engineering, and you could open the door for shadowing opportunities or even secondments. Organizations have had a lot of success over the years finding in-roads for support staff who want to become engineers and are currently working on their skills in their spare time. Often it just takes one good connection to make it a reality.

• Offer to be a sounding board. Your perspective from higher up in the organization can be invaluable. You can meet occasionally to hear how things are going for them and offer advice. In doing so, you will learn a lot about what is going on at the periphery, which you can then use to inform your own decisions.

The senior levels of the org chart are not somewhere that you want to hide. Isolation, over a long period of time, will mean that you will become thoroughly out of touch with the outside world: the actual place where the product is being sold, used, and supported. As such, you should proactively build connections with those at the periphery.

Some senior leaders will do anything to not have to talk to customers or customer-facing staff. Don't be one of them. In fact, they can be one of your strongest tools in your arsenal. There is so much to learn from them.

Exercise: Identify Your Allies

Have a think about the periphery of your company:

• How would you define the periphery? Who are your existing and potential customers, and who is the closest to them? Which departments do they work in? Who runs those departments? Who is working on the front line within them?

• Write down a list of ten people who could become close allies. What do you know about them? What do you think they could teach you? What could you offer in return? What could you do to begin to build a relationship with them?

• Reach out to each of the people on your list and introduce yourself if you don't know them already. State your intention of wanting to understand more about their work and get closer to the periphery, and see whether they'd be open to having a conversation with you. If they are, schedule a call with them and begin to build a relationship.

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