Do the right thing!

Many years ago, I used to run the technical operations team for a company of about 250 people. After software was deployed to our systems, our inventory system could suffer issues and I, like the rest of my team, wore pagers to bring things back online if that happened.

One night our systems went offline in the middle of the night. I received the second page (which meant that no one picked up the first one) and I spent most of the evening trying to repair the situation before inventory was necessary on the East Coast. It was 3AM and I decided that missing the 8AM meeting was not a big deal.

The next morning, I learned a very important lesson from my mentor. While it was important to get the servers up and running at 3AM, it should have been my priority to be at the meeting at 8AM to represent what happened the night before.

We are often asked to use our judgment and do the right thing. What often is missing from that request are perspectives of regarding role and scope of influence.

• Individual contributors look for ways to ensure that they can meet the customers/end-users expectations.
• Leads look to do the right thing for their local team.
• Manager (or a manager of leads) do their best to represent their overarching team.

Questions in this space relate to work-life balance, team load balancing, and reduction in context switching.
The other inflection point is regarding scope of influence. This is where the conversation becomes more difficult to articulate. The questions and answers become less concrete.

• Is doing this workload or piece of work better for your organization, for your product, or for your company?
  
  This meme gets used, but gets talked about at the company level when a local scope is best utilized. "It is the right thing for company" is said but words are often left off. This actual statement often means "it is the right thing for the company to spend your resources on my project even though I didnt plan or ask for it."
  
  By changing the context from "company" to "division" or "group," the discussion effectively changes. This does not mean you should not consider the impacts to the company in your discussions, but it should be a transparent discussion where the below points are also discussed.
• Are you or your group the best to handle this responsibility? This requires reflection and dismissal of self-deception techniques. Make sure you pass "the Mom sniff test" and only you know if you do.
• Are all facets being considered when you are being asked to do the right thing? Budget, scope, resources, time, shared prioritization, etc.
• Is doing this effort today the right decision beyond today? Will you look back on this decision in 3/6/12 months and still be ok with this decision based on the information you have today?

These questions are often not asked nor offered as they change the leverage that the statement "do the right thing" has in forcing a specific behavior; compliance.
This is also where you can also negotiate for better results through compliance today for "doing the right thing" tomorrow with the above questions answered. You can ask the question "while this effort is important today, is this effort a business priority for your team?" and then hold all parties accountable for their respective answers.