“Rules…without them we live with the animals.”
— John Wick
Back in the 18th century, the most popular combat sport in the U.K. was bare-knuckle boxing. Two fighters would get together and fight without any modern rules or equipment, such as padding or gloves. The sport looked nothing like modern boxing, as boxers kept their hands low (at chest level), mostly punched to the body, and wrestled a lot.
The reason old-school bare-knuckle boxing looks so different from modern boxing is because of rule changes. When a ruleset changes, the players involved typically have a set of immediate reactions to said rules. Over time, as the rules sink in, patterns tend to emerge that may not be obviously related to the explicit rules, which I will call “derived behaviors.” Finally, there are also implicit rules: rules that are not explicitly stated but picked up by players from observing which behaviors get rewarded or punished. In this article, I will go through all three — explicit rules, derived behaviors, and implicit rules — as well as how to use them to drive behavioral changes to your organization.
Explicit Rules
In 1867, the Queensbury rules were established, forming the foundation of modern boxing. Among other rules, gloves were required, grappling was forbidden, and boxers were only allowed to punch the head and torso. With these changes, a new style of boxing emerged. Since gloves provided protection for the hand, boxers were able to target the head with greater force and higher frequency. As a result, boxers learned to keep their hands by their chin to protect their head, and elbows by their ribs to protect their torso.
Management is no different. The rules you set and the metrics you measure will provide incentives that dictate people’s behavior. For example, Facebook famously advocated for the “move fast; break things” mantra. As a result, their product development process was optimized around making fast and iterative changes — when I was an intern, we were expected to push changes to production the first week on the job.
On the other hand, Google operates with a much longer time horizon, and any project idea that doesn’t have at least a few million potential users is deemed unworthy of pursuit. Consequently, it takes them much longer to build out a new service or product but it is typically thoroughly engineered and tested before being launched to the user. A friend of mine worked on a project for 9 months before it was launched.
These two examples represent a very common dynamic in tech companies: optimizing for speed or long-term quality. We often see this dichotomy in the tendencies of product managers v.s. engineers. Product managers are typically evaluated based on feature launches and user engagement, so they often advocate for new features that optimize user numbers immediately. However, if the technical foundation is shaky, engineers are tasked with spending more time answering on-call alerts and taking on ongoing maintenance. Consequently, engineers often advocate for key code refactors or building things in a more scalable manner at the expense of speed.
Both sides are right. On many occasions, time is of the essence for a feature to reach users. On other occasions, ignoring technical quality may eventually cause a halt where no features can be developed due to the mounting tech debt. It is ultimately up to leadership at all levels to determine the right guiding principles and framework for how to resolve these competing considerations within their respective groups.
Derivative Behaviors
Behaviors may also be multiple derivatives from the original rule. In other words, some actions people take are not obviously directly related to the rules that are set. Instead, they are patterns that emerged as natural extensions due to the rules in place.
For example, over time, modern boxers learned to take a wider and more bladed stance¹ to maximize their power in their cross (rear hand strike) while minimizing the target area of exposure (head and torso). On the other hand, in Muay Thai, where elbows, kicks, knees, and clinch (stand up grappling) are allowed, fighters take a more squared stance in order to check kicks and keep their hands at eye level to prevent elbows². Likewise, while boxers use clinch (stand-up grappling) as a stalling tactic to force referees to break up the fight, Muay Thai fighters use it as a setup for knees, elbows, and throws.
Similarly, a lot of banks set up a structure where the business team “funds” the tech department’s time by proposing software projects. If a tech department does not get any “funding” or projects to dedicate its manpower to, they eventually get laid off.
While this process was modeled after low-skilled labor in factories, it had unintentional consequences. Business teams felt entitled to throw a set of specs over the fence and expect tech departments to complete them within whatever arbitrary timeline that is set. The business team is evaluated on the efficacy of the project, but the tech team is evaluated by the time it takes to complete it.
This ends up creating an incentive structure where engineers do not have the “luxury” to preemptively think about the problem holistically. Instead, they optimize on doing the minimal work necessary to meet the specs. This often results in poorly built software, costing these banks, even more, to go back and reactively fix issues than if the tech team was empowered to proactively identify gaps in the spec. Frequently, it is nearly impossible to improve the software development processes from within, as evidenced by the many recent fintech acquisitions by large financial service corporations.
Implicit Rules
Not all rules are spelled out or formally presented to people. People often pick up implicit rules based on which behavior is rewarded, independent of explicit rules. Take Muay Thai as an example: in Thailand, punches score less than kicks, knees, and elbows, so many fighters opt to face their palms forward, which optimizes for parrying and blocking at the expense of slower and weaker punches. However, in the US, punches, and kicks are weighted equally, so many fighters have their fists mostly closed and palms facing their faces (like in boxing), which optimizes for fast and powerful punches. Although the rules don’t specify which “form” is correct, people gravitate towards what yields the best outcome in competitions.
I once worked with a project manager, “Chad”, who often berated others in public meetings whenever he didn’t understand a concept. The conversation might go like this:
Eng: “Due to the change in the data template from the client, we need another two weeks to complete the data ingestion.”
Chad: “Why do you need another two weeks? The data looked the same to me.”
Eng: “Well, one-third of the column names and data types changed, so our corresponding data model ontology has to change as well.
Chad: “That doesn’t make any sense to me. Tell me exactly why you have to delay yet again.”
This behavior often occurred in front of executives. However, despite constant feedback from multiple team members, no changes were ever made. Eventually, four people from various departments — this project was a cross-functional effort — requested to switch projects because they constantly feared that Chad might throw them under the bus in front of executives. Those who stayed started to copy his behavior, as it was deemed acceptable.
As a leader, you should be very careful when setting the rules. What are the types of behavior you are trying to encourage? Do your rules or actions incentivize said behavior? If you believe there are behaviors you’d like to change in your organization, I recommend starting with the following two categories: hiring and performance evaluation.
Hiring
The easiest way to promote desirable behaviors is to have many employees who already behave that way! As a leader, it is important to clarify which attributes the company looks for during the recruiting process and ensure that the interviews truly assess these attributes³. In my experience, laying out explicit evaluation guidelines for hard skills tends to be easier — what companies struggle with is typically identifying the right soft skills to select for and how to weigh them.
At Airbnb, we really value our 4 core values, so we added two additional interview rounds for all roles which are designed to assess these core values. In fact, we value them so much that we would reject a candidate for failing our core values interviews even if he passed the other rounds with flying colors. Many other companies have similar practices, such as Amazon’s 14 leadership principles interview.
But you also have to watch out for implicit rules! At a previous job, I once flagged to the hiring committee that an executive candidate lied on his resume, only for the CTO to respond, “Is that really a deal-breaker?” A few weeks later, we interviewed another executive candidate who the founders really liked because they shared similar backgrounds. We were specifically instructed to “go easy on him on the technical portions of the interview because he probably wouldn’t do well in them.” This showed everyone that honesty, merit, and fairness were not qualities that leadership valued in the recruiting process.
Performance Evaluation
In another previous job, the VP of Engineering once said in a presentation, “We didn’t include ‘initiative’ in our evaluation criteria, which is why our engineers are not taking initiative to come up with projects. We’ve now officially added it in so that our engineers can demonstrate more initiative.” I recall my then-manager scoffing at that notion: “Just because something is not in the evaluation criteria doesn’t mean things will not be done — we should trust all employees to make the right judgment and do what is best for the company.”
Although I initially agreed with my former manager, as I managed more over the years, I have come to a more nuanced view on this. While I still believe in empowering employees to make the right decisions, having official guidelines helps ensure that their decision-making process aligns with the company. For example, during the rapid growth phase at Airbnb, product teams often traded quality for speed, which was the right call at the time. However, as the company matured, leadership recognized the need for technical quality. Accordingly, we added technical quality as a new attribute to our engineers’ evaluation criteria. We did this to formally declare a shift in our mindset: that we value building high-quality software so much so that it is specifically encoded into the evaluation criteria.
Actions (or implicit rules) speak louder than words. The aforementioned project manager, Chad, who often berated others during key meetings, got promoted within a year, despite the CEO declaring that one of his — and by extension, the company’s — core values was “it costs nothing to be nice.” Soon thereafter, other employees started to copy his aggressive behavior in meetings, as they believed that it made them appear competent to the executives.
When I first joined Airbnb, I wanted people on my team to optimize for what the team needed from them most, as opposed to the success of their individual projects. Despite my repeated reminders, it required some heavy-handed intervention to ensure that traditionally “unglamorous” work, such as fixing bugs and optimizing on-call alerts, was done. However, after the first performance evaluation cycle, the team realized that I meant what I said. Now, everyone is bought in on jumping into “unglamorous” work for the welfare of the team.
Finally, performance evaluation has to be applied consistently. A friend of mine works at a company that recently rolled out a career leveling system. Although an important leveling criterion was demonstrating outcomes, one of the employees was leveled higher than others despite not having delivered on any of his projects. This caused all the managers to lose trust in the leveling system, which in turn made it harder for them to effectively champion the new changes to their respective teams. Lack of trust in the system means you will have to try that much harder to encourage the behaviors you want.
In summary, both explicit and implicit rules directly impact how people behave. As a leader, pay special attention to derivative behaviors and implicit rules, as they are the hardest to recognize. The pioneers who turned Taekwondo into an Olympic sport, which focused on point-scoring with kicks, most likely didn’t anticipate that Taekwondo would evolve into its current system where fighters keep their hands down and throw fast but light kicks to “touch” their opponent's chest pad. This, in turn, leaves their head open in a real fight, as well as weakening their kicks.
Likewise, in the workplace, do you publicly praise Adam’s leadership skills because he’s more talkative in meetings? What about the impact it may have on your team? Make sure you have a clear idea of what “rules” you want to establish for your group, and whether they are incentivizing the right behaviors. You don’t have to write all of them down like the main protagonist in NCIS, but it is worthwhile to check-in every once a while to ensure that you are promoting the right behaviors.
[1] A “bladed” stance is where the hips are facing close to 90 degrees from the opponent, whereas a “squared” stance is where the hips face the opponents directly.
[2] Elbows at close-range are faster than punches at mid-range, giving you less time to react for parrying or weaving.
[3] I go in more depth in a previous article: It’s not Filling a Position — it’s Building a Team: How to Assess Soft Skills Effectively & Consistently
For more musings on tech culture, organization building, and management, follow me on Twitter @kenk616.
