The conversations I regularly have with clients, other executives, and my mentors are usually around “what’s your org’s vision?” or “what do you want your org to do”. Foci has gone through a tremendous period of growth and change over the last 12 months and the answers to those questions seem to be ever changing. This has led me and the rest of the management team to have some very interesting discussions around how we define Foci and our purpose.
The “what” and the “how” doesn’t matter
Regardless of how well thought out your vision or strategy is, the reality is that $%*@ happens. Your clients can change their mind, you may lose some key contracts, the market will evolve and change, competitors will emerge, or you may not be able to get that unicorn architect/developer to run that world-changing product you want to build. And every time you have to make a pivot to adjust to those changes, it can be a very painful experience, both for you and your team.
The identity of an organization is very important, especially if you have a strong team culture like us. Team members imprint themselves onto that identity and subconsciously use it as a reference point for their everyday work. We started life as an Oracle Fusion Middleware company, then became an Architecture and Integration company, and now we’re doing more Cloud-Native custom dev with a broader range of system integration and program management services. Each of those shifts in focus created quite a bit of disruption in the team. People asked “Wait what? I thought we were doing the other thing? What does that mean to our existing projects? Will we stop doing the other thing altogether?” These were all fair questions, but after working through it all, we noticed that none of it actually impacted our team culture or our core behaviours.
What we took away from this were 2 things:
- What you did as a firm or how you did it had very little alignment to your culture.
- Our people are very emotionally connected to Foci’s identity and feel any change in that identity keenly.
It’s all about the “why”
This naturally led us to look at why our folks joined Foci and what made them excited about coming into work each day. Turns out no one was really driven by the prospect of writing thousands of lines of C# code, installing and configuring Oracle SOA Suite, or creating a stakeholder engagement plan. Sure, those things interested people, but they weren’t really core motivators.
We ended up landing on 2 aspects of motivation that were the most important:
- What brings you the most satisfaction (e.g., solving a problem, having an impact, getting recognition, seeing something you’ve built be used)
- What is your metric of value (e.g., complexity of the problem, number of people impacted, transaction volume, financial savings)
Problems are our rocket fuel
We always joked about having a generic tagline like “we solve problems” (it’s on our website) because we were constantly evolving the business. Appropriately that turned out to be the answer. What we realized is that our entire team and our hiring processes all coalesced around the core desire to solve complex and interesting problems. We weren’t motivated by how many people were using an app that we had developed or whether the systems we helped our clients build were processing 100 or 1,000,000 transactions a day.
The thing that gave us all a real sense of accomplishment and gave us that little shot of dopamine we humans naturally crave was when we were able to solve a problem for our client. The bigger the complexity greater the satisfaction. As long as we had a healthy supply of complex and interesting problems to feed our team, we could go anywhere.
The destination and the things you do to get there will always change over time. The things that motivate and drive you to move forward are more constant and core to your being. Defining your organization based on the goal you want to achieve or the tasks that you do makes every pivot feel like an identity crisis. Putting in the time to identify the rocket fuel that constantly propels your team forward creates a solid corporate identity to anchor against regardless of the path your organization decides to take. Interesting problems are our rocket fuel. As long as we as a management team ensure that our team has a steady flow of interesting problems to solve, we can have every confidence in Foci’s ability to achieve any goal that we set for ourselves. Until we change our mind, of course.