Relationships, feedback, and organizational cultures 💡
Monday Ideas — Edition #150
🤖 Augment Agent — your AI pair programmer that understands your codebase
This is brought to you by today’s sponsor, Augment!
Our friends at Augment, with whom we have written our recent piece on how teams are using AI, just released a brand new coding agent, specifically built for production-grade applications and professional software teams.
It is off to a great start already, with record scores on the SWE-bench. One of the things I like the most is that it comes with native integrations with the most popular tools, including Github, Linear, Notion, Jira, and Confluence 👇
The team also released their own set of best practices for using coding agents, coming from months of dogfooding.
You can learn more about the agent in the product announcement below 👇
1) 🏅 Your personal alliance
Over the past few years I went through two big changes in my social interactions:
💻 Switch to remote work → Not meeting people as part of everyday work.
✏️ Going full-time on Refactoring → Working alone 95% of the time.
Socially-wise, both these changes are for the worse, so, today, if I want to cultivate good personal and professional relationships, I need to be more intentional about it.
One of the best advices I got is to create a close circle of people you trust, about the various areas of your life. Those people can advise you and keep you accountable, and you can hopefully do the same for them.
You might think you already naturally have such a circle, but think again, because it likely doesn’t cover all the areas of your life. To make it more well-rounded, you probably need to put in some work.
Gibson Biddle calls this your Personal Board of Directors.
Emmanuel on the community calls them Alliances, which I also like a lot 👇
I created some alliances → I ask for a little help to “push” me time to time and try to commit myself to them (I really don’t want to fail them) to initiate a routine or something that make me more healthy or improve my environment.
And I return the favour when needed, or maybe it’s a mutual benefit because I push / inspire them to take care of themselves as well (and people love to help but it has to be bidirectional).
Good relationships are also one of the best ways to defuse stress and keep us healthy, and I wrote more about it in this article from the past 👇
2) 🪴 The three organizational cultures
Ron Westrum studied organizational cultures his whole life, and created a maturity model that organizes them in three types: pathological, bureaucratic, and generative. Let's see what each of them looks like, especially in tech companies 👇
👑 Pathological culture is power-oriented
In pathological cultures, the organization is oriented around power and fear. Information is treated as a personal resource to be hoarded for competitive advantage.
You can probably think of examples you have encountered in your career. Here are typical signs:
🤐 Information hoarding — documentation is sparse and knowledge is treated as job security.
👉 Blame culture — incidents lead to finger-pointing and people avoid taking risks.
🚫 Innovation discouraged — new ideas are crushed as they may threaten existing power structures.
The first step to leave pathological culture is to establish good rules and processes that prevent such extremes. This is also, however, how you end up with a bureaucratic culture 👇
📋 Bureaucratic culture is rule-oriented
Bureaucratic cultures are focused on rules, processes, and territories. While better than pathological ones, they still create significant friction. In engineering, this is when you see:
📝 Process over outcome — heavy change management, multiple approvals needed for anything to get done.
🏰 Silos — knowledge is documented but confined within team boundaries. Collaboration is hard and gate-keeping still exists: only at a team level instead of individual.
⚖️ Risk aversion — innovation is more or less seen as a potential source of problems, the team serves the process, as opposed to the process serving the team.
Good bureaucratic cultures gradually and eventually get leaner, and blossom into generative cultures 👇
🚀 Generative culture is performance-oriented
Generative cultures optimize for performance. They focus on the mission and remove obstacles that get in the way. Generative engineering teams consistently show these traits:
🤝 High cooperation — information flows freely across teams.
🔍 Learning mindset — failures are seen as opportunities to improve.
💡 Innovation enabled — new ideas are welcomed and implemented.
So here is a recap:
You can find our full article on generative cultures below 👇
3) 📣 Netflix’s culture of feedback
Last year we read No Rules Rules, the book about Netflix’s culture, in the community book club.
My favorite part is the focus on candor, which simply means giving great feedback all the time.
The book has four memorable pieces of advice about it:
4️⃣ The 4A Framework
Netflix developed a simple framework top help people give and receive feedback, based on four items:
When giving feedback:
Aim to assist — feedback must be given with positive intent, and be framed on how it can help the individual or the company.
Actionable — corrective feedback must focus on what the recipient can do differently, in a way that they can act upon it.
When receiving feedback:
Appreciate — the receiver needs to listen carefully and be open minded about feedback, without being defensive or angry. Consider feedback a gift.
Accept (or discard) — the recipient needs to listen and consider all the feedback, but they are not required to follow it. This decision is entirely up to the recipient.
👑 Give the boss feedback
People typically refrain from giving corrective feedback because they want to avoid conflict.
To avoid this, managers need to lead by example, encouraging frequent feedback from their reports. You can ask for feedback directly, during meetings, and put feedback as an agenda item to encourage people to prepare items in advance.
The more your reports feel safe to give you feedback, the safer they will feel to receive it from you.
⏳ Give feedback anytime
The best time to give feedback is immediately, as soon as the matter happens.
The sooner you give feedback the more context both you and the receiver retain, which makes it clearer and less prone to misunderstanding.
Hastings also stresses the importance of reinforcing feedback — a.k.a. positive feedback. Reinforcing good behavior is just as important as correcting bad one, which echoes our very own piece about feedback and the praise-to-criticism ratio.
📋 Formalizing feedback
The final piece of advice is about making feedback a formal process in your organization.
Netflix replaced regular performance reviews with 360° reviews, where each person receives feedback from all directions: their manager, their peers, their reports (hence the 360°).
These reviews are held annually, in written form, and are not directly tied to raises, promotions, or firings (but managers arguably get precious information from them).
You can find our full review + summary of No Rules Rules below 👇
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I wish you a great week! ☀️
Luca
Great set of topics to kick off the week!!
Just a thought on organizational cultures that as shown on your timeline it goes towards the performance-driven culture as the team and/or organization matures, e.g. team learns to align on common rules/processes/standards as a way to achieve higher performance.