Delightful Alignment

8th Apr 2025

It's a beautiful day, and the weather's good too.

Whenever I work with someone, I unconsciously categorise them into one of two groups: those who “get it” and those who “don’t get it”.

I want to dig deeper into this. What is “it”? Is it something we’re born with, or can it be learned?

To give me something to work with, here are some examples I’ve seen for the “doesn’t get it” camp:

  • Losing a high performer over minor pay disputes
  • Micromanaging a team and noticeably dropping performance
  • Overpromising immediately after failing to meet a previous deadline
  • Reducing toilet paper stocked in bathrooms to “see if people would use less”

And for those who “get it”:

  • Enabling employee flexibility
  • Trusting experts to make the calls on their subject matter
  • Respecting the dangers of complexity
  • Researching how others have solved a problem before inventing something new

The pattern appears to be whether time is spent on surface-level solutions that give the appearance of solving problems, without actually making things better.

What’s interesting is how painfully obvious it is once you’ve lived that experience and felt how it impacts you. If you’ve been micromanaged, disrespected, or ignored, then you lose a lot of motivation and respect for the company. It nudges the dial away from I want this company to succeed to this is just a paycheck.

The opposite is true as well. I’ve been lucky enough to feel what it’s like when processes are working. It’s a feeling I would call delightful alignment, where two competing concerns align in such a way that both are met, and everyone wins. It’s such a big and obvious benefit that I feel like bashing my head against a wall when people are opposed to it.

As an example that I hope everyone already knows: happy employees create better outcomes.

  • When employees feel valued and supported, they are more engaged and productive.
  • A culture of trust and respect fosters innovation and collaboration.
  • Retaining talent is far more cost-effective than constantly hiring and training replacements.

For a more software engineering-oriented case: enable engineers to be lazy.

  • I don’t want to spend my weekend fixing a bug; I’d prefer to prevent it from happening.
  • I don’t want to manually test for regressions; I’d prefer to write reliable automated tests.
  • I don’t want to manually deploy releases; I’d prefer to automate it with CI/CD.
  • I don’t want to maintain and enhance complex code; I’d prefer to write it simply, leveraging existing patterns.

I now think that those who “get it” are those who are empathetic, open-minded enough to understand what different people need to succeed, and who don’t get caught up in surface-level solutions.

I’m still not sure whether it’s obtained through nature or nurture, but it’s been helpful to me to identify it.