When I was little, sometimes I’d get bored and look through my Dad’s bookshelf. There were a number of books of Chinese philosophy, which I read while only half-absorbing. The work of Han Feizi, however, stuck with me more than most.

Han Feizi was a philosopher of statecraft, in the Chinese legalist tradition. Unlike the Confucians, he was not interested in a idealized philosophy of “harmonious” governance. He expounded a theory of pragmatic statecraft:

In his book, Han Fei exihibits a kind of “summa legista” (Ralf Moritz, Die Philosophie im alten China), in which he assembles the main arguments of his legalist precursors: Written law and regulations (fa 法), the art of ruling by use of competent advisors (shu 術), and the undisputed authority of the ruler (shi 勢) are the three instruments of a strong state.

http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/Diverse/hanfeizi.html

I was recently reminded of 法, 術 and 勢 when I was contemplating why certain initiatives proceeded at work, while others failed to gain traction.  In particularly, I thought about the word shi 勢, which in Chinese means more than just authority. It’s often used to refer to the momentum of a situation.

Han Feizi lived in the spring-and-autumn warring period. I live in what is probably the second dotcom boom. What does Han Feizi’s advice to his feudal lords have to do with an employee at a startup?

I will argue that to lead a team effectively on a project, one must have agreed upon practices (fa 法), employ the team according to their talents (shu 術) and possess the mandate for embarking on the project.

In particular, my frustrations recently have to do with trying to move projects forward without the required mandate. What do I mean by mandate here? In my mind, mandate has two components – authority, and consensus.

Authority without Consensus

Authority alone doesn’t get you very far either. Another recent project saw the exec team push for getting a feature out the door quickly. In my mind, too quickly.I was very reluctant to move forward with it, because I felt it needed more testing. The leadership team was very understanding, but believed that we should “ship, then iterate.” It was a philosophy that I agreed with.

And yet, I noticed myself dragging my feet on necessary changes, and raising my concerns again and again. Even though in my mind I was convinced, my heart wasn’t in it. The feature eventually got shipped, but it took a lot longer than merely the work involved would suggest. If you want to get the best out of your people, having authority simply isn’t enough.

Consensus without Authority

So, what about consensus? There was another recent project, one which I pushed for, where everyone who heard about the project idea thought it’s a good idea, even the CTO and the product manager. The problem was, it’s just big enough to be beyond one person’s tinkering time, and touch enough pieces of the product that it requires cross team collaboration.

So it will require schedule, resourcing, and putting it on the roadmap, which I could not do. The idea lingered, and members of the team were disappointed. “I wish we could do that!” “We could!” “But it’ll take a couple days.” So the idea stayed on the back burner. For months.

Authority + Consensus = Mandate

That is, until we had a team hackathon. Suddenly, I had the authority to decide what we wanted to work on, as long as I could convince others. A small (2.5 person) team of us built a prototype of the idea in two days, and the business team have been using it ever since.

What made it possible? It was the combination of top down delegation of authority, and the bottom up pooling of consensus. The difficulty there was never technical, it was organizational, and it made me appreciate the necessity of mandate. Consensus isn’t enough, nor is authority.

So what?

Mandate is important, because many of the thing we strive to do can only be done as a team. Learning to work effectively in a team environment therefore involves learning to gain mandate.

Which brings me back to Han Feizi. The character 勢 the he uses evokes the idea of terrain in warfare.  In order to be effective, the statesmen must read the terrain well and understand how to leverage it. In an organization, the terrain consists of relationships, norms and hierarchy, through which power and information flows. It’s not enough to just “do good work” - one must understand how the work is perceived, and how the work affects the people and the organization.

I guess what I am learning is “just the work” isn’t enough. It’s time to learn to read organizations.