In the german military forces, there is a new idea coming into effect: Give your commanders the ability to spend free expenses (linked article is in german language). Like, if your battailon lacks sunglasses, you don’t have to wait for bureaucracy to procure them for you (and it probably takes longer than the sun is your immediate problem), you can go out and just buy them.
This is not a new idea, and not a bad one. It implements a simple principle: Resources follow responsibilities. If you have goals to reach, decisions to make and people to manage, you need proper resources. And by resources, I don’t only mean money. Some leniency in procedures, maneuvering space (both real and figuratively) and time are resources that can’t be bought with money, but are essential sometimes.
At our company, we installed this principle over a decade ago. The “creativity budget” is a budget of free expenses for each employee to improve their particular working situation. This might mean a new computer mouse, a conference visit or a specific software. You, the employee, are at the frontline of your work and probably knows best what’s needed. Our creativity budget is the means to obtain it, no questions asked.
And this shows the underlying core principle: Responsibilities follow trust. If I trust you to reach the goals, to make the right decisions and to manage your team, it would be inconsequential to not give you the proper responsibilities. And, transitively, to provide you with adequate resources. As it seems, responsibilities are the middle man between trust and resources.
At our company, you don’t need to invest your free expenses for basic work attire. We are software engineers, so “work attire” means a high-class computer (with several monitors, currently our default is three), a powerful notebook, a decent smartphone and all the non-technical stuff that will determine your long-term work output, like a fitting desk and your personal, comfortable work chair.
For me, it was always consequential that great results can only come from the combination of a great developer and great equipment. I cannot understand how it is expected from developers to produce top-notch software on mediocre or even subpar computers and tools. In my opinion, these things strongly relate with each other. Give your developers good equipment and good results will follow. Putting it in a simplistic formula: the ability of the developer multiplied with the power of the equipment makes the quality of the software result.
So, if I trust your ability as a developer, provide you with premium equipment, give you room to maneuver and resources to cover your individual requirements, there should be nothing in the way to hold you back. And that places another responsibility onto your shoulder: You are responsible for your work results. And you deserve all the praise for the better ones. Because without you, the able developer, all the prerequisites listed above would still yield to nothing.
Schneide Blog 