Deciphering People

During my time working in the software development industry I have met a large group of interesting professionals with varying personalities. I have blogged before that some of these relationships have been challenges. However, I guess that is just part of life’s rich tapestry otherwise known as human-kind……We are only talking about 6 or 7 out of hundreds and hundreds……

Another occasion I have blogged about management and team building principles. In particular I once wrote a post that was referring to the team leader or manager being whiter than white when it came to their decisions and actions.

Viewing a team member or a manager through a different perspective is a technique I have come to appreciate in recent years. After all, there is always another view point out there. Whether you agree with the other persons view or not is largely irrelevant, at least in the first instance. The skill is if you are able to see it from their perspective, you are in better position to assist them seeing your viewpoint. Which in theory, should lead to a better solution for your business, client/customer or yourself.

Instigating thinking of perspective in your life and encouraging those around you to think in a similar vein must be good for you, your team or your business that you represent. Far too many people get caught up in politics. I must admit that from time to time I used to get dragged into these kinds of debates.

Developing these skills is difficult and my previous role here in NZ certainly gave me a lot of opportunity to witness first hand a whole myriad of people who failed to see the other perspective and continued on their personally driven paths. Not realising that they were leaving a trail of chaos and dissention in the rank and file.

Considering that this was pointed out to the business on numerous occasions and not to mention by countless numbers within the organisation, it was rather disappointing to witness the situation continue to escalate month after month.

Other approaches to dealing with problems is to not change the perspective and understand other views but to change he scope of the problem. i.e. Describe the problem to yourself in a different way. Therefore, rather than sitting there wondering “Why aren’t my ideas being taken on board?” Ask the question in a different way. “Do the people I am talking to care about the business?”. If the answer is no, then you probably have your answer.

Now we have covered the two simple strategies for breaking down a problem in the workplace, business or home. Yes I did say home. How many of you have kids? How many of you have had to intervene into a piece of sibling rivalry? Firstly, you carefully listen to the views of all the kids involved before choosing who and how to sanction/punish/ground.

Why, why, why then do we see professionals in the workplace not follow these simple steps of listening to all the view points before making a judgement call. I am guessing, it could be preconceived ideas based on ignorance, arrogance, education, experience, naivety……….. This list goes on and on.

Analysing this a little further I feel there is a small element of fear for some. A large degree of politics and sheer greed. Not necessarily monetary greed. Power hungry greed, people who will often step on anyone they feel obstructs them from their personal mission without considering the merits or sentiment of the view holder. Very rarely do these individualistic and selfish approaches to managing a team or business align with the company strategy.

Yet time and time again this cancer of the modern workplace appears to raise it ugly head above the clouds and rain or should I say reign down a culture more aligned to the 15th century rather than the 21st. Thankfully I live in the 21st century and practice personal policies and ethics that try to understand before I react.

If you find yourself in this situation, what are your options? I guess this depends on the area of conflict, whether you feel that anything will change, your personal circumstances etc. This list is longer that the Chinese phone book in Howick.

Sedentary work, or office work as my physio described it to me the other week suffers this kind of politics more than most other areas. If there is a disagreement at a car parts yard or a cement layers business the actions are generally quite direct and quick. In the office world we appear to provide an environment where a punch up and a skinful or beer is not considered conducive to a harmonious working environment. And quite rightly so.

As a result of this mature approach we are actually creating a breeding ground for single minded, single problem definition and/or single perception people. It is like the air cooled/heated offices act as a giant Petri dish allowing this bacteria to blossom.

Considering the above, I have always wondered if this kind of person has a hidden agenda or some sort of underlying code of conduct that requires decrypting, a bit like the Da Vinci code I guess. Are they a freak wave in the corporate world? I have met very few people like this but the one that stands shall remain nameless in the blog at this stage.

Until such a time that I am ready to publish more on the subject I guess we have to make do with one final thought.

Not until you have been a victim do you really understand the ramifications of these actions. However, if you are prepared to stand up and challenge areas that you feel passionate about you’ll root out these personality types before too long. Once that objective is achieved, if you can’t win the argument, move on and find somewhere where you can influence and enjoy your work. I have met far too many people over the years who have spent years and years (quite literally) of their lives battling against these machines. Sometime you just need to know when to move on. I did.

Thanks for reading.
Lee.

Where's the dishcloth?

Bugs!!!! Love them or loathe them, realistic developers understand that bugs are part of our everyday life. We have technical bugs, environment bugs, business logic bugs, integration bugs, somebody elses bugs and god forbid, stomach bugs.

Now apart from the stomach bugs. Who is responsible for clearing up this mess?

There are numerous approaches depending on the product(s) you have developed, your organisational structure and your focus on bugs in general. I prefer the ‘zero tolerance’ approach to bugs, however, others are quiet happy to have a level of bugs in their code and apply risk and cost ROI calcualtions to determine whether the bug is recitfied, and if so, when. I feel there is a whole post on that subject alone and I’ll save that for a slow news day.

Moving back to the tactics around who should be responsible for clearing up this shoddy code. If you work as part of a small team of developers or lone wolf it is likely you have little choice other than to get the developer who wrote the code to fix it up (look in the mirror). You are unlikely to have development support teams who act as dedicated bug fixers or access to a stream of developers on the graduate recruitment programme that fix up the bugs as part of their development induction process. The later two are certainly perfectly valid approaches although a little old fashioned in my view, after all, who trains up new recruits in the process of only showing you how not to write good code.

Personally, I believe that the developer who created the code should be the developer who fixes the bug. Obviously this won’t happen if they have left or are away on annual leave or a significant amount of time has passed, but in general it would be good practice to follow this process through. There are many fine reasons for either approach and no doubt I will conclude with some views around this a wee bit later.

For now, I prefer to use the anology of those everlasting worksurface ‘tea rings’ when referring to bug clearing methodologies.

“Tea Rings!!!”.

Yes you heard me correctly. Consider the communial kitchen in your office. You probably visit this vicinity between 4 and 10 times per day to make that cup of espresso stimulus or the relaxing afternoon chai tea.

The process is quite simple. You will carefully choose the serving vessel and may even warm it through first. You will likely compliment your brew with milk or cream and sweeten to taste, unless of course you actually listen to the advice of your dental hygienist and drink water only. Whilst queueing patiently for the kettle to boil like the quintessential englishman you will definitely have pondered your preferred order for mixing these ingredients. Water or milk first probably being the most important choice and certainly the one that has polarised the tea drinking world for generations.

More often than not this process is repeated throughout the day and with the exception of having to raid the dishwasher for a preloved teaspoon it generally goes without a hitch time after time after time. Software development generally pans out this way too. Once a developer becomes productive and uses your best practices they will be able to make a good brew (code) with no mishaps (bugs).

After all the effort analysing, prototyping, designing, creating and ensuring adherrence to your quality control processes you are finally ready to move your code (brew) to production or systems testing. From time to time though there is that unsightly spilage around the base of the cup as you pick it up. These are those tea rings that are etched on every spare post-it note pad on your desk or the coat the surface of that old CDR you are using as your cup coaster, the same coaster that once contained the backups of your companies servers.

So who is the best person to clear up this mess. As the creator it should be a small matter of picking up the nearest dishcloth and wiping the worksurface clean. But wait. When you look at the mess you notice that there are other tea rings there, some sugar mounds and a spattering of breadcrumbs from that cheese toasty you could smell from the other side of the office earlier. At this stage do you clean this lot up as well.

You may elect to wipe clean your own mess only, expell a little more elbow grease and time and clean all of it or choose to ignore the tea ring as in the whole scheme of things, it is hardly noticable in amongst the remainder of the mess. For me there is only one satisfactory approach and that is to deal with the issue as soon as it arrives.

It only takes seconds to analyse the problem and take effective corrective action. If you choose to mop up all the mess then you must be aware of the dependencies of fixing up all the issues. What appears quite simple may take longer and if the mess is particularly ingrained you could actually damage the efforts of others.

Doing nothing though really isn’t an option either as this creates an environment that bugs are satisfactory. Housekeeping is just as important in the office kitchen as it is with keeping your code and products bug free. If you do favour seperate teams or graduate programmes for doing the teams dirty work, imagine for one moment how they feel knowing that they are merely cleaning up other peoples mess.

Lastly, how are your developers ever going to get better and improve your product if there are no consequences for producing shoddy code in the first instance.

Thanks for reading.
Lee.

Always wipe your bum!

“What comes around goes around” is a phrase commonly used when preaching to others about ethical behaviour or by those that believe that there is a levelling force out there that cares enough to ensure that things work out evenly in the end. Other phrases like “You are what you eat”, “You will reap what you sow” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” are also symbolic of phrases embracing karma.

I am a keen believer that as a role model (Manager/Leader) in team management you need to practice what you preach. During the team management phases of my career, my style has generally been a hands-on approach. This enables me to utilise my technical and leadership qualities on a daily basis from within the bosom of the team. I have never sought my own luxury office or other status symbol as an indication of my position. My positioning amongst the team would mean I am always available to talk through ideas or issues. I most certainly will be there to encourage, assist and develop the teams skills. If I ever needed privacy I could always track down a meeting room, shelter in the local café or work from home for an afternoon.

The purpose of this article is not to discuss the merits of positioning yourself as a manager or a leader within your development team, or is it to debate the benefits of the hands-on versus hands-off management and leadership philosophies. Each of these items are environment specific and so in depth that they are best served with full discussion in a future article.

I want to discuss the aspects of being a role model for your team and how your behaviour affects others around you.

I have worked with many different people over the years all with interesting quirks and features and every single one of them has in some way or another left their mark on me, not physically but by influencing my views as a ‘software development professional’ and helping me cast my expectations of the working community in general.

Some I speak of as visionaries and ahead of the curve, I value many others as trusted colleagues whose integrity has shaped my beliefs of honesty and transparency, there are the characters who make you laugh/cry or cringe, even before they speak. Then there are the odd four or five that if I were to write down my true opinion would land me in court fighting a defamation hearing, the blog would be censored as the article degenerates with unprintable language that even Kevin ‘Bloody’ Wilson would find objectionable.

Many managers fail to understand that you are judged on more than just your innovations or effectiveness, and you can guarantee more than death and taxes, your staff and colleagues will eloquently appraise you behind your back, if you are lucky to your face also. Managing upwards or sideways is only half the issue and this is where your political skills shine if you are that way inclined. Having a team that is 100% focused behind you is the harder half of the equation to implement successfully, and it is this half that is often overlooked by a manager on the path of change glory.

To put this into context I once read a couple of short quotes that I believe summarises the management challenge quite succinctly.

“Bulls**it can get you to the top of the corporate ladder, but it’s not good enough to keep you there”.

“When a monkey at the top of the tree looks down they see smiling faces. When you are below and look up, you only see a**eholes.”

As a manager you will be remembered for what you do wrong or badly as much as you do good. Actually, a sack full of positive memories can often be overshadowed by one or two bad decisions whether by misjudgement or deliberately/deviously thought out. The fact that this perception is fair or not is open for debate.

On a personal level I owe as much to the four or five people I’d rather not mention (All ex colleagues) as I do to those that have provided the motivation and broadened my thinking.

Quite often I have seen people behave in a manner that inspires me to make that mental note of “I wouldn’t do it that way” or “When I am in that position I wouldn’t do that”.

• Ever had a manager who bullies staff or chastises staff in front of others?
• Ever had a manager that values process and technology over the people aspects of running a team?
• Ever had a manager who seeks opinion but never listens and ignores all input?
• Ever had a manager who promises a review and then waited months or years for it to materialise?
• Ever had a manager breeze though a company with change havoc only to move on without seeing the job through.

Many of these are management lessons on page one of the manual and combine communication and basic human needs. Anyone who has ever taken the time to read material related to Maslow's triangle will understand my point here. I have seen all of these incidents above over the years with varying results, and once again the negative memories override any goodwill previously earned.

Last week I witnessed another of those moments (albeit small) when a direct line manager at my firm failed to stand up and be counted during a leaving speech of a long serving colleague who now reported to them. I was aware of a few differences in opinion between the two people that led to the resignation in the first place, but I felt that this could have been a time of reconciliation.

So whilst most were expecting the usual speech from the line manager I was shocked to see the manager hiding in the wings, quite literally, and instead it was left for other managers to make the ‘Sorry to see you leave speech’. The employee did their speech afterwards and kept it civil and in my view edged the overall contest on points.

I will try and look for the positives out of all this even though I was disappointed enough to blog this today. I am not saying that as a manager or leader you have to be whiter than white. There are occasions when you have to make decisions people won't like. In other situations in sports management I might suggest that pleasantries are not high on the agenda. But I am saying that it is important to consider every factor of your role and day. It is often the little things that undo a manager.

So, another mark has been etched into my mind and I have learnt that it is more important to front up rather than avoid those awkward moments. After all, the negatives may build up and may invoke a re-greasing of the corporate ladder.

So, if you believe in karma please remember, you never know who is sitting on the rung just above or below you or whether they harbour plans to move ahead, so always wipe your bum.

Thanks for reading.
Lee.