Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: personal bias

  • Why I Prefer to Hire Women

    I have a news for you: IT industry is dominated by men.

    – Pawel, why don’t you tell us something we don’t know?

    There should be more women in the industry.

    Which part of “something we don’t know” you haven’t understood?

    Fine, you get the message. I just wonder why you don’t hire more women.

    I confess in my current team there is round number of women. Zero. I worked with a few teams like this. And every time one of my goals was to bring a few women to the team. Why? There are a few reasons. I will generalize here and I’m going to do it on purpose. After an hour or so of interview you can’t really say what kind of personality you deal with, so you have to go with your biases and prejudices anyway.

    • Women bring different soft skills to team talent pool. They’re usually more open and emotional than men. Do a simple test and recall your last retrospective or check the record from it. Can you see how different arguments were pointed by women than by men?
    • Women bring more culture. Pure-men groups tend to change into something like herd of hogs. Bringing a woman on board magically improves everyone’s manners and language. I mean hogs are nice but I wouldn’t like to work with them.
    • Women are more responsible. This may be one of my prejudices but I find women more responsible than men. I can hardly recall any woman who came to work having heavy hangover while I have no problems to name a long list on men who did.
    • Women are more accountable. It is connected with the previous point. Women tend to treat their duties very seriously. Even when it is something they didn’t personally commit to but rather something their boss expects from them their commitment is usually stronger. And I think here about these unrealistic expectations many poor managers set against their teams too.
    • After all, there aren’t many women in the industry so don’t make it even worse.

    Having said that, I’m not going to hire woman over man just because of sex. If there’s a significant difference between two candidates I will always choose a better one, however I understand “better” at the time. But at the same time every woman entering an interview with me has a small plus for free at the beginning. I guess I could put it as one of recruitment tips but changing your sex isn’t a great tip, is it?

    On the other hand I’ve seen enough prejudices working against women to throw my two cents. And I have a question for you: having two similar candidates which one would you choose?

  • Managers Are Clueless

    So you’re a manager. You even think you’re pretty damn good manager. Fine for me. Do you remember Pointy-Haired Boss? Yes, that clueless manager from Dilbert cartoon. You have this guy sitting in your head. So do I, by the way.

    Is that supposed to be insult? Well, not exactly. I really think every manager has this clueless version of himself in the back of his head which is used more often than we’d like to admit. You still don’t believe me. Do a simple exercise. Think about your team. Arrange members from the best to the worst. Easy?

    It wasn’t supposed to be easy. The trick is how you decided that one ‘average’ person is after all better than another ‘average’ person. Some guessing I guess. Why exactly you have chosen the best one? And what a couple of worst people have done to earn their place? Is it possible that you justify their position with some past event (success or failure) which was spectacular enough they earn the place in your mind? Is it possible you didn’t take into consideration recent history because you already are strongly biased?

    And now the best part, think how many things you haven’t taken into consideration. You haven’t thought about tons of important things and you were still able to say who is better and who is worse from others. And no, I don’t believe none of them are important. Isn’t that clueless?

    A Confession

    I worked with bunches of underpaid and overpaid folks. I saw work which was underrated or overrated just because of person who authored it or the person who judged or both. Many of decisions standing behind these situations were mine. I’m not proud of it.

    What I can say is I didn’t do it on purpose. I just lacked knowledge. Sometimes I wasn’t even conscious my knowledge was insufficient to make a right call. Sometimes I should try harder or think more. I was, and I am, a clueless manager. I try to fight it but that’s an uphill battle. I have my prejudices and preferences and I don’t claim I’m able to fully ignore them.

    The Bad News

    I’m not the only one. I’m tempted to say that every manager is so because the only ones who would be different must be heartless robots which aren’t great candidates for managers anyway.

    This means you as a manager, and your manager too and her manager and so on, are clueless to some point. Usually more than you’d like to admit. This mean there’s a chance your judgments aren’t fair or your work may be misjudged. And finally this means your subordinates can trick you along with your cluelessness to make you think better about them.

    Managers were, are and will be clueless. We may fight with it but we’re likely to fail. Most of us don’t even try anyway.