Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

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

Tag: respect

  • Respect (and How It Makes or Breaks Culture)

    Respect (and How It Makes or Breaks Culture)

    It seems my Milk Kanban article has made a stir. I kinda expected some backlash along the “it’s not really Kanban” lines. However, when the post hit Hacker News, I got a swath of remarks attacking it from a different angle.

    The problem is, as the comments go, that someone’s job is outsourced to random colleagues. In this case, it would be Kasia (our office manager) outsourcing her job (ensuring that the office is supplied with milk) to macchiato drinkers who can’t be bothered because they have more important stuff to do.

    Oh boy, where do I start?

    Get Out of Your Cave

    It took me quite a while to grasp that some commenters perceived managing the milk supply as a priority job for an office manager.

    Yes, I know our context so much better; we’re a small company, and everyone wears multiple hats. But even in big organizations, I’d be shocked if such a matter was anyone’s top priority.

    For Kasia, it’s like the 100th thing on the list of stuff she takes care of.

    But again, even if we consider a generic example, it would be so easy to figure out how many things, big and small, an office manager takes care of. Then, there’s probably twice as much of stuff that’s not visible on the surface.

    I mean, any developer, whose primary task is working with code that’s inherently invisible, should grok that concept.

    Effectiveness versus Efficiency

    However, then things only get more interesting. Even when people considered doing something to help, they’d instantly play the efficiency card.

    “I can’t be bothered to let someone know that we’re running out of milk because I’m doing this important work, and me being a 10x developer requires absolute focus.”

    Weird that they have time for a coffee break then, but what would I know?

    But yes, having someone do 30 seconds of work, which may save someone else 10 minutes, is a sensible tradeoff. Even if the latter is paid less. Even if that half a minute wouldn’t be efficient.

    That’s the most basic effectiveness versus efficiency consideration. I can be efficient as hell, but unless we, as the whole team, can reliably deliver value, it doesn’t matter.

    It’s the equivalent of a developer whose coding pace would be fabulous, except there would be no one to code review or test their features. They may feel like they were being productive. The team, however, would be so.

    In fact, the amount of work in progress they’d introduce would make the team less efficient. It would introduce more multitasking, more rework, and more context loss.

    One has to wonder whether people showing such a lack of understanding of how the whole organization delivers value should really be valued as highly.

    A narrow focus on efficiency, especially in an isolated context, is typically detrimental to the effectiveness of the whole process.

    Respect

    However, if anything in that discussion makes me sad, it’s the lack of respect.

    “If checking the milk reserves once a day is too much of a pain for a person hired as an office manager, the person should self-reflect on his/her choice to take the job.”

    And that comes from developers, a group that is notoriously crappy at filling time tracking data, even when companies rely on that data to bill clients.

    However, my beef here is with a lack of respect for another job. Yes, this job is not paid as well. But I’m sure as hell that as much as an average office manager would fail miserably if they were to do software engineering, an average developer wouldn’t fare better in an office manager’s shoes.

    In our case, just as an example, we’re yet to have a single foreigner who wouldn’t be deeply grateful to Kasia for help with all the formal stuff related to employment papers, work permits, etc.

    In fact, it would be easier for us to lose a couple of our best engineers than to lose Kasia.

    The point is, though, that it doesn’t even matter whether we really understand someone else’s job. It matters whether we respect it as a part of the bigger whole.

    If not, it’s easy to boil it down to “I want my goddamn coffee to have milk, and someone better make sure I have it.” It’s easy to subordinate everyone else’s work only to whatever I might need of them. Then, of course, people won’t be willing to spend half a minute helping anyone with anything. Even if that someone makes sure that the milk is in the cupboard.

    I understand that in many companies, this is the norm. People are not respected, and, in turn, they don’t respect others. They won’t be willing to help with anything that’s not explicitly their assignment.

    It’s not a Milk Kanban problem. It’s a (lack of) respect problem.

    Now, establishing respect as a part of organizational culture is so much harder than making the milk supply work effectively.

    Wrap Up

    I understand the specific context of these comments. The software industry made us, in a significant part, spoiled kids. It’s still easy to sustain a lucrative career by focusing only on one’s technical skills, individual tasks, and not much more.

    I’m not necessarily surprised by how the comments disregarded the work of others, the broader context, and common goals. The sentiments, though, are not unique to software developers. I see a lot of similar attitudes in management.

    And the ways of dealing with the issue will be similar. Understand others’ roles and jobs. Understand the difference between group effectiveness and individual efficiency. Most importantly, respect others and their contributions.

    Milk Kanban or not, it’s easy to get enough milk in a cupboard. Building a culture of respect, on the other hand, is damn hard.

    And it starts with the very people who have disproportional leverage on the organization. Yes, the same folks who tend to earn more and fill the most prestigious roles.

  • Why Collective Intelligence Beats Individual Intelligence

    As long-term readers likely know I am a big fan of the idea of collective intelligence and big proponent of optimizing teams toward high collective intelligence.

    First, what is collective intelligence? The easiest way of explaining that is through the comparison to individual intelligence (IQ). While IQ tests differ in type the pattern is similar: we ask an individual to solve a set of complex problems; the better they perform the higher their IQ is.

    By the same token, we can measure intelligence of teams through measuring how well a group solves a series of complex problems.

    There are a few very interesting findings in the original research on collective intelligence. It all starts with an observation that collective intelligence beats the crap out of individual intelligence. In highly collectively intelligent teams’ solutions provided by a group were systematically significantly better than solutions offered by any individual, including the smartest person in the room. However, even in teams with low collective intelligence the group solutions were on par with the best option provided by an individual.

    It totally makes sense when we think of it. No matter how smart the solution provided by an individual is it most likely can be improved through clues and suggestions provided by others. Either directly or indirectly. And it doesn’t matter whether the others are even smarter. The thing that matters is that they think differently.

    This theme is portrayed well in some pop-cultural productions. In Sherlock series the protagonist surprisingly frequently refers to his sidekick—John Watson—as not too clever or even dumb. On even more occasions Sherlock stresses that he needs Dr. Watson to inspire his superior mind. It’s not that Watson is smarter than Holmes. It’s that together they are smarter than Holmes alone, even given his prodigious mind.

    The same pattern has been exploited in House M.D. series, where the team’s effort was consistently beating individual effort. It was so even if the final solution was facilitated mostly through the brilliance of the main character.

    As a matter of fact, collective intelligence in play is one of those things that you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. Like the other day, when I was sharing the idea of a workshop with one of my colleagues and I mentioned one feature I’d love to add to the app I was going to use during the workshop. The problem was that we explored an idea to add that feature before and, because of some old architectural decisions, adding the feature was no easy feat. Thus, we gave up. My colleague listened to my complaints and asked why we wouldn’t just add a simple and dirty hack just for the sake of the workshop. I was so immersed with the whole context of how hard it was to do it properly that the idea wouldn’t even cross my mind, no matter how obvious it might sound in retrospect.

    And it wasn’t even a context of a persistent team; merely an ad-hoc discussion in a random group. Think, how much more we contribute in a more permanent setup—in a team which shares the same context on a daily basis.

    The interesting follow-up to the observation that collective intelligence is supreme is that collective intelligence doesn’t depend on individual intelligence. As a matter of fact, there’s no correlation between the two. In other words, hiring all the smartasses doesn’t mean they’d constitute a team of high collective intelligence.

    It is likely better to support a brilliant mind with folks who aren’t nearly as eloquent but provide another, diverse, point of view that to get more of the brilliance. What’s more a team built out of people of average intelligence can be better off than a bunch of smart folks gathered together.

    It is because collective intelligence—the brilliance of a group—isn’t fueled by smarts but by collaboration. Two critical factors for high collective intelligence is social perceptiveness and evenness of communication. The former is awareness of others, empathy, and unselfish willingness to act for the good of others. The latter is creating a space for everyone to speak up and facilitating the discussions so that all are involved roughly equally. Neither of these attributes directly taps into individual intelligence.

    That’s, by the way, where pop-cultural references fall short. Neither Holmes nor House care about the collaborative aspect of work of their teams and both make a virtue out their utter lack of empathy. It means that their teams are of low collective intelligence. I can’t help but thinking how much they could have achieved had they been optimized more toward collective intelligence.

    Most of our industry fall in the very same trap when hiring. Tremendous part of our recruitment processes is optimized toward validating individual skills following a subconscious belief that this is what’s going to make teams successful.

    As Dan Kahneman observes in his classic Thinking Fast and Slow, if our brain can’t easily answer to a difficult question it subconsciously substitutes the question with a similar one which is easy to and treats the answer to the latter as if it was the answer to the former. In this context we may be substituting a difficult question about how a candidate would perform in a team with much simpler one about how they would perform individually. The problem is that the assessment of a candidate may be very different depending on which question we answered.

    If we truly want to optimize our teams for good collaboration we need to focus on the aspects that drive collective intelligence. We need to focus on character traits that are not that easy to observe, and yet they prove to be critical for teams’ long-term success, such as perceptiveness, awareness, empathy, compassion and respect. Ironically, such a team will outsmart one built around smarts and wits.

  • Can One Be Too Respectful?

    Some time ago, during our weekly Lean Coffee at Lunar Logic, which is the only all hands meeting at the company, I made a disrespectful comment. It was a topic which I have a strong opinion about. A particular example that was brought to support one argument triggered a visceral reaction on my side. I said more, and more emotionally, than I should have.

    A day after I asked people for feedback to understand better what had happened and how I could avoid crossing the line in future. The recurring theme was that the way I expressed myself, both the words and the form of my remark, was disrespectful to some.

    That triggered another discussion some time later, and in a smaller group. It was about the meaning of being respectful and its implication of our behaviors in all sorts of situations.

    We started with an assumption that being respectful means acting in a way that doesn’t hurt others intentionally. But hey, there’s the whole unintentional spectrum of effects. Luckily, we are pretty good at sharing feedback and being transparent in front of each other. This means that when someone unintentionally crosses the line it is likely that they will hear a comment referring to that behavior being disrespectful.

    Going forward, with such stuff a natural desire is to be on a safe side. In other words, if I have doubts whether saying something would be disrespectful to someone I should not say that. It’s a safe choice.

    And that’s exactly where we started questioning ourselves. Doesn’t our aspiration to be respectful affect how we act in less obvious situations? Doesn’t it mean that we restrain critique, harsh words, or confrontation even when we believe that they would otherwise be justified? Doesn’t we restrain ourselves from being authentic?

    As a matter of fact, there can be two different sources of such a restraint. First, someone may be worried that criticism or confrontation itself would be received as disrespectful. After all, we are subjective; we may have opposite points of view and we can only control how we express our thoughts, not how they are received by the other party. We may do as much as we can to talk and behave in a respectful way but ultimately we can’t control how our attitude and behavior will be interpreted.

    Second, and more importantly, most of us has neither enough skill nor practice to be able to react in such a respectful way contextually. Even if we could succeed given that we prepare, e.g. when sharing difficult feedback, we would fail to act similarly when caught off guard, e.g. in an unexpected discussion about a topic we have a strong opinion about. And I don’t use it as an excuse. I make a simple observation in the spirit of starting with what we have.

    Now, if being respectful is our guiding principle we may choose not to speak up, rather than risk hurting someone. That would mean that we suppress conflict, feedback and idea cross-pollination. That would mean that we suppress our development both as individuals and as an organization.

    The question we were staring at was: can we be too respectful?

    Can we bring respect to the level when it is not justifiable anymore? Can being respectful yield unwanted outcome?

    Intuitively my answer was negative. And yet I couldn’t discard the argument as a whole since I’ve experienced the dilemma myself.

    The thing is that respect is a nuanced thing. The same behavior may be perceived as respectful by one person and as disrespectful by someone else. The same behavior may be perceived either as respectful or as disrespectful by the same person depending on whose behavior we put under scrutiny. The context matters. The group setup matters. The mood matters. And the list goes on and on.

    In a way, we can’t design a set of behavior that would be universally respectful. Well, not unless we are really,really far on the safe side. This, as we already established, would have some unwanted outcomes.

    And yet one of these catchy phrases I picked from Stephen Parry kept my mind working.

    Showing respect for people does not mean you have to like them, agree with their views, or fail to challenge any half-baked reasoning they may have.

    My thoughts were that we might have been using “respect” in overly broad way, like a wall shield rather than a buckler. However, I couldn’t wrap my head around something that would provide some guidance where the line should be. After all, Stephen’s remark focuses on what respect is not and not on what it is.

    Then I came across the following passage from Ray Dalio:

    Make sure people give more consideration to others than they demand for themselves.

    It is more inconsiderate to prevent people from exercising their rights because you are offended by them than it is for them to do whatever it is what offends you. That said, it is inconsiderate not to weigh the impact of one’s actions on others, so we expect people to use sensible judgment and not doing obviously offensive things.

    This principle, in a neat way, connects the dots in both directions and through that it addresses the risk of being “overly respectful” through suppressing oneself. It creates responsibility on each party involved in an interaction.

    A party that is about to do something that may potentially be disrespectful is bound to use sensible judgement and assess whether such a behavior can be commonly perceived as offensive.

    The other party, on the other hand, takes responsibility of using “the respect shield” sparingly, as if it was a buckler protecting the most sensitive areas and not a wall shield covering from literally everything.

    This way we create some sort of a middle ground when it comes to respect. We don’t call out all behaviors that can potentially be perceived as disrespectful. We don’t even call out some that touch us personally, assuming good intentions and acknowledging that people have different standards. What we gain thanks to that is an environment where there is a space for more contributions from everyone.

    There’s another consequence. Such a notion of respect, which accepts more behaviors, means that when someone calls “disrespectful” it is a strong signal that the line has been crossed. After all we may assume that such a call was considerate and took into account that suppressing someone else without a good reason is disrespectful too.

    Of course, maintaining the balance doesn’t come for free. It requires consideration. On one hand there’s a risk of extending that middle ground of consent too far. It would happen when we start accepting behaviors that are hurtful. On the other hand there’s a risk of shrinking that space too much. It would happen when we give less and less slack to others when they act out.

    The principle, however, provides us with a pretty good reference point: give others more consideration that you expect for yourself. That’s how we can avoid being both disrespectful as well as suppressing ourselves in a fear of being overly respectful.

    Should I know this principle I wouldn’t have said as much in the situation that kicked off this whole thinking process. Yet still I would still make my point strongly, even at the risk of other party feeling attacked by the strong statement. And that would probably have been the best possible outcome.