Stop saying "That's just what they are like"

Recently, I had an issue with some people on the sales team. They were repeatedly making suggestions that we had already told them were unhelpful (hiring a development team in India) and spending a lot of time telling us that we weren't doing the right things on the product program.

Let's get a few facts clear for people who don't live in the R&D world:

1. Just adding people to a problem generally doesn't solve it (it's like having a baby, if you get two women to do it you can't halve the time).
2. Indian development outsourcing is a very risky proposition for a small team. You have to deal with people 12 hours away. It's hard enough getting developers to talk to each other when they sit next to each other (often not the most outgoing chatty folks); getting them to talk to people in the middle of the night is another thing. 
3. Product programs are not owned by R&D. They are owned by product managers. If you are bugging the R&D team, it's like bugging your brother or sister to get your parents to change their mind. It may work, but everyone gets annoyed. 

When I reached out to the sales lead, he was willing to talk but said "their comments come from a good place", as in, they were really trying to help (yes, I am sure that is what mansplainers think too). And he also noted, "I really don't have time for this". When I talked to other executives, they said "Just ignore it. That is what sales guys are like". 

Here I am a co-founder of a company, who has a viewpoint and desire to see a different type of culture at the company, and I am confronted with this lack of support.

For the record, I did not want them to change because of the two items noted but because of the two items on top of the a seemingly endless list  - not following any corporate guidelines without constant reminding, not using corporate tools, not heeding any advice (and eventually coming around to the same position 9 months later thereby wasting the scarce resource of time), trying to force our product into a me-too (which never wins), making everything a last-minute crisis for everyone else - to name a few. 

I got thinking about why it is this way:

1. Are the sales people so valuable to my company that we can't afford to challenge them? I just don't believe that. 
2. Is this our biggest problem? The answer is absolutely not. 
3. Would it be difficult to get them to change their behaviour? And the answer here is yes. 

I am being told "that's just what they are like" because that is the easy way out. Changing them is possible but it's difficult. The easier choice given everything we have on our plates is just to let it go. 

If we all thought that way, our companies and our products would never progress. In R&D, we have redesigned how we work based on our experiences and the experiences of other companies and have built a very different model for releasing product. (side note: our VC have said our approach in R&D is world class).  We have also innovated around the delivery of our service. We dared to challenge the status quo and we are better for it.  It was often very hard and we met lots of opposition, but we persisted because we believed it was right. 

Will allowing the sales team to continue their behaviours be damaging - to a certain extent yes, I think it will hurt the culture of the company and probably cause some rifts,  but in the end, we will still be successful as a business.  Will people get hurt? No, perhaps a few feelings but nothing permanent. After consideration, I have decided to let it go and not pursue getting them to change.  As I noted - no one will get hurt and the damage will not be that large. 

You are now probably wondering, what the heck? Why write a blog to say that you gave up? Where is the lesson?

Well, I decided not to pursue this particular issue because the consequences of not doing it are minimal. But it has raised a much greater concern for me. I was so shocked at how quickly everyone was willing to accept the status quo.  "It's just the way they are, Kim".  Because changing behaviour and calling out people on their behaviour is hard. It is much easier to just let things continue as they are. 

When you look around IRL (as my kids say), the consequence of accepting how things just are can be extremely damaging. Be very careful before you join in and say its ok too (implicitly, often,  by not saying anything).  Sometimes it will be EXTREMELY HARD, but you have to go against the status quo, STAND UP FOR WHAT IS RIGHT,  and WORK FOR CHANGE.  And if you don't know what I mean, let me leave you with a few names to ponder  ... Jian Ghomeshi, Travis Kalanick, Harvey Weinstein, and Donald Trump.  If only, much earlier, someone had stopped saying "that is just what they are like".

 

Life is too short to drink bad wine

"Life is too short to drink bad wine" has become a motto for me. I love a good glass of wine. If I get a bad glass or bottle, I will simply get rid of it.  My friends have gasped as I poured out an expensive, yet terrible tasting, bottle. But why drink it? It may seem like I am wasting money but in fact, I am trying not to waste my time or ruin my enjoyment. I value those things more than the money spent on the wine.

This saying is great literally and will spare you choking down a bad wine choice but it is also a great saying metaphorically. Life is short. It may not seem that way when you are a teenager or in your twenties but as you age, it becomes very clear. And with such a short time, you should not waste any time doing things that make you sad, unhappy, or bored. Do things that you enjoy, that make you happy, or bring you fulfillment. 

I realize that there are practical realities that dictate that you need to earn money so that you can have shelter, food, and transportation. And I know that there can be tough times to go throw in pursuit of a bigger goal (like that horrible university course you need to take to graduate, the bad, yet honest, performance review you need to give to an employee at work, or surviving the teenage years of your children because, well, they are too old for you to give them up for adoption). But if you are really not enjoying yourself, think about it. Figure out what you like and don't like, and determine if it is just a temporary rough patch, or if you just need a change. 

When people who work for me ask for a change or to be involved in a particular project or task, I will try hard to get them what they want. I appreciate them advocating for themselves. I would far rather hear about the issue before they get into the task than hear the complaining as they begrudgingly complete the work.  Unless you are in a very rigid job, your boss will likely try to accommodate your requests.  

So don't wait any longer. If you are unhappy or unfulfilled or wasting your time, please make a change. Because life is really too short. And whatever you do, don't drink bad wine. 

Common sense?

Common sense is defined in Merriam-Webster as "the ability to think and behave in a reasonable way and to make good decisions".  Despite its name, common sense is not that common. And it is best to remember that.

I was going to draw on the current White House administration for examples of how uncommon it is, but that is so depressing. I will leave SNL to deal with them.

Instead, let me share a sign that I saw at the Santa Clara Marriott Pool last November.

I have stayed at many Marriott hotels and many California hotels and have never seen a similar sign. So, I am certain that the posting of this sign was born of necessity (a collective "Ewwww" heard). They appear to have learned the hard way that common sense is not that common.

If you want something done in a particular way or you are counting on a specific outcome from your team, do not leave it up to their "common sense". You must state your expectations clearly. Let people know what you want. It may seem like overkill but you will be much happier with the results. Don't learn the hard way!

p.s. I did go in the pool and the water was beautiful and clear!

If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging

The first law of holes is "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging".  That is, if you find yourself in an untenable position, it is best to stop carrying on and exacerbating the situation.  This is an incredibly useful law both personally and professionally.

It may seem obvious, but it is surprising how many people don't follow this law. I have been known not to follow it. Sometimes you just can't seem to stop digging; sometimes you don't even see the hole.

Quite often,  holes are easy to spot. Suppose you are in an argument and everything you say makes the person you are arguing with angrier and there is no resolution in sight. Assuming that you are not arguing just for sport (yes, I do have family members who do this for sport), you would stop the argument. You see that you are not getting anywhere (i.e. in a hole) and you stop digging.

A couple of years ago I hurt my knee quite badly. I took over the counter pain medicine, I continued doing exercise that hurt the knee, and I "soldiered through" right up to the point where I could no longer straighten my leg or walk without a limp. I knew I was in a hole but I had basically just kept digging instead of stopping and addressing the issue. I hoped it would get better on its own (oh to be young again). It took spousal intervention for me to get a grip and stop digging this particular hole. And because I had waited so long, it took many medical appointments and 12 full months to have a straight leg, minimal pain and no limp.

Now, consider a small team of developers with a small code base.  They develop a single automated test suite that ensures everything works as expected before the code is released. It catches problems and takes less than 10 minutes to run. Perfect. Other developers join the team and follow the test example. The code base gets larger and now the release test suite takes 2 hours to run. Developers start to complain about it. So they restructure how the test suite runs and get the time reduced to 15 minutes. Great work. Problem solved. Then more code is developed and more developers join the team. The suite takes longer and has to be restructured again.  Test times are now 30 minutes. Not too bad. But the cycle continues. More developers, more tests, more complaining, more reduction. And now the test time is 120 minutes. This is bad. This is a HOLE and it is getting bigger every day. This is not a hypothetical; this is the hole that my team and I dug together for 3 years. We moved some dirt around at times, but we never stopped digging. It was not until we were at a crisis point that I actually saw the hole. We all talked about how we could stop making it worse. After 4 months of considerable effort,  we had a plan which allowed us to add new code in a way that allowed our testing to scale as we needed. We had finally stopped digging. And then we developed a 12-month plan to get out of the hole. If we had stopped a year sooner, the problem would have been significantly easier to resolve. As a result of this experience, the team is now always looking for holes and thinking about how to stop digging.

Learning to spot holes and realizing when to stop digging are skills that you can develop. But they do require awareness. So start looking out for them.  Listen when someone tells you that you might be in a hole. And when you find yourself there, do yourself a favour and stop digging!

Guess who's back?

Well, it has been a while since I posted. Turns out being a partner in a startup is hard work. In fact, as interesting and exhilarating as it is, it is equally time-consuming and exhausting. I have decided to ratchet back my involvement a bit in the startup and decided to fill some of my extra time with writing. And so here I am posting again.

For a long time, I have talked about writing a book. My mother-in-law thinks I am a gifted writer based on my Christmas card letters. Yes, really. I almost bought into that thought, since she was so insistent, and once entered a CBC short story writing contest. I thought my story was awesome and submitted it with pride. I lost. From what I can tell, I lost badly. In the general tips on writing short stories that one of the judges posted after the contest, I had followed 100% of "never do this" tips. Turns out I am not a gifted writer. So there will not be a book. But I still have things to say. And this is where I can do it using my own not-award-winning style.

The impetus for posting today, of all days, was that yesterday I read about startups that allow you to record messages and send them to people after you die. I loved the movie P.S. I Love You (so much that I went to the Irish countryside to see where they met).  But honestly, for me, probably since I am in good health, the concept of recording messages for after my death does not sit well. I think it would be best if I passed on my wisdom and messages while I was alive and kicking. So I am doing just that, starting today.

The next set of posts will be "pearls of wisdom" for life and for work.  These pearls, I believe, should be passed on. They have served me well. So kids ... get ready to start reading and learning ...

The value of handwritten notes

Four years ago, I heard an interview with Seth Godin on the CBC. It was a New Year's Day show and he was asked what one thing he would recommend for business people as a new habit. His answer was a bit of a surprise for me; he suggested handing out handwritten thank you notes every day. I remember him saying "just give it a try and see what happens". I could not resist.

For the first thirty days of that year, I gave a handwritten note to someone in the company to thank them for something they had done that day. Each note was a nice thank you card that I filled in with a special message specifically for the person and then put into an envelope and dropped on their desk (or snail mailed to people in other physical locations).  I congratulated developers for solving a particularly hard problem or for volunteering for a necessary but mundane task. I thanked testers for spending extra hours to ensure our release was ready to go out on time. I thanked the admin assistant for bringing in lunch. I expressed sincere appreciation to the marketing person for giving me some goodies to give away at a recruiting event. I thanked our program manager for working with a particularly difficult team to resolve a longstanding problem. I congratulated a manager for adeptly handling a sensitive situation with one of his team members. Most of my thank you notes, as you can see, were for things that you would expect people to do as part of their regular job, but still, each day as I sat down to think about it, these were the things that I was grateful had been done. And, as I began to realize, these were the things that I rarely explicitly thanked people for doing.

Two things happened. The first and most pleasant outcome (for me and my family) was that I consistently left the office on a positive note. Despite what had happened during the day, my last thoughts before leaving were reflecting on the great things people had done that day as I wrote my daily thank you note. And the second, and more important outcome, was the impact that it had on my team. People really appreciated that I had noticed what they had done and had thanked them personally.  They began to go out of their way to be more helpful than normal. As the notes started to be hung up in cubes, others noticed them and tried to get them. It was not an experiment that resulted in everyone getting a card; some people got multiples and some got none. Overall my immediate team became more helpful to the team and more appreciate of one another. And the extended team was much more willing than they had been in the past to help me or my team out because they knew it was genuinely appreciated.

After 30 days, I ended the experiment but I did keep a stash of thank you cards around and used them on a regular but far less frequent basis for the rest of my time at the company.

In the past month I had two colleagues mention these notes. For each of them the note had connected me to them in a more significant way that I had imagined. One told me that he had started to write notes in his new company and was glad I had taught him the lesson of being appreciative and the importance of expressing it personally. And the other just wanted to thank me for the good work my team had done and to say he missed the personal connection with the team that no longer seemed to exist.

I was reminded today of the important of handwritten notes by a post in the Harvard Business Review. You can check it out here.

Handwritten notes can be a valuable way to express your gratitude and to help build a cohesive team. They take time but they are worth it. I highly recommend that you give it a try.


P.S. Just FYI, handwritten notes actually require you to spend time and write something meaningful. Expect to spend 15 to 20 minutes and to throw some notes out if you make an error or your handwriting is illegible due to lack of practice. Dropping a pre-printed note without writing a little message or without signing it will not work. You don't get points by handwriting someone's name or address on the front of the envelope. If you can't be bothered to do this well, don't do it. Each holiday season,  I roll my eyes when someone sends me an unsigned Christmas card. Whether the sender knows it or not the message is clear "My life is too busy to connect with you, but, hey, I got the darn cards off my holiday to-do checklist". Because even my chiropodist, who I have visited only twice and who probably would not recognize me if I walked past him on the street, went to the trouble of personally signing the card he sent to me. 

How Poor Leaders become Good Leaders

It is possible to improve if you are not a good leader. Here are some tips from an HBR blog post:

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/02/how_poor_leaders_become_good_l.html

Many of these items are what I believe make a good leader so it is good to see that HBR agrees with me!