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!

Management v. Leadership

Many people confuse leadership with management.  In this blog post on Management and Leadership rom HBR, John Kotter shares his frustration with this confusion  It is important to know the difference particularly if you are a manager and you want to be a leader.

Leadership is essential for defining the right thing to do and management is critical to getting things done well. There are many great leaders who are not great managers and vice versa. 

I have seen far too many instances of a good manager coming up with a great plan and executing it but all for not, since the feature added was of little value or did not meet the customers needs.  Basically the manager did the wrong thing very well. Now, you could argue that they did their job and it was the leaders, the other guys, who did their job incorrectly. True perhaps but its a bit hollow given the wasted development effort.

If you find yourself in this position, that is, doing the wrong thing, you need to find the internal fortitude to speak up and to work toward a solution that makes sense. It may be hard, it may be challenging but it is what a leader would do. 

Keep in mind this phrase that a wise man once told me "a poorly executed brilliant plan is vastly superior to a brilliantly executed poor plan".

Stop Being Nice

I suppose it is not the right time of year to telling people this, but stop being nice. Niceness is not correlated to success. All of us know someone who is really nice, but being nice is not the same as being effective or being a good leader/manager. It may be hard to make the adjustment, but it is necessary (I know because as young woman I worked hard at being very nice). You can be genuine, you can care about people, and you can do great things all without being nice. Now, that doesn't mean being rude or offensive, but it does mean standing your ground and saying what you think. And that may just mean that sometimes people won't like you. Its time to get over needing to be liked by everyone. Check out the following:

From HBR Blog "The Morning Advantage" Dec 3, 2012 by Sarah Green

"Being liked is overrated," writes Jessica Valenti in The Nation. She's primarily writing about women — for whom likability is negatively correlated with success — but her advice is useful for the yes-men out there, too. Valenti, the founder of the blog Feministing, admits to wasting hours online responding to every commenter, giving equal time and attention to both the thoughtful people and the snarkiest trolls. "It pains me to think of what I could have achieved if I had that time back."

When we adjust our behavior to be more likable — withholding our most deeply held opinions so as not to offend, agonizing over every bit of negative feedback, eventually "tempering our thoughts" as well as our words — we stunt our selves, our careers, our impact in the world. "The truth is that we don’t need everyone to like us," she writes, "We need a few people to love us."

I'll give Valenti the last word: "Yes, the more successful you are — or the stronger, the more opinionated — the less you will be generally liked. All of a sudden people will think you’re too 'braggy,' too loud, too something. But the trade off is undoubtedly worth it. Power and authenticity are worth it." It's a piece worth "liking."

Time for reflection

Usually at this time of year, I am working on a speech for the company holiday party. My goal is always to give a meaningful and entertaining message. So I begin to reflect on the past year - all the things we accomplished, the occasional disappointment, the new people we added to the team, the people who left. The speech gets done but more importantly, I am compelled to review the year, put it in perspective, and consider what my team and I should be doing differently in the future.

At my current company, our development process includes a biweekly retrospective, where we review the engineering processes and procedures and make changes as needed. There are places to look at the company's progress from a financial standpoint on a regular basis. But there is no place in the business where we look at how we are doing as leaders. I am going to make a change so that on a quarterly basis we do take time out to do a level set to "measure and learn" so that it becomes part of the overall company process. The details are not yet figured out but it will be something simple. More importantly, I believe it will be something that is effective as we are working hard to establish a culture that accepts change and thrives on continuous learning and improvement. 

I encourage all of you to do some reflection at this time of year (and on a more regular basis).  If you need some help on what kinds of things to do, here is a year-end checklist from Inc. to give you some ideas.