Imagine that someone on your team comes to you with a story about conflict with another engineer – they cannot come to an agreement on what technical approach to take, every design session boils over into an argument, code reviews turn into bickering, they cannot stand working on the same team anymore; they would like a to transfer to a new team. Let’s put aside for a moment the opportunity for coaching about raising up issues before they become critical, and also the self-reflection about how this could have gotten to this point on your team without your seeing the signs. Should you start putting together the paperwork for the transfer?
If this is the first that you’ve heard of the problem, then there really is not enough information to say for sure – it’s time to start digging, to start questioning, and to start understanding if this is truly irreconcilable differences or if there are other issues at play. It might be that the other engineer has no idea of the impact they are having, they enjoy a spirited discussion, and don’t realize that their enthusiastic debate is another person’s flame war. It could be that there is a mismatch in values – that both engineers are fighting for the right answer, but that right answer is different for them because they are solving for different problems. It could legitimately be that both engineers cause such frustration to each other that the best outcome for everyone is separation, but even then, a deeper understanding of the situation might help find a new arrangement that solves the problem rather than just shifting the friction to a new team.
For this, and frankly almost every personnel issue I’ve encountered, my next step is asking questions. No two people will respond to the same events in exactly the same way so it’s a poor practice to assume that you would see things exactly the same given the same stimulus. Even if I could have perfect empathy with how someone reasons about the world, it’s just not possible to work backwards from a moment of frustration and know exactly what led to it – it is a lossy transformation. To have a chance of understanding what is going on, I need to ask questions: what happened? How did that make you feel? Why did you react the way you did?
The answers are almost always surprising. Whether I gain insight into the actions and interactions of my team, or about how those actions impact the people who perceive them, I always learn something through the exercise.
It’s also surprising how often this attempt to gain understanding is a solution of its own, though perhaps it shouldn’t be. As the saying goes “a trouble shared is a trouble halved“. We are all human, and for many issues, just knowing that we are not alone in our struggles, and than someone else understands and cares about the challenges we face is a powerful help.
This isn’t just a tool for when the problem comes to you. If someone appears to be struggling with a task, I find it critical to dig into why. It might be that the problem was harder than I expected when I assigned the work, or maybe there is an easy approach that I took for granted that wasn’t as obvious as I thought. It could be that they were spending time helping out teammate and just hadn’t gotten to the work I requested. All of these require a different solution, or different support from a manager.
You can’t expect someone to volunteer this information either. If you want it, you need to ask. Society conditions us to not make excuses, and own the results of their work, so if you want to know if there are external factors that impacts someone’s ability to get their work done, you need to proactively make the room for them to tell you. There are also pressures that make it challenging for folks to be open about what they want from their work or their role, so if you want to make decisions with that in mind, you should make sure to ask, though I would argue that it would be better for everyone if we were all a bit more open about our needs and goals.
A huge part of being a manager is understanding the needs of the team so you can provide for them. The way to start learning those needs is to ask, and then keep asking. Don’t let a desire to jump to action stand in the way of your curiosity. If you dig a bit deeper you give yourself a chance of solving more fundamental issues, and you make your team a better place to work for everyone.
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