Become the Unsurprised Developer and Remove Growth Roadblocks
The way we behave at work affects our output as well as that of our teams. When some members of the team use certain phrases, they place growth roadblocks on the team that prevent growth.
Here are some common growth roadblocks I’ve seen, and what to do about them.
Growth Roadblocks
Feign surprise
One way we can undermine people within our team can be to feign surprise when they don’t know something.
This can apply to both technical concepts (“What?! You don’t know what a monad is?!) or something non-technical (“You don’t know who SBF is?!”) but the effect of either is the same.
The implication is that you should know something when you don’t. This can produce shame and a closed mindset as you move to hide your lack of knowledge in a particular area.
Everybody
When we feign surprise, we might use everybody to indicate just how ignorant a speaker is about a particular topic.
This use of language means someone who got something wrong might be made to feel that they’re not just technically incompetent but also not a true member of the team.
Minor Corrections
Let’s face it, we’ve all been there.
I remember a code review when someone nitpicked over the alphabetical ordering of imports and missed a logic error in the body of the code (the ordering of that array didn’t quite work).
Minor corrections can be disruptive when the correction has no bearing on the crux of the matter (be it code or conversation). At its worst, this can derail conversations with corrections, subsequent corrections, and so on until the point is lost.
Stand-up Meetings
My hate of stand-ups is well-documented. For some in a team, they are a meeting to advertise how clever they are at the expense of their colleagues, and that they are not able to work as fast or to a standard as high as their colleagues.
This is one where people try to put themselves ahead of colleagues in their team, no matter the impact of their actions.
Solutions
Everybody should know it’s important to create an environment where learning is fostered rather than hindered. The solutions to each of the issues above are similar since they are about putting the team above the individual and fostering a growth mindset to mean the team improves.
These issues expose the underlying culture of expecting everyone to know everything and not learn. That’s an issue in itself.
Feign surprise
This generally means the person being dismissive cares more about their ego and showing off (possibly to a wider group) than learning. The tick here is not to act surprised (even if you are).
A key trick is to turn this surprise into excitement. “Let me tell you about that”. Luckily this gets easier with practice.
Everybody
It is better to avoid using words like “everybody”. You can ask yourself the pertinent question — who are you to speak for everybody? Even if you are a leader you should remember that great leaders listen rather than broadcast their opinions as fact.
Minor Corrections
Keep it on topic as much as you can.
Stand-up Meetings
If you wish to advertise how great you are at programming perhaps you should do that with the quality of your code rather than telling others publicly that they are not as good as you.
Create a Positive Culture
In the 1950’s Carl Rogers created the term psychological safety to describe establishing the conditions to foster an individual’s creativity.
To paraphrase the work, there are three processes necessary to foster creativity:
Accept an individual as having unconditional worth
Providing a climate in which external evaluation is absent
Understanding empathically
working in such a culture provides opportunities for risk-taking. Want to pitch out-of-the-box ideas to directors? You’d better hope that some level of psychological safety is in place. It’s time to work on that in your current role, and make software development better for everyone.
Conclusion
The most innovative and resilient teams are those that embrace diversity — in thought, experience, and knowledge.
Fostering an environment where questions are encouraged and ignorance is seen as a temporary state has clear benefits and is one of things that has the opportunity to advance the entire field of software development. Who knows what we might achieve in the future?
Link to xkcd:
Link to the evidence: