I want to tell you a story about an event that is a repeating pattern in my life. This story is not wholly true for the following reasons:
· It is an amalgamation of all the occurrences of this pattern
· NDAs cover some of those occurrences
· I have rose-tinted views of many of the occurrences because they have all added to the tapestry of my life
Many years ago, I was asked to leave a job I hated. I spent three hours clearing out my desk and saying goodbye to all the people I loved. My boss thought he was doing my team, my department, and maybe even the wider organisation a favour by getting rid of me. I was a pain in his side, and therefore I must be a pain in everyone’s side. He sat watching as person after person came to commiserate with me about the loss of having someone who fought for them, brought them closer to their colleagues, and supported their professional development. These were not things he saw in me, and was dazed and confused by these impressions.
In a previous and more junior role, he had seen so many things poorly done. Meetings run chaotically that not only achieved little to nothing but took time out of his day when he could have been doing his job. Collaborative working practices meant he had to explain what he was doing to people who didn’t know as much as he did, and who didn’t remember what he had told them last time. Business people telling him the direction the software should be taken in without any understanding of technology, users, or the market.
He always knew that when he got to a position with enough authority, he would protect developers from all the problems he had navigated by making sure none of these things occurred, or minimise their impact as much as possible. And so he did.
Meetings held no value, so they were kept short or not run at all. He hated pair programming, so everyone worked on their own. Product was largely ignored and only invited when the business needed to be informed about what the developers had built.
I empathised with his position. I, too, had seen the same dysfunctions as he had. The difference was that I believed that by achieving a position with enough authority, I could ensure that all the things I had seen poorly done would be done better.
Meetings are an opportunity for collaboration, so excellent facilitators are required to ensure the participants have the greatest chance of success. A meeting needs to be considered, designed, and run in a way that allows participants to concentrate on delivering the desired outcomes and outputs. A development team needs to work together to avoid creating silos or waste, and so needs coaching and mentoring on how collaborative development practices can enhance their work and allows a group to create things that no single one could have done on their own. And what is the point of building anything if it hasn’t been thought about by people aware of the market and user needs? Those with budgetary responsibility are definitely the people who should be setting the way for the development team; to do so, they need to be respected and supported in their own specific ways.
One of my core values is Continuous Improvement. (I used to label this value I Can Do It Better, but I have found it easier to align my language on this one.) Without thought or consideration, I am always looking to do better what I see being done. Whether it is something I am doing or something someone else is doing. I think it stems from a sense of self-satisfaction or arrogance that I have spent my entire life trying to temper as best I can. I became a front end developer because I believed I could make better websites; I became a scrum master because I believed I could be better than the scrum masters I had worked with; I may even have become a mum because I believed I could be a better mum than my own.
For so many development managers I have worked with over the years, the drive for improvement doesn’t seem to be a desire they have. The acquisition of authority or power is so they can destroy or control. The arrogance I see in these managers manifests in a desire to get everything out of the way of the developers by getting in the way of everything else. The shock and surprise to them is that the developers do not produce more work of higher quality more quickly. Without guidance, direction, and collaboration, their developers run in multiple different directions and are lucky to produce anything that works, let alone of value. At which point, the bad development manager decides he needs to control every aspect of the developer’s work because they lack the maturity / skills / understanding to be able to do anything by themselves. If we’re lucky, it stops with the developers, yet it often expands to scrum masters and coaches, product owners, and anyone else they feel is not competent enough to do what needs to be done in the moment.
Working with this manager has remained a continual challenge for me throughout my career. The conviction of his beliefs makes challenging them near impossible without embarking on a suicide mission. Recognising the hills he is willing to die on, and deciding if they are the hills I, too, am willing to die on. Finding ways to illustrate that by looking at how he interprets the world he saw before, we can explore different solutions to those problems and that we should explore the problem space rather than immediately jumping to the solution space. How do I encourage such a person to invite a person such as me to coach or mentor them?
I think my approach has always been the same as yours: keep providing value to those who see you as valuable, until those that don't want you around scheme to get rid of you, then move on. Can't change those that don't want to change. I always figure if I can touch just one person in a positive way in any situationI, I'd consider the engagement a success.
I have a question though. Is this recurring manager always a "he"? My experience is yes, but not exclusively. And a second question... what do you think you are expected to learn by this recurring pattern? Annoying question, I know, but I couldn't help but ask :)
Sadly, I don't think there is any amount of encouragement you can offer. In fact, I think the more encouragement the LESS likely they will want a coach. Ego is a powerful, powerful force. They operate on lots of statements that start with "I." I am the best developer. I was promoted and promoted and promoted because I produced results. For me, I needed to have a few life-altering events to check that Ego (i.e. beat the s&*% out of it) before I really started looking for a different way of doing things. It took time. You can leave a trail of breadcrumbs and hope that at some point in the distant future something clicks with that person.
I am curious though - why do you think this person keeps coming back to you? You clearly add value else they wouldn't keep coming back.