Feb 11, 2010 0
Things I have learned from my boss
I recently commented on a blog post that started with a tale of a lousy supervisor doing a truly horrific job of relaying negative feedback to a subordinate. It got me thinking about some of the miserable bosses I’ve had over the years. Not wanting to linger too much in negativity, I tried to conjure up some of the better managers I reported to. A good manager is hard to find, but when you have one, you often get to learn valuable lessons. Here are some things I have learned from one good boss.
Maintain a blame-free work environment
Finger-pointing is a toxic, counter-productive behavior, but there is more to it; in a software startup it is essential to move forward at a fast and efficient pace. A no-mistakes pace is simply too slow. To survive, we have to move at a speed that guarantees a certain rate of error. We must accept the fact that mistakes will be made and corrected on the fly, simply because a pace that yields no mistakes will not bring us to takeoff before the end of the runway. I once spent a few weeks at a client site in a foreign country where a culture of “no mistakes” prevails; as you may expect, everything was gold-plated to death. Time was regularly wasted on unnecessarily perfect performances, and on cover-ups when things didn’t go according to plan.
“No blame” does not mean “no accountability”. Anyone who’s ever worked for me has heard me say: “It’s OK to make a mistake and you will not be judged for it. Making a mistake and not learning from it is a different story”.
Don’t confuse “urgent” with “important”
You plan your day, week and month. You focus your efforts in a calculated effort to achieve very specific goals. Then someone rushes in screaming that the sky is falling and all progress is put on hold until the oh-so-urgent issue is resolved. There’s a hero’s aura about riding to the rescue and saving the day, but when the day is done, you are still a day (or a week, or a month) behind your schedule. The fires you are putting out may be real, or they may be artificial emergencies conceived to manipulate your priority list. Don’t let the moment’s glory distract you from executing your plan for too long. It may not be as urgent, but it is far more important.
Manage your personal productivity
Developers’ productivity is a complicated issue. First off, the disparity between individuals is huge. It is not uncommon for a star developer to be ten times as productive as an average, good developer. You will not find this kind of distribution with say, athletes or steel mill workers. On top of that, there are many subjective and even random factors at play; the estimates that we use to measure productivity are always partially subjective, and if Alice took a day to resolve one specific bug, while Bob took a week to resolve another, can you really say that Alice is more productive? Or was she just lucky?
Improving your personal productivity is a great way to get better at what you do, but as a developer you are the only one who can tell how productive your day is. You can expect your manager to measure your productivity over time, but when it comes to your day-to-day personal productivity — you’re on your own. The CEO of a company I worked for used to say: “It’s tough with you developers, even if I see you wandering around aimlessly all day, as long as you have that thinking expression on your faces, you could be working”. So watch your own personal productivity every day. You’re the only one who can do it, and you’re the one to benefit from it.
Have you had a boss worth remembering? Leave a comment.
* In case you were wondering: the mythical boss I am referring to is Alex Shapira. Alex has done wonders for many software companies, he’s an executive consultant now.
