Everyone deserves a second chance

I was watching one of the episodes on a TV series which I loved called Outsourced last week. In that episode there is a scenario where the manager (Tod) finds out that one of his employees is struggling to meet the sales target and the top management instructs the manager to get rid of one employee to keep up with the revenues. But what does “Tod” the manager do. He did confront the employee on his lack of performance and asked him what the cause of it was. Then along with the employee, he helps this guy to reach his targets by helping him resolve his personal issue. Now that I believe is the quintessence of a great manager.

This got me thinking, often times, even in the software industry, I have seen people who struggle being cornered and ignored. Most of the times it is not due to the lack of competence on their part. If you give them a chance to express themselves, I have often seen that it was due to a personal matter, financial crisis, insufficient information during on-boarding and many other reasons for the employee to under-perform. The saying goes “Put yourself in their shoes”. It would be appropriate to put yourself in their shoes and walk in it as well to get a feel of what the employee is going through. In my opinion, employees should not only be measured by their personal excellence, but should also be measured by how they support their team mates to succeed as well. A team will only be successful if they work as one cohesive unit. In daily stand-ups if I see someone struggling on a task for more than two consecutive days I would approach them offline and ask how I can help them out. The fact that you ask them and are there for them in their difficult time brings out a sense of belonging to them.

Johanna Rothman in her book “Behind closed doors” gives an overview of how we can deal with such employees. She calls it the “Get well plan” where the manager along with the employee comes up with a plan for the employee to succeed. You cannot simply fire a person without giving him/her a second chance to redeem themselves. I believe this approach is a fabulous idea where you can set a fixed set of goals within a fixed time frame to help out an employee who is struggling in your team.

So the next time you see someone in your team struggling, talk to them, get to know what their problem is and help them out. You will have pride (humble of course) of knowing that you were able to make a significant impact on the life of someone.

Being an architect and handling some of the managerial aspects

From mid last year, I have been playing a junior architect role, transitioning out of the technical lead role I was playing. It has been an interesting ride so far with many obstacles and many more to come I’m sure which makes it even more interesting. Taking the plunge to the new role required a change in the mindset. As a technical lead, I was predominantly focused on the technical aspects related to the product/project I was working on whereby the quality aspects of the code was the primary concern. With the switch to an architect, though most of those responsibilities still remain, there was an additional aspect which I had overlooked during the initial period.  In the capricious environment we usually work in, things do get overlooked which if left unattended will hinder the performance of your team and in turn affect the organization you work for.

Though I considered it to be a project management aspect, I came to figure out that this aspect was a responsibility of mine with this new role. So what is this overlooked aspect you ask? The management of the people aspect. Although you as an architect will not be involved with other project management aspects such as budgeting, schedule planning (though you need to assist on this one), goal setting, emitting CO2 with managerial meetings with no agenda (no pun intended of course), you do have the most important aspect of it all to manage, which is the people aspect. Though technical leadership and direction is your primary focus, you cannot overlook the fact that your team and the team morale is the determinant success factor of your team.

As an architect, you are now directly responsible of the career progression of your team. If you have a few under performers in your team, it does not mean you should corner them out and report them to management. On the contrary, you have to understand the individual’s issues, the reasons for under-performing and setting up a plan for that individual to focus on making the wrongs right. Most of the time, the under performers have a reason for their current predicament and understanding that will enable you to help that person out of the difficult situation. This is the time the team as a whole should drive the required productivity of the team until the under-performers do come up to the required standard. Constant feedback will help the people to understand their weakness and improve on it.

The catch here is that sometimes you figure out some people just do not take constructive feedback well. You cannot take this personally as this is the idiosyncratic behavior of some people. You can help someone as much as they want to be helped.

Learning to give feedback was another skill I had to obtain with this new role. Giving feedback is not the hardest part, but giving it in a way where the receiver does not go into a defensive mode is the harder part. Again, though I see this as a project manager’s responsibility, I believe as an architect, you are still responsible for the growth of your team and should give them feedback in order for them to grow. Feedback will include both the positive and the negative. “Good job with the XYZ module” is not a positive feedback. “Good job” works only if you are Hancock (you have to watch the movie to get that one). You have to be very specific regarding the accomplishment of the individual. “The new automation build script you setup for the team helped us to give regular internal releases whereby we were able to get feedback early on the features the team was working on”. Now that is a very specific positive feedback attributing what the person did and aligning that to the company’s goals of reducing operations costs and turnaround time.

Even though technical leadership still remains as the primary focus for you as an architect, you should not forget the most important people factor which will help you succeed as a team and move forward adding value to the organization you work for.

In the next post I will focus on the changes I had to make especially in the thought pattern transitioning from being a glorified geek.

Thank you for reading people, and as always your feedback is much appreciated and do please leave by a comment if you have anything to say, the good, the bad and the ugly.