Everyone has experienced those looming, dreadful events that come along every once in a while. Sometimes they can turn out to be no big deal, just a small rain shower. Other times, you can see the dark clouds approaching as you slowly inch your way towards the event. It doesn’t look pretty, and you know it’s only a matter of time before the category five hurricane sweeps right over your team.
You may have been hoping it would turn at the last minute, but it never does. You brace for impact as the storm hits and chaos ensues. Once it passes you’re left to pick up the pieces as you try to understand what went wrong.
What is a storm?
A storm is a lot like a big exam you didn’t study for. You had every opportunity to prepare, but you didn’t. As the exam approached you knew the outcome before it even started. You are destined to fail.
The hard truth is that we simply can’t assume anything.
Like a big exam, storms often take the form of things we can plan for in advance. It could be a critical strategic decision that was made too late (or too early), an important meeting with an executive you thought would go well but didn’t, or an anticipated release that ended up having tons of bugs.
Storms can also be surprises or an outside event beyond your control; A company restructure, a market event, or a third party service going down. In these cases, we may not have been able to prevent it, but we can plan for contingencies.
Can we act like meteorologists?
We can see the storm clouds off in the distance. We know the storm is forming. Part of our jobs as leaders is to identify those storms before they turn into category five hurricanes. Our job is to pick up on the indications and identify potential warning signs. How can we plan for these storms to ensure the least amount of damage?
Unfortunately, there is no Super Doppler 6000™ for software teams. There are no weather satellites or weathervanes. Our best bet is to use our shared understanding as a team to identify problems before they have a chance to grow.
In the case of the examples where we have some control, how can we identify these problems early to ensure the storm dissipates? What can we do to ensure we bring our umbrella and our rain boots, or make sure our roof is patched up before the wind picks up?
A storm is brewing
Remember that having a problem is not an indication that we are bad at our jobs.
You work with a team that was pretty set in its ways. Instead of regular releases, the plan was to knock it all out and release everything at once, in a year. Your team is now pretty far along. You’re making good progress, and the executive wants to have a meeting to see where everything is. You’re confident that everything is fine, because six months ago the team met, and everyone decided on a strategy.
Halfway through the meeting, you realize that your team and the executive are not on the same page at all. The executive was expecting something completely different.
⛈ ? ?
You may ask yourself how this could have happened, but the answer is clear. More communication would have avoided this completely.
Often, we assume that our leaders are communicating important information back to us as they receive it. We make the assumption that our leadership team is communicating changes that might affect us. The hard truth is that we simply can’t assume anything.
Leaders, especially “important” ones, tend to have schedules packed with meetings. It might be too easy for information, that we would find important, to never make it down to us. If we find that we aren’t hearing from our leadership team often, it’s our responsibility to reach out and connect.
A simple solution is a regular check-in. A quick 15 or 30-minute one-on-one would likely have avoided this storm altogether. In these syncs you should be asking, “Is this the right approach?” or “Do you have any feedback for me?” If we have problems it’s also our responsibility to ask for help. Remember that having a problem is not an indication that we are bad at our jobs.
Some additional indications
If so, this is a good indication that the people on your team don’t understand the big picture. If they’re confused about this piece, the chances are good they are missing other things too. Never assume that everyone understands something the same way as you. Your team may need to reset and get a refresher on the structure of the system and the state of the business. As Derek loves to say, “Start at the start!”
Are your leaders simply blasting out important information like organizational changes, business priorities, or market impacts and not allowing time to explain it in more detail? These types of emails are easily overlooked. If important information can change your team’s strategy, this type of communication can create surprises in the future. A simple tactic is to discuss with your team what the communication strategy is for different types of information, create protocols, document them well, and stick to them.
If you’re relying on your emails to communicate lots of information, there’s a good chance people are missing a lot of it. Long emails should be avoided because they can be easily lost or overlooked. If the information is important for the long term, document it in a formal way like a wiki or Confluence. If it’s not long term, have a session with the team and share it. If email is the only way to share, ensure that you’re following up and encourage feedback.
This is a clear lack of “communication empathy” — where you overlook the fact that people digest information in different ways. Similar to the above, if important documents are simply attached to an email chain with no clear explanation or context, there’s a good chance that you’re not the only one missing something. If these important documents are not explained in detail and left to individual team members to interpret on their own, there’s a good chance you’ll end up with divergent ideas or trajectories if they even read through it at all. Always provide a two or three-sentence summary to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding.
In software, things change, fast. If you decide too early your decision becomes stale very quickly. Decisions have a very short shelf life and should be treated like milk sitting on the counter instead of a box of delicious Triscuit crackers. Remember to make your decision at the last responsible moment
A key component to Agile is testing early and often and iterating until you get it right. If your team is waiting months and months to release before a user has had a chance to validate the software, there is a good chance you have spent a lot of time building the wrong thing.
Is your team resistant to change? How willing and open is your team to change the way they work? Are they open to experimentation and change processes as needed? If your team is not willing to experiment and possibly change as needed, they likely aren’t measuring their processes to see how effective they are in the first place! Encourage your team to track its effectiveness and incentivize flexibility.
If your team doesn’t get along there’s a good chance weathering even the smallest storm will be a challenge. Conflicts should always be worked out using a set of standard protocols in a professional setting to avoid any unnecessary issues. Here are some ideas:
• Involve HR if the issues are critical.
• Try to have your team members work it out themselves.
• Involve the manager as a mediator.
• Involve the external conflict resolution system in the organization if one exists.
• Don’t just keep trying to wing it.
Stress is often unavoidable. But lots of stressful situations can be avoided. Stress often comes from looking at a large problem as one giant mess rather than a series of simpler tasks that lead to a larger goal. Have your team do exercises where they break down some of the larger problems in the organization into parts. Have them show how solving these smaller individual problems will help to solve the larger problem. Also note that dependencies create complexity, which ultimately leads to stress. Focus on simplifying your environment, your schedule, or your habits to reduce opportunities for stressful environments.
A running theme here is communication. Open and consistent communication is the key to so many things in life, and it’s no different at work. Communicating with your team will ensure that everyone is on the same page, has the same understanding, and ultimately, has the same expectations of outcomes.
Even if a Super Doppler 6000™ isn’t available for software teams, it’s possible to use those above indications we’ve laid out above as well as analytics and trends to better identify potential problems before they pop up.
To be sure, not every storm is avoidable. But if we keep an eye out for some of these indications and act when necessary, there’s a great chance that we can turn these big, bad thunderstorms into happy little spring showers.
