🏥 When working with people: First, do no harm

A reflection on the mistakes I have made, the mistakes I have seen, and the actions I'm taking

Nov 26, 2023

This is not an article from an expert, but the words of a student.

I have failed on this.

I have harmed people through action and inaction.

This is the result of a weekend reflection. I’m sharing it publicly because I believe it can create healthier work environments.

🏆 Takeaways

What you think you do and say is not how the people around you interpret it
Ignorance is not an excuse. Fix your ignorance instead of trying to fix others.

❌ My mistakes

👀 Lack of awareness

“Ignorance of the law does not exempt from compliance” - Aristotle

I love the quote above. The same happens when working with people. Ignorance is never a justification. Find ways to become less ignorant instead of using it as an excuse.

If ignorance was a valid excuse, then we would benefit from ignorance. The less we know, the less responsibilities towards others we would have.

You are biased. I am biased. Everyone is. Try to observe situations as a 3rd person observer.

Currently, I consider a mistake trying to bring everyone closer to the “ideal engineer”. We’d be making everyone average.

It’s fake that a team benefits from people with multiple backgrounds if we have such a fixed mindset on how people should talk, write, or act.

Accept other personalities and coach them into doubling down on their strengths. Instead of trying to change their behaviors, help people change their mindset into being able to work with different people.

For a long time, I considered biographies and anything related to the past as losing time. I only cared about the future and advancement. But there’s no way to understand the future without understanding the past. Aim to uncover the story behind each person.

Some time ago I would have considered someone inefficient because they didn’t do things like I saw best. I would judge based on the little information that I had on what worked for me. Jumping too fast into a conclusion is the mindset of a fool. Observing with the mindset of a student is the approach of a wise person.

The truth is that there are people very different than me that get their shit done.

😡 Imposing, dominating

The wisest people observe. They listen more than they speak. Leaders identify through observation the levers to pull in each person.

Some time ago I would hoard speaking turns. I would speak so that nobody else could speak and they would have to agree with me. I think I would even interrupt people thinking I knew what they were going to say, I thought I was one step ahead.

This is still a tendency I have to speak a lot and listen little. But I was lucky to have someone flag me early this pattern. I like systems and challenges. Now I see it as a challenge to communicate clearly with the least words possible. To communicate effectively to your audience, first, you need to observe your audience.

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🙀 Becoming a copycat

Early in my career, without any experience, I just mimicked other people who seemed to have importance in my job. Now I have learned to distinguish the nuances and found my own stance. I know that if I repeated certain situations with the experience I have right now, I would have acted differently. I would have prioritized creating a psychologically safe environment. I would have prioritized getting to understand people.

“Fake it until you make it” is real. It’s fair enough to start that way. But it can’t last forever. At some point, you have to have your own opinions on things.

Use critical thinking based on observations instead of adopting some way of working blindly.

When you arive new to the job, everyone seems extremely smart becuase they know what you don’t know.

As time passes, you realize who are “role models” and who isn’t someone to spend too much time with.

But further down the line, you realize the traits you want to adopt from those “role models“ and identify those which you woulnd’t want for yourself.

🥇 Doing anything to win

I understood work as a competition. Someone doing worse would make me look better, so I would not have much interest in helping. Looking back, I don’t consider I was being evil and trying someone to fail on purpose. But I’m sure people have perceived me as so. It’s not what I think, it’s what the audience thinks.

That was narrow thinking. I didn’t realize that making other betters would make me look even better. That I would become the go-to person for these people and they would have me in high esteem. That I would get more traction in my ideas and they would be executed faster.

I still see life and work as a competition. With everyone, on everything.

That makes them exciting. However, you wouldn’t be excited to win against a kid all the time. You want a challenging opponent, a code of conduct for fair play, and your competition is only on the field. Outside the field, you are all on the same journey of trying to get better.

📖 Ineffective communication

“In the absence of information, your team will make up the worst possible version of the truth, usually reflecting their worst fears” - Rands in The Art of Leadership: Small Things Well Done

Like many others, I also had the problem of thinking that when everything was clear in my mind, the others would quickly get things too.

Through writing, I have learned that there’s a huge gap between thinking that I understand something and being able to teach it.

Now I can see it as a challenge to myself decomposing a problem into simple concepts that everyone can understand, and communicating it so that everyone ends up understanding it.

It’s your communication problem if your audience doesn’t understand.

Be customer-obsessed. That’s one of Amazon’s leadership principles. In your communication, your audience is your customer. No matter what’s the situation and no matter what you think of it, the audience is always right.

The words on the wall are not the company culture. The company culture is the stories told in the hallways. Don’t feed the wrong stories.

👿 The judgment problem

I see this mistake every day, and I’m constantly reminding myself not to make it. I don’t think I made this in public, but certainly, I had it as a thought in my mind.

We don’t have to judge. Neither people in the room or outside the room.

“You fucked it up”,
“This code is shit”
”These people are stupid”.

We are not logical machines. We are emotional creatures. Everyone wants to feel important, don’t dismiss them.

You don’t have to judge to give an answer to a question. Just answer the question that is asked.

Question: Can we use this existing API?

Bad answer: That thing is shitty, a crappy design. The ones that created it are stupid and some are not even working here anymore, I bet they were fired.

Better answer: I’d prefer not to because its design would constrain us in the future.

Notice how the bad answer is making emotional judgments without providing useful information. If I was a new joiner in that team, I’d be afraid as fuck of sending my code for review in that environment.

The better answer is focused on the tech problem and not making it a people problem.

Learn to disagree the right way: Lending your helping hand. Acknowledging the approach of others and explaining why you’d prefer another approach.

And when talking about code, respect what came before. That’s one of my favorite Amazon Principal Engineer Tenet

✅ Actions I’m taking

💎 Prioritize people

Build trust by doing what you say you’ll do.

Some of these people will be your go-to person even when you don’t work together. Be remembered as “the guy who left us in good shape” and not “the guy who made everything a mess”

I consider it a mistake when relationships are purely professional. Leaning too hard into professionalism means you can’t work with people. You exempt yourself from all responsibility and rely on the social norms of professional relationships

An efficient team trusts each other. They care about each other outside of work. They can even trash talk in a safe environment. They see each other as humans and not as resources in a company.

⭐ Acknowledge people

When someone new joins a team, they may complain about everything. Or they complain about nothing because they assume everyone else is right and they are wrong

We all go through a first month of honeymoon, a month of despair, and then a month of becoming stable.

Create a safe environment to complain about absolutely anything. This is what Rands calls “the blue tape”. Give them the freedom to mark everything they think it’s wrong. You’ll later acknowledge those complaints or spend time explaining why they are that way.

The worst we can do is tell people to “just wait”. The unresolved concerns are building up inside them and they prevent them from advancing.

🙌 Celebrate people

When new people join, they go from zero to just meeting expectations for their level.

The fact that the end of their onboarding is just meeting expectations doesn’t mean not to celebrate. Celebrate their progress and not the absolute value of their work.

Recognize them as quickly as possible when they happen.

I still remember my Senior Engineer writing me in Slack after asking a few questions on a document review. I felt exhilarated, I wanted to continue doing these actions because it felt good.

Imagine the opposite when you ask a question and someone dismisses you saying it’s super simple and even stupid people would understand (the judgment problem). That makes the person asking and all the people listening look down and don’t ask a question ever again.

I encourage you to listen to Lewis Howles's “The School of Greatness” podcast or Steven Bartlett's “The Diary of a CEO” podcast. For absolutely every guest in their shows, they go above and beyond to acknowledge their work and celebrate it. If words had a color, there would be rainbows coming out of their mouths.

💬 Provide effective feedback to people

All the things above don’t mean we should ignore problems and trust that “wishful positive thinking” will make people better by itself.

When communicating negative feedback, the sooner the better. Waiting will just make the problem bigger. Be specific about the situation and genuinely ask if what you perceived is exactly what the person meant. Most of the time people will answer it was not what they meant to happen.

Feedback ages like milk, not like wine. It’ll get sour and spoil something else if left unattended.

Catch up with someone after a bad situation happens instead of “just waiting“. Remember the quote about people thinking the worst when lacking information? Our brains are paranoid, don’t let people overthink things.

👉 Share this post in your network to create healthier work environments

🎯 Conclusion

Make the exercise of going back a few years in time and checking all the people-related situations you would approach differently now.

Don’t think about it with regret but with hope for doing better with someone else in the future.

A good exercise is writing those people a letter, even if you keep it private.

“To all the people that I hurt, your tears became a mirror where I saw my own insecurities. You have taught me more than I could have imagined, and those learnings keep arriving over time. I can’t change the past but I can change the future of someone else.”

🗃️ Resources

👏 The weekly applause

We are 1000 people in the newsletter. This surpassed my expectations a long time ago. I’m deeply grateful for the support you are bringing me. I’ll continue writing to my past self the advice I didn’t even know I needed.

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