No Pain, No Gain

One of the biggest mistakes is shielding people from the pain they need to learn.

Firing People

I first became a manager when I was 26. I first had to fire someone when I was 26.

I spent the whole week anxious. The night before I couldn’t sleep. On the day of the firing I was all nerves. On the way to the conference room I felt sick to my stomach. While telling him that he no longer had a job, my hands were shaking under the table. When he reacted to the news, I felt emotional.

I walked him to the elevator and said goodbye. Then I went back to my desk where my team was. I asked everyone to gather and let them know that he was no longer with the team. Everyone sat down and I looked at my screen for an hour without doing anything, mindlessly clicking around, pretending to work. I took off early and got several drinks. I kept thinking for days what he was doing and how he was doing.

It was traumatic.

But, it was supposed to be. When I saw how terrible it was to fire someone, I deeply understood how important it was to hire great people and performance manage well. Every subsequent firing had the same effect - I will hire better, I will performance manage better.

These convictions were not held lighty. In rooms of 10 people all pushing to hire someone because they were “good enough,” I would say absolutely not. Good enough isn’t good enough. Underneath that conviction was a deep knowledge of the experience of firing. I will not be lazy here if it risks that happening again.

The agony of firing was part of what made me much better at management. The problem with may big company environments is that managers are shielded from pain:

• A seasoned HR person is with you the whole way, and will answer anything that that needs a response

• They often do 90% of the talking, or even all of it

• What you say is very limited and constrained

And the kicker? The real crazy thing - it’s often remote. Talking into a screen is a joke. It removes the humanity from an interaction like nothing else can. You’re essentially playing a video game.

So what happens? You remove the suffering and people don’t learn. They don’t learn to hire better. They don’t learn to performance manage better. The worst case isn’t a real life horror show of an experience - it’s a 15 minute make believe session and then you’re back to sitting in your home office eating bon bons.

Shipping Bugs

Shipping bugs is another place that you are supposed to learn from pain. As companies get big and cultures get blameless, engineers are often very, very isolated from the impact of their bugs. You write a bug, it causes issues for some amorphous customers you keep hearing about, and you have to scramble in an incident to fix it up. No muss no fuss. Sprint planning happens on Tuesday just like always.

That’s nonsense. That’s hiding from the pain.

Engineers would do better to engage with customers, see their reactions, explain the bug. When you see one of your users distraught over the time and effort they’ve spent managing the fallout of a bug you wrote, when you see how they’re worried about how they vouched for your software, when you hear that their team was doing data fixes all weekend, that hot feeling of shame and apology should sink into your bloodstream.

Those visceral feelings from seeing customer impact of bugs are what can help engineering teams radicalize on quality. It’s what can help teams overcome the discomfort of upholding standards and going the extra mile.

Conclusion

People should be exposed to the right trauma. There are certain transformational experiences that are created by the outcomes of your failures. Ignoring them, hiding from them, or otherwise letting anything deflect them from you blocks a critical signal in your reward/accountability function.

Find ways to lean into the experiences that help you learn about your failures. That means doing more of the firing yourself, not offloading to another. It means engaging with the customers you let down.

These experiences are not meant to make you desensitized. This is a common misconception. Good managers can fire people without having as much anguish, not because they’re used to it, but because they learned from their previous experiences and know they did everything they could to hire well and manage fairly.

Finally, if you ever have a cultural issue of people simply not acting up to your values or standards, find them the people that the failure impacts. Make a result of future failures a required interaction with those people. Things then often fix themselves quickly.

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