How to Talk to Humans

I have a natural aversion to buzzwords like 'leadership,' but I've come to realize that it's just another word for 'problem-solving'.  In a recent training, I was taught that leadership is primarily about dealing with emotions, both yours and your co-workers.  After all, it's hard to solve problems if you can't work well with others, and this involves messy emotional stuff.

Thinking that my ability to deal with emotions might be due to being dead inside rather than being empathic, I decided to read How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk, another Jeff Atwood recommendation.  I don't even have kids, but this seemed like a better alternative to books like How to Win Friends and Influence People.

What's really great about HtTSKWL&LSKWT is that shows why it's so important to give recognition to the emotions people experience.  Imagine, the authors suggest, you have a bad day because your boss chews you out in front of your co-workers for not completing an assignment on time.  Later, you run into a friend and tell her what happened.  What are your reactions to her possible responses?

1. Denial of feelings:  "There's no reason to be upset.  It's not a big deal."
2. Philosophy:  "Shit happens.  Deal with it."
3. Advice:  "You know what you should do?  You go to your boss's office and tell her about it tomorrow."
4. Questions:  "What did you do to make her so mad?  Wasn't there some reason?"
5. Defense of the other person:  "I can understand why your boss would be so upset.  You're lucky you didn't get into more trouble."
6. Pity:  "Oh, that's so terrible.  I feel so sorry for you."
7. Amateur psychoanalysis:  "Bosses are stand-ins for parents.  You're not getting back at mommy by handing in your work late."

What these responses have in common is that they all deny the reality of an emotion.  They try to get past it.  But that reality is still there for the person feeling it.  When you deny an emotion, you deny a person's reality.

You'll probably agree that the only good response is something like the following.  It shows that your friend recognizes the emotion you're feeling.

8. Empathy:  "That must have been rough--to have been called out in front of all those people.  You must have been really upset!"

In order to provide an empathic response, you need to listen with attention, acknowledge the feeling, and give a name to the emotion.  Perhaps later, you can provide advice, but don't be too quick to do this.  If you start trying to problem-solve before you recognize someone's emotions, they will probably feel like you haven't listened to them.

Another important thing I realized when reading this book is that the emotion isn't the person.  No one wants to have negative emotions, but it can't be helped.  Emotions just happen.  I think of them as a separate entity entirely, or a different system from the well-reasoned, conscious person we all want to be.

Once I started trying to recognize other people's emotions, I noticed that they felt like I was listening better.  In fact, I was.  It's not just a bunch of psycho-babble, akin to 'I feel that you feel that I feel, etc.'  I actually started to empathize better with what others were feeling.  When you say, 'It must have been hard to be chewed out by your boss,' it's hard not to imagine how you'd feel in the same situation.  Moreover, I started being able to label my own emotions better.  I even once had an epiphany, 'Oh, I'm feeling stressed out!'

Technical Problems and People Problems

'The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.'
-- Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

Not the catchiest title

Why is a 25-year-old computer book still as important today as it was 1987? You're not likely to read a programming book from the 80's in order to learn anything useful for your job today. In fact, one of the small hardships of being a serious developer and spending much of your free time improving yourself is that every book you buy is out of date a year after you buy it.

So what's so great about Peopleware? Despite the constant changes in technology, there is an element of development that has little to do with technology and that will never change. It's people.

Check this out. DeMarco and Lister analyzed hundreds of failed projects over a decade and found that in all cases there was 'not a single technological issue to explain the failure'. This is a remarkable fact. Very few developers are dealing with bleeding edge technology that may or may not live up to the job. Most of us are just solving problems with other smart people. Coming to agreement about what the problem is that we need to solve is the hardest part.

Peopleware is written with the manager in mind, but, since leadership is not synonymous with management, it can still help you work on a team successfully. It can also help you determine if your current or future boss is a good manager. As DeMarco and Lister write,

'Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they've got more people worries than technical worries.  But they seldom manage that way. They manage as though technology were their principal concern. They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted and most interesting puzzles that their people will have to solve, almost as though they themselves were going to do the work rather than manage it. They are forever on the lookout for a technical wiz-bang that promises to automate away part of the work. The most strongly people-oriented aspects of their responsibility are often given the lowest priority.'

One big problem with IT management is that most developers become developers because they like development. If they have the leadership abilities to become managers--or if they get promoted anyway--it's hard for them to help themselves from getting involved in technical problems, to the detriment of the sociological or people-issues that they should be dealing with. It's just too easy to fall into those old habits. I think I could be a good manager, but I know that I like development so much I'm not sure I'd be willing to give it up--at least not any time soon.

'Democrat' and 'Republican' have become dirty words--hopefully 'Business' and 'IT' haven't done the same in your office

Of course, it's not only in IT that people tend to ignore the sociological or people element. The same thing happens in politics all the time. In my work at the Kettering Foundation, I saw that people will almost always try to talk about technical fixes rather than getting down to discussion about trade-offs, winners and losers, and sacrifices. We trade 'solutions' (small government or big government), but we don't really talk to one another about what we'd be willing to give up to get what we want. We don't discuss what we want health care or immigration reform to do, but we have no shortage of technical fixes to make the problem go away.

Even when we know what the solution should be, like a two-state solution for the Israel-Palestine conflict, we often have no idea how to go about doing it. That's because solving people problems is a lot harder than coming up with technical solutions. What we can do is a whole lot easier than how we're going to do it. For this reason, Peopleware is going to stick with me a long time.

On Leadership

"Leadership" is one of those words that used to make me cringe.  I couldn't see how it could be defined, measured, or taught.  I associated it with being a manager, something I haven't pursued--just like I haven't read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People.  Becoming a leader, I thought, involved spending time away from the things that interested me most.

But, according to technical management guru Gerald Weinberg, leadership is "the process of creating an environment in which people become empowered."  A leader is someone who helps people solve problems.  It's not necessarily a manager.  The managers in your company might rarely or never be leaders--for example, if they primarily assign mountains of paperwork, engage in political infighting, or micromanage all work.

This is a powerful thought, though obvious once you've had it. A leader cares not only about their own work but helps other people get things done.  Of course, most work today is so dependent upon other people that it would be hard to get anything done without empowering others.  Being an effective leader seems synonymous with being an effective doer.

Weinberg suggests that leaders empower people to solve problems in a number of ways.  One important way is helping people understand problems and possible solutions to them.  Some people are leaders because they're great at getting to the root of a problem and convincing others that they're right.  Or, they can tell you why something you thought was a problem really isn't one.  Or, they come up with solutions that no one else has come up with.

Some of the best insights I got from the book involved interacting with coworkers.  Weinberg has found that attempts to help are often perceived as interference.  This is why it's important to ask whether or not someone needs your help.  I know people who are so eager and so full of ideas that they often cause those they were trying to help to stop listening.  "We're just trying to solve X, and you bring up 10 other things we should be doing!" they're thinking.  Similarly, when you can't understand why someone is acting a certain way, it's often best to assume they're really trying to help you.

There are plenty of nuggets in Weinberg's work, but something I'm going to try to work on is communicating my feelings, something I've never been great with.  Since you can never know how people see you or what they are thinking, your communications should not assume either.  That is, you shouldn't say, "I know you are having trouble completing your work because of issues you're having at home."  Instead, Weinberg suggests beginning with something more like, "I'm feeling frustrated that we're having trouble completing projects on time.  The only thing I can assign my frustration to is your frequent absences.  Is there something we can work out?"  This risks becoming psychobabble akin to "I feel that you feel that I'm feeling you're feeling, etc.", but I'm going to give it a try.