I had an impromptu conversation this afternoon with a system engineer. He wasn’t looking for ‘coaching’, in the same vein that my developers are inclined to do, but a conversation about how to integrate a new technology into the credit union’s mechanisms. I am a poor network engineer. My understanding of network sophistication is pretty slim, and my ignorance was exposed, repeatedly, throughout this conversation.
However, as we discussed the problem, and came to a series of potential solutions, a common thread came up in my colleague’s responses to a solution.
“Yeah, that probably could work, but it will be nearly impossible to get this through…”
“This would work, and would be kinda fun. But moving the CU toward this is like turning a ship around…”
I checked in here. There wasn’t a technical reason these solutions weren’t reasonable. They were just too ‘new’. I queried further, and it became very clear a lot these ideas were things my peer had thought of. He just never got permission to move forward.
And just like that, it became a coaching moment.
Aside: One of my old managers used to hate complaints. Hated them. His personal stake in what we had built attached a personal note to anything technical complained about. If you came to him with a complaint, and an expectation that he would ‘fix it’ for you, you came away rebuffed, and in no unclear terms. But if you came to him with a complaint, and a well-thought out fix for it?
That nearly always ended up differently.
I coached this particular engineer about feeling welcome to take that next step, and propose a ‘fix.’ This is common to the Pull-Request model of open source software. An lone issue and complaint is reasonably ignored, but an issue with a well-thought-out pull request, correcting the flaw? That is something worth paying attention to. Even if the correction is inaccurate, it is worth paying more attention to someone willing to put in the work to correct it. In your own life and work, put some skin in the game.
Avoid being a complainer that is not willing to own the problem or the solution. Get in there, find out what’s hard about the problem, and take the chance to own the solution. Will it always work? Of course not, but the effort you take learning about the problem will likely lead to a better solution down the line.
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