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Monday, July 18, 2016

The Virtue of Hubris and The Value of Complaining

In my previous post, I discussed the leadership virtues of Laziness and Impatience. But as you may know, I neglected one of the core virtues in my list, namely, that of hubris. Hubris. Pride. As Larry Wall says,
Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer.
I would translate this as taking pride in one's work, and being willing to not just take pride in it, but show off that work, talk about it, teach others its magic. And hubris is important. One of the challenges of impatience is that it sometimes drives us to cut corners. Cutting corners can make work go faster, but it can also have a price in the long run. So we balance that desire to cut corners with a desire to maintain pride in our work, and use those conflicting values to keep each other in check.

Hubris done well in my opinion has some interesting expressions. You may think of the person who takes pride in their work as someone who loves to learn and share new things. Who loves to brag about the good stuff. This is certainly part of hubris, sharing lessons learned and trying to help others by showing off our wins. Many tech teams encourage this actively, through rituals like "drinks and demos" where teams get up to share what they accomplished during the week. We encourage people to write up cool stuff we've built, to go speak at conferences and talk about cool technology, and this is all a great thing to do.

However, I think there's more to it than just showing off the good stuff. Within a team, hubris also shows in people who are willing to complain about the bad stuff. Yes, that's right, I think that there is value to expressing not just the positive, but also the negative. In fact, I think that you are actively harming your culture and creating a culture of false pride when you only encourage people to speak up to share good things.

Complaining is all about context. The problems we are facing are our context, and the solutions to those problems must be made within understanding of that context. Context is what makes microservices right for one team and wrong for another. Context is what makes hiring a certain way successful in a high-growth startup but devastating in a big company. Context is so important that when you misunderstand the role that it plays in a solution, you run the risk of misapplying that solution to a place where it will cause you more problems than it solves. Applying someone else's lessons to your context without understanding is how we end up with these cargo cult solutions.

So, the details of the problem are pretty important for putting the solution we're bragging about into context. But here's the thing. If you squash people who want to complain or criticize, you lose the details of your problems. Those complaints contain the details!

Does your company have a practice of telling people to "bring solutions, not complaints?" That is at best hiding problems, not avoiding them. It is unrealistic to expect people to be able to solve every problem they see in front of them. I mean, can you do that, really? It is hard enough to expect your executives to be able to do this, believe me, I know. Your team is going to see problems that they will not know how to solve, and to tell them to keep that to themselves until they figure out the solution is a great way to avoid dealing with real issues.

Instead, I encourage you to ask people to give you details when they have complaints. Help them put their complaints in context. If they complain a system sucks, ask them why. Maybe the answer is that they don't like the formatting standards, in which case an appropriate response might be, unfortunately not everything goes your way. On the other hand, maybe the answer is that it takes them a long time to make changes because the system has no tests and breaks easily, in which case, perhaps you want to think about actually fixing that problem.

If you do this well, you actually teach people how to understand which problems are important, and which problems are not. Letting people complain might seem like it will do nothing but encourage negativity and drama, but if you guide people to learn from their complaints it can instead help your team grow. It's great when people can bring problems AND solutions to you simultaneously, but it's more likely that they will need help to see the best solution. Helping them see the best solution starts by helping them understand how to state the problem.

We are going to have disagreements and conflict in our teams. None of us sees the world in the same way, and that is good. We form teams because as a group, sharing our perspectives, we can create things that are greater than the sum of their parts. Trying to create conflict-free environments is a fool's errand. But you can guide conflict and complaints to result in an increased understanding of context. Instead of discouraging all disagreement, push people to be specific about their thoughts and concerns, and attempt to understand them. As a leader, ask questions to tease out details, and show that you are actually interested in the perspectives on your team, even when you might disagree.

Taking pride sometimes means speaking up when something doesn't seem to be right, when something seems to be less than what it could be. Criticism can help us become even better than we are, if we are willing to listen to its details. Please don't smother this in the name of harmony or positivity, because repressing conflict only leads to a false sense of security and prevents us from achieving true greatness.

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