Never Kick Anybody When They’re Down
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The title of this post comes from a quote by Jack Welch, former CEO of General Electric, in a Freakonomics podcast.
WELCH: The worst one, I think that I could think of off hand — I had a number of experiences in my life and while I was running it that were uncomfortable. I blew up a factory.
(snip)
I expected I might get fired. I drove down in my Volkswagen from Pittsfield. I met Charlie, it turns out he was a Ph.D. Chemical Engineer from M.I.T. So, he took me through the Socratic method. You know, “Why it happened? What would you do differently? Why did you do that? Why didn’t you do this?” And he was coaching me, and it was — couldn’t be nicer. And I learned from that, never kick anybody when they’re down. Kick them when they start to swell and instead of grow, and whack ’em when that happens.
The quote says that you should never condemn someone for making a mistake. They already know themselves that they had messed up and there's no need for others to pile on. Instead, you should help them learn from it.
I'd like to give some perspectives on this quote from two different angles (both based on personal experience):
Perspective 1: As the one who made the mistake
In my first year as a software engineer, I was really bad at getting things done. I was only given a single task and had a bunch of time to spend on getting that single task done. Yet, I failed time and time again to get it done.
Sure, I was working on it but it was my first year and I really didn't know what the code base, how the system worked, how the business worked, etc. We didn't have much documentation nor much hand over from the previous engineer. I was really struggling.
We had a weekly status update meeting with my manager and my manager's manager. As I wasn't geting anything done, my update was always "no update, still working on it". It's not hard to imagine how that looked to my manager's manager (he wasn't happy). One day, he snapped and said something along the lines of:
Why is this taking ages? I can't believe you're still working on this. What are you really doing everyday? Please send me an e-mail report of what you are doing everyday.
How did this feel to me struggling in their first year as a software engineer and knowing I wasn't getting anything done? It felt really bad. I became really afraid and anxious. My performance dipped further and I became even less productive.
Now that I look back, I think what I needed was some coaching and mentoring. There's responsibility on my part to for not seeking out for help but it would probably have resulted in a better outcome if my manager or manager's manager had created an environment where I could have asked for that help.
Perspective 2: As the manager
This is a fairly recent event and had a couple of years under my belt as a manager.
One of my team members (let's call him Sam) was working on a project and he was having a hard time making progress. He had some software engineering experience at his previous job but the language and framework we were using was new to him.
We had another senior engineer who had a lot of experience in the area and was giving a lot of feedback to Sam (e.g. in code reviews, etc). It was obvious Sam was suffering and the code review feedback was really getting to him. The reviews were good and constructive but there was quite a lot of it and it was piling up inside Sam. Sam would come to our 1-on-1s with a lot of anxiety and stress. He was essentially suffering from "imposter syndrome".
As manager I had two options:
Hard feedback: Tell Sam that he wasn't doing a good job and that he'll need to up his game.
Soft feedback: Tell Sam that he was doing OK and that he was making progress so he should keep at it.
From my experience and Jack Welch's word, I knew option 1 was not a good idea. It would back him into a corner and make matters worse. His impostor syndrome would get worse, he would become less produtive and worst case, leave the company.
I went with option 2. I told Sam that he was doing OK and the code reviews and feedbacks from the senior engineer was going to make him better. Sam understood and went back sifting through the feedbacks.
The result? Sam was able to start delivering, overcome his imposter syndrome and he became the go-to-person for the area.
My take away from these two experiences is that it's really important to be mindful of how you give feedback. It's really easy to kick someone when they're down. You may feel good (you've probably let some of your stress out too), but it's not going to help the person and probably not a good long term strategy for you either.
So, "Never Kick Anybody When They’re Down".