Mantras.

When something goes wrong, focus on what happened rather than who to blame.

There is a subtle distinction here. Personal issues should be kept private, of course. Team and business performance are about improving our processes and how we work together. Too often, those two things get confused.

Surface problems for the group to discuss. Every time I have softened on this rule, it has damaged the business.

What started happening was: “We’ll take this offline.” No, we won’t. We’ll talk about it now. People were trying to save face, and problems that the team needed to discuss became private conversations. That is office politics or school playground stuff.

A high-functioning engineering team is very clear on who knows what about what, and where people need support or training. In a sports team, you do not need a private conversation to establish that the striker is off their game. The team can see it and work on it together.

Often I would lead this by putting something I had done up for criticism. We would discuss it and work out how to improve it together. Engineers are usually used to this, but to someone who is not used to open criticism, it can come across as surprisingly blunt.

This connects to fearless feedback, but it does not have to be adversarial. It can simply be: “This happened. Let’s understand it and work out how to improve it.”

I hired a project manager who was very effective, but started having these private chats and ending calls instead of talking about problems. Then they started isolating developers rather than bringing them together. Talking about bugs or issues became a hush-hush gossip affair.

This was so wrong it makes me angry to this day. It was my fault for allowing it to happen. People got hurt.

If you are a developer in my team and you have just deleted the production database or crashed the system, you will be on the call with me and the relevant team members to fix it together.

That is a failing of the business. If an apprentice or inexperienced person was put in a position they should not have been in, that is the business’s fault. If the business did not train them, that is the business’s fault. We need to understand how we allowed it to happen.

Fear makes people cover their tracks and blame individuals. It is impossible to do good technical work that way. Borrow from the engineering practices behind aviation safety: mistakes and incidents will happen, so understand the full chain of events.

Yes, you get poor performance. But when you hire good people who want to learn, it is often a training, knowledge or skill problem. Those are the problems you want. You can work on them together.

Bad behaviour, or poor performance caused by other things, is a separate issue. Too often these are all mixed into one.

• Keep personal issues private.
• Discuss work problems openly with the relevant team.
• Invite criticism of your own work and improve it together.
• If someone drops production, include them in understanding and fixing it.

Related mantra: Give and receive fearless feedback →

Related mantra: Toxic behaviour →

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