It’s been a few years since I got myself back into a leadership role after a lengthy pause. Nobody goes to leadership by being fully prepared for it, but knowing what impact my bosses had on my life (career, learning, income, mental health, etc) I care about not f*ing it up. I found support in reading and community learning as my main source of information before I got to a company-sponsored training. However, some areas never seem to have been brought up. Maybe I was blind, but I thought I’d share in case somebody else will find it useful.

Letting the team fuck around and find out

People don’t learn best from the mistake of others, it’s more effective to learn from your own. I’m aware that this goes against general wisdom. I wish it would be sometimes enough to ask the team to follow a best practice, my experience over the years, or some advice from another team or even company. This does of course work, but I notice it doesn’t make the biggest learning impact. I can’t be a hypocrite - the biggest lessons I learned were by noticing my own mistake soon enough to fix it.

So I decided it’s the best way to apply to people whose development I happen to be in charge of. Ideally, I want the team to work on the most impactful projects, but from time to time there’ll be something that I would describe as a company-neutral-impact. This is when a teammate will invest a little of their time into a project that will make very little if any impact on the company's bottom line.

However, by investing this little work time to learn, making own mistakes, making conclusions.. and generally speaking fucking-around-and-finding-out…

1. The person on the team will feel more grateful to the company for allowing the possibility to try something that they want to try.
2. The person on the team will learn much “harder”. Finding out the result this way will stick in the brain way harder than if I would just say “This is what will happen”. This kind of learning will make all the following projects (that are more impactful) much stronger.
3. There’s a chance this will have a bigger impact than anticipated, so the company wins by running a low investment test. What didn’t work a few years ago, might be working now. It’s good to find out to be wrong.

Being OK with quick and partial judgment

When your friends from high school know only the “past” version of you it’s ok. When one of the friends knows you only as a party animal that dances on the tables it’s ok. When your parents know only some things in your life it’s ok. In personal life, quick assumptions about you have no to mild consequences, like not being invited to a friend-group lunch.

If you join a big meeting and the only feedback you share is a challenging of one of the initiatives - people’s first impression can be that you’re focusing too much on the negative things. If you discuss your department budget with a colleague and refer to your team as ‘people cost’ in that particular context - they can consider you don’t think about the team as people and individuals. Part of leading other people is helping them spot areas of improvement - some will understand that this is part of your job and be grateful, others will make conclusions that you’re nitpicking and criticizing (which can be of course true if there’s no balanced feedback).

I especially found it amusing to get a reputation as a control freak by using spreadsheets for project tracking. Being raised by an accountant and an engineer this is the most common sense thing for me, not to mention that without notes I won’t keep 10 projects’ details in my head. However, for somebody who’s “raw dogging” managing their scope of work, my way of working would be making me a dork, that later gets extrapolated to being rigid to changes, inflexible, micromanaging, etc.

The whole topic of stakeholder management and company reputation exists for a reason and is indeed something people need to keep in mind. However, I don’t see nearly enough attention to the topic of how to deal with this partial random impression that people have of you, as you have to encounter them back at work where you spend 1/3 of your life. Just like in personal life, it’s important to be just calm and OK with that fact that people will form their opinions about you, and you won’t be able to do anything about it. However, it is harder to just be cool if the cost of it is not being assigned to a project, having your opinion ignored for a company strategy, or being missed for a promotion.

People are great at some things are horrible at others

Have you ever had an inner debate if you should be still listening to the music you love if the person who made it turns out to be a piece of shit?

I find similar inner debate with people I was or am working with.

Level easy. Everybody is good at something and worse at other aspects. This is normal, this is the base. This is the disillusionment that we go through first with our parents and then later with first bosses. The roles we perceive as “they must know what they are doing” and the shattering glass of realization that everybody from age 3 to 88 is just winging it. At work, you’ll meet people who are good at some tasks, and fuck up epically at others. It’s just a learning curve that we all are following.

Level harder. I admire a lot of people work-wise that I happened to meet professionally. I’m amazed by their work ethics, stamina, creativity, energy, art of people management, conflict-resolving skills, mental business math, ruthless necessary decision making, being a visionary, hunger for bettering self, work tech genius etc. Which makes me very confused how to continue our professional relationship when they do something weird.

Some examples of weird actions I observed from people who are absolutely amazing at work things:

• Spread (not true) affair rumors to get a person fired
• Make the team clock out to take a bathroom break
• Refuse to collaborate with girls who refused to go out on a date
• Take sick leave every time a person on the team had to be fired, so that HR department had to do it instead
• Fly off the emotional rails into a screaming match at a mild disagreement
• Ask only girls to get things ready for team lunches and clean up afterwards
• Publicly shame their immediate team (midmgmt) in front of the whole company as a lesson
• Openly xenophobic

If you walk with a friend and see them kick a stray dog, you can make a decision based on your own moral compass if you continue being friends with somebody. For each of us those lines are in different places and are often blurred. Some things we tolerate from relatives, we wouldn’t tolerate from friends. Some things are eh-enough to be accepted. But there’s always a choice.

In a company environment, you’re stuck with it for some years, as you can’t change jobs by encountering behavior you’re not OK with. Often you can’t even stop communication with such individuals. It’s a weird mix of respect and disrespect that I find interesting to mentally manage, as my values are not the right ones for others or might not align with a company ones.

Shutting up to say “ewww.. “ 🙄 and keep talking to the person is not the exercise I prefer.

These are by no way a career dealbreakers, but I found this to be an interesting topic to bend my morals and mental health around as I entered workforce. If you have any tips how are you handling those, please do share!