One of the best things about being in management is dispensing wisdom, especially to very unwise people who despise the fact that your job is really necessary. I take some painful joy in helping people like this. I know the instant they have extracted what they needed from me to help them be more successful, they immediately go back to the watercooler and talk crap about me. I hope you all enjoy it, you ungrateful monsters.
When people come and ask for help there are a lot of different tools in the chest to provide them with help. I prefer to teach people how to get themselves out of their own messes than doing all their work for them. I am very fond of the fisherman metaphor and have used it to explain why I, as a teacher, do not just give all the answers to the test immediately.
“If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish you feed him for a lifetime.”
Everyone agrees this is profound and clever. There is often an aha moment for some people when they realize that what they are trying to do is analogous to fishing; dripping bits of wisdom like this onto people helps augment the mystery and power of leadership. It probably buys me about five minutes a week of reprieve from crap talking by my detractors at the watercooler. Even if it does not, it is still a “go to” for me.
The problem is that I really have it slightly wrong. I came to that realization after watching other people’s behaviors on the topic of hungry people and fishing.
It is sometimes too easy to shove someone away from work and just take it over. It is pretty brutal to do that to one of your own direct reports honestly, and it should be a tool of last resort when there is urgent business need. Generally you want to coach people to find the nuggets of wisdom they need to identify that the monster driving people out of the amusement park is really just Old Man Jenkins the Janitor. Scooby Doo mysteries have nothing to do with fishing; let me get back to my point.
The challenge with teaching people how to solve their own problems is that it is hard and time consuming. It requires skill. It requires tools. It requires super duper serious patience.
All of those things are hard to come by, plus they are usually not the things that got you into your leadership-and-or-management position to begin with.
What the hell though, you are knowledge workers, right? Figure it out.
So I want to give you my restatement of the fisherman’s parable.
“As someone who is responsible for feeding others, if you don’t teach people to fish as fast as possible you will both choke to a super stupid death on fish.”
I admit, it is not that elegant. It is rather poignant. I see people choking themselves and their teams to death quite a bit. My sage-like advice on this subject is pretty basic:
“Hey! Stop doing that!”
You have to invest some time in learning skills to teach people in a leadership or management role. Everyone has different methods that make sense for them, and there are different methods beyond those that may make more sense for the person trying to learn. I do not have a degree in teach-ology to give some advice here. I know what works for me and I know when I have to adapt those tools because someone else is choking to death on fish.
Similarly, you have to build, buy or steal tools to help with teaching. This can be collaborative documents, repos, code-along tools, or just standing behind someone with a clipboard asking smart questions. That works for some people, astonishing as that may sound.
If you do not make time to do those two things then invariably the people you are not teaching well are not going to learn well, and also they are not going to get their jobs done.
If they are not getting their jobs done and things get serious, you are going to have to do some of their work when no one is looking. Hint: This is addicting, some people like getting paid to let other people do their work for them, be very very careful of this kind of behavior and avoid making it a default.
If you create a situation where you are not teaching people the skills they need, and additionally you are carrying them over the finish line, then you will have a problem come End Of Year Review. Even if you are a 10x engineer and capable of doing amazing amounts of super cool work, the suits and bean counters will sniff you out; breaking your back does not scale. Plus, the shareholders resent the hefty carry.
Eventually the day will arrive and you will get “gently told” to be an IC, or perhaps “less gently told” the company is going in a different direction (that does not include you). At that horrific moment, you will realize that you have just choked yourself, and probably a few other people, to death on fish.
PS: I really like fish. I also like the clicks and the likes and the hashtags and the socials. Eventually I will figure out the Magic Words To Be The Viral!
