To be an effective leader, you need to develop many skills. Communicating is one of the harder leadership skills for software developers to master. One of the reasons I started this blog is to help spread my painfully acquired knowledge about engineering leadership to people… If one person changes their actions as a result of a blog post, then that was a blog post worth writing. Writing this blog is not a community project—I have a great editor and a premium Grammarly subscription. I am grateful beyond words for these two things.
I also write this blog because it helps me be a better communicator. Communication is an important part of leading people, and I have a few more posts about it in the queue.
Today’s post is about editing.
As a leader, you need to apply many filters to your messaging. This gets complicated because you might need to apply these filters in real-time or figure out how to artfully retract or edit a misstep in your messaging. Thankfully, Slack allows you to delete or edit your messages, which is one of the features I appreciate tremendously. You can sneer all you like at me, confessing to posting a message in an incorrect channel or for an incorrect audience. Karma will fax you your comeuppance eventually; it has happened to me and will happen to you.
Here are some filters you may apply when putting your words onto the internet for all eternity.
Does this violate human resources or employer policies?
This is generally an easy one to follow. Most of us have common sense, an understanding of confidentiality agreements, and possibly training about what is and is not acceptable in professional communications.
Am I being unreasonably aggressive to one or more people?
This one is tricky. When you want to give someone really hard feedback, it is important to give it privately. It is also important to couch it professionally. I enjoy the “coaching sandwich” approach to written messages. You start by saying a positive statement, followed by your feedback (generally not positive), and you close with another positive statement.
“Hello, Sam. You just took down production due to an issue in your code. It appears to be a single line change, and do you even test this stuff?” is one way to communicate an issue to a team member.
“Hello, Sam. Thank you for taking point on this week’s release. Production went down for a small window of time due to a small change in the code. In the future, it would be helpful to verify changes, even little ones, to our deployments.” is is a better way to say it.
I do think that there are times to publicly tell your teams that there are issues that need to be addressed. My general approach is to message them privately first. If multiple people are making the same mistake, I might politely message the team publicly once or twice while I figure out what the overall issue is with what I am saying because sometimes the message might not carry the right level of concern or severity. Eventually, I might get to the point where I tag them publicly after I have exhausted all possibility that I am making a mistake in my communications and have given enough hints that I believe the time to wait for habit-changing has passed.
Am I hurting my team’s morale?
This is a tricky one. I have developed a good sense of what doesn’t hurt my team’s morale—by saying enough things that have driven a bus over their morale. Sometimes, I even went so far as to back that bus over the team for good measure, giggling like a madman.
Figuring out the right tone to talk to people on your team takes some time.
“Hello, I need to delegate this task to one of you, my direct reports, so I can do more important things” is one way to communicate that you need something done.
“Hello, I need someone to take on an important team responsibility that presently does not have an owner” is another way that says the same thing.
Here are a few things to note. First, don’t talk about your team as “my team.” Instead, talk about it as “our team” or “us”. I am a big fan of the “we” when talking about work. Second, do not make it sound like the work is beneath you. I will do a shift of QA when it’s needed to get stuff done—I am not proud. Presenting task choices to people as an opportunity to lead and own things is a much better approach than looking for a minion to delegate your work to.
Is this the right time for this message?
There are a few elements to message timing, especially on Friday. Please don’t fuck up somebody’s weekend if you do not have to. If I have bad news for someone, I will do my best to deliver it to them earlier in the week or on the following Monday. I know some bean counters out there will mumble about lost productivity for the dark cloud you just hung over someone’s noggin, but if it is work-related, that should be okay. Don’t send someone home to be all pissy when they take little Timmy to Little League on Saturday morning.
You will also want to avoid Friday if it is an important message. Or, if you have to deliver the message on a Friday, send a reminder to yourself to reiterate the message the following Monday. People will blow up their mental stack of work over the weekend, and if you expect everyone to have full recall and clarity after a Friday announcement, you will be disappointed.
Am I giving enough context for this message?
This merits its own article. Sometimes, people are in the middle of doing something, and when you ask them a question, they have no idea what you are talking about. Not everyone is in your head 100% of the time, and they might not understand what you are asking without a decent explanation. I am working on improving my own context-setting in messages.
Is there anyone I can ask to look at this before I send it?
This last question is the hardest for a new leader to answer. Many assume they must demonstrate that they have A+ Advanced Communication Skills on day one of their job. This is far from true! I will send draft messages to peers, managers, and even select team members who report directly to me to make sure it makes sense. You absolutely are not alone on your road to leadership, and if you have a good relationship with your boss, I 100% recommend that you take advantage of their guidance and advice in communicating with teams.
This brings us to our final two questions.
How do I feel if I pretend to be my audience and read this message?
Being able to read a message as if you are someone else is a hard skill to master. It is also an important skill to attempt. If you cannot successfully imagine how your message reads to other people, your leadership journey will be hard, if not downright impossible.
I feel like I ought to be clapping with each of the last four words above.
If. Not. Downright. Impossible.
I am sorry if I just clobbered you on the chin with a size twelve shoe.
Leadership is hard, and communication is really important. You can have individuals at work with whom you may assume some familiarity and relax one or two of these rules. You will also have times when you will need to go through this list two or three times for a really important message. You should start to develop the habit of reading messages like you are someone else if you want to take your professional growth seriously.
This final question is meant to be thoughtful and to take you away from feeling like I just shoved you down the stairs.
Does this message make sense?
This question makes me want to grab my Slack window and shake it violently. I would love to have some kind of magic voodoo software to parse my Slack messages ultra-fast and better catch goofy typos and incomplete sentences. The red squigglies underneath a mistyped word are insufficient, and I struggle with mid-stream edits when I am urgently capturing or transmitting information. I do not think I am alone in this. I think that we sometimes take it for granted. Some software does better at post-whargarble-entry error correction, and some teams do their own forward error correction correctly enough that it does not matter significantly in some environments. In other environments, you look like a zoomer fr fr, and that might not be a good look.
Thank you for reading along today. I do not have a tantalizing Amazon Affiliate Link for you today. I also don’t have a crappy one.
See you all next week!
