Despite of all the pandemic going around, this past year has been going very well for me at work.
On the team front, I have:
- started my own team
- run a daily standup meeting and scrum process
- new hire onboarded very well and already became go-to person across teams
- built a reputation of an effective/efficient team
- team seems happy and productive
- influenced beyond my team and attracted talents to contribute to my team
On the technical front, I have
- built and landed a data warehouse for internal analytics
- evaluated and built various ELT/ETL data pipelines using different systems
- started to actually do ML in production (yay!)
That seems like a lot of accomplishment! I do not want to brag here, but rather, I’d like to share and reflect what I have learned in this process.
1. When a mistake is made, explicitedly show empathy with the person you are interacting with, either the child or the team member, and let them know that you’ve been there yourself too.
As my son grew older and matured more, he has grown into a person with personality. He’s an amazing little guy that is curious, laughs a lot, and gets frustrated easily as a 2 year-old. As he grows, I’ve learned to really show my sympathy not just to offer hugs, but also to describe and empathize with him how he feels (“I know you are crying because we told you you can’t have another sweet pouch. I get frustrated too when I get rejected, and it’s not a great feeling, and I sometimes cry too from rejections.” Amazingly, this worked well and he actually seemed to like being understood even though it was such a complex story for him).
For my team, in our daily standup meetings we share three things:
- what I did yesterday
- what I’m planning to do today
- am I stuck?
I don’t try to look like a rock star in front of my team. In fact, I’m never afraid to share that I got stuck on something stupid, and I’d share what I’ve learned. It encouraged my team to also share their frustrations either on systems or themselves. It’s a great power because when the team is vulnerable with each other, we have more transparency and we help each other more.
When my reports share that they got stuck on something, my instinct as a mom is to show that I empathize and they are not stupid, and I have made the same mistake before too, and I try to also own the mistake that I, too, could have prevented them from wasting that much time by sharing my experience.
This in turn encourages them to share “how” they’re trying to solve a problem before they jump into the problem, then they get a chance to discuss with me and check if I have any tips to share, thus they can work more efficiently. It’s a very nice, positive feedback loop - and it starts with showing empathy.
2. Explain the reason you do certain things. If they really want to explore something themselves, warn them of the consequences and let them try things on their own.
With my son, I’ve learned to explain things in detail to him, explain why I do certain things (“I have to blow this food because it’s too hot and it will burn you”), and I also sometimes let him explore the consequences (“If you insist on eating the food when it’s hot, I’ll let you, but it is going to be hot!” and then let him touch the hot food). Usually there are no surprises, he would burst into cry if the food really is too spicy. But sometimes he surprises me that he actually can take pretty sour foods like lemon.
With my team, it’s even more interesting with this approach. A lot of times they really do want to try things on their own, and I actually do think it’s an important quality for any worker to want to try things. I actually would encourage them to try things. For example, I would say: I have tried these three tools, A, B, and C. I personally think A is the best because it provides these nice features, but at the same time the catch is that it’s a bit clunky when you try to do X. Tool B is better in that sense, but lacks other features. Would you like to try them yourself and compare with my experience?
My reports would evaluate their urgency and interest and would sometimes choose to follow my advice, while sometimes they would decide to still try these different tools because I don’t consider myself to be the expert of everything. Then I would add, “please share what you find out!” and they would go explore these options and share the experience back. They surprise me sometimes!
3. Always know where they are in their capabilities, and let them stretch their abilities a bit. Tell them you have faith they’ll do it well and if they screw up, it’s ok too because it’s a stretch.
This is pretty obvious with a toddler. My son always surprises me with his new vocabulary or things that he can now do and couldn’t yesterday, whether it’s jumping from a step down, or recognizing most of the alphabets (at 2 year old it feels really early, but I’m not an expert, nor do I teach him any letters). But I always try to come up with new tricks to let him try out, and tell him that it’s a stretch. He’s always happy to take the challenge. He gets a bit frustrated when he can’t do it, then we try again tomorrow.
With my team, it’s quite interesting. There’s this tool that I’d really love to use, but I didn’t have time to do a thorough research for it. My report is quite inexperienced, but I told her I needed the help to research this solution and tell me if it is suitable for our solution. I told her to study it for a few hours, and if she can’t get anywhere with it, we’ll drop it. I scheduled a meeting in the afternoon to go through her findings. To my surprise, she conducted a very thorough research and pointed out why we can’t use it in this scenario, but also reported where it could be useful in other cases. It definitely exceeded my expectations and I let her know that it was done amazingly.
4. You are more capable of handling mess.
Let’s face it, it’s so easy to lose it when other people mess up. When the kid spills milk after you warn them repeatedly. The team member that you reminded again and again to deliver results in time and they didn’t.
I generally try not to yell or be too upset in front of my child, likewise in front of my team. I think my mental tolerance was raised by being a mom. When learning that someone screwed up something, my mind very quickly assesses how bad the situation is, what does it take to clean up and recover, and then I tell myself, it’s ok, it’s replaceable, I can wipe up the milk spill, throw out the broken glass, I can go and explain to the other team.
Overall, I’m just tougher mentally for other people’s mistakes, and I honestly don’t even mind if people think they are my mistakes - because I’m reponsible for them.
5. You learn to keep an eye on the present, but the other eye on the long term solutions.
Being a mom, you are forced to be very present. Your kid needs to eat now. Your kid wants you to read a book now. Your kid should go to bed now.
But you’re also forced to look at longer term down the road - should he go to preschool? What are the pros and cons of different schools? He likes fish and other water animals, should we get an annual pass for the aquarium? What should we do with all the toys?
It has forced me to have the same mentality when running a team. My team is happy now, but what about 3 months from now? 6 months from now? We need a system to do code review, otherwise our data pipelines will explode and become really hard to maintain. I need to build a process so other teams can follow the process without my team running around doing small fixes all the time.
This long-term mentality really puts me into looking at the bigger picture, and that has actually helped me in a professional setting and has come up a lot in my performance reviews, which is a wonderful side effect.