Bring Solutions, Not Problems

The most useless vocalization in the world is a baseless or brainless complaint without intent to improve.

Examples:

  • “That code is so bad.”
  • “This process is awful.”

If you do this, you’re helping no one. In fact you’re just adding poison to the well. Hopefully you want more than that. Hopefully you want to influence your team in a positive way.

If you come upon a problem, a process that is inefficient, or maybe just something you don’t agree with, step back for a moment and think about the way you’d fix it. Now present that.

Examples:

  • “Your code runs a little slow. Have you tried doing this?”
  • “I was thinking about this process, and I think it’d be better if we did it this way.”

Be prepared, though. In my experience it is the person who comes up with a better solution that is called to implement and maintain it.

Persist or Drop It.

Not all good ideas are immediately adopted. When this happens the only two options you really have are to keep bringing it up, or Let It Go. (I’m sorry!)

Sometimes you’re going to feel like you’re trying to lead a one man rebellion from inside a prison in a distant universe by Morse code on a xylophone. It’s not always easy, but a good idea can be worth it.

For example, I started trying to edge my team in the direction of a DevOps mindset around the time PowerShell DSC came out, about 2 years ago. But change is hard to come by. This is the same reason that in IT dinosaurs still roam the earth.. like that production NT 4 box I caught sight of recently. Blew my mind.

When you know there’s a better way, you just have to keep at it. My team and I are now working on a project to implement Cisco UCS Director and PowerShell DSC with VMware to provide a scalable, efficient, and reliable VM life-cycle service delivery. Team members are learning and using PowerShell more every day. We’ve learned that the solution to a problem is rarely to throw more bodies at it. Persistence is paying off. Who knows where we’ll go from here.

That being said, you also have to know when to get out. Don’t be afraid to agree that your idea isn’t as good as you originally thought when people start poking holes in it. Go back to the drawing board. Fight again another day.

Or, even better, be OK admitting that a teammate’s idea is a better one than yours. Embrace it, adopt it, and help them run with it.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

At the end of the day they’re your team, your colleagues, and, hopefully, they’re at least a little bit your friends. That’s how I prefer my co-workers anyway.

Do everything you do with the intent to support your team. Come up with things that make all of you a better more efficient machine, but also do your part to create an environment people want to be a part of.

Disagree, don’t antagonize. Raise up, don’t knock down. The best ideas, the greatest achievements, will come when people want to be a part of the conversation. Be excited and interested in your work and you’ll find that it’s a rather infectious feeling.

Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world.” In IT we have a similar philosophy that we refer to as garbage in, garbage out. By definition, the quality of the output is equal to the quality of the input. If you want to have a great team, start by being a great teammate.