Transparency. It’s what everyone thinks they want to hear, but often can’t handle. Its arch enemy is perception – people care about perception. Perception is reality. That sucks, a lot. Specifically in the realm of information technology. I’ve held a bunch of different job functions, which likely could be an entire post of its own. In my prior post (That sounds terrible…. | Unsolicited IT Advice), I talked a little bit about FOBSAD (Fear Of Being Seen As Dumb) and how it can prevent us from saying what we really mean. It is a sort of, I don’t know – imposter syndrome. It prevents really smart people from saying what they mean when it comes to technical inquisitions. As if, the guy (because it’s almost always “that guy”) across the table wrote the concept himself. As if him and Grace Hopper used to sit around drinking cocktails and devising up plans for coding languages.

So where’s the meat of this post Matt? We are on the second paragraph (loosely defined) already. In order to advance in your career (or more importantly make an impact), you have to be effective. People may say they want successful people, hard workers, or knowledge czars – but what they really mean is they want effective people. Effective people generally move the the ball “closer to the end zone”, or are more worried about the next play than what just happened. Being effective is hard, because being effective usually means taking one for the team in an effort to move forward. Effective people are usually never the smartest in the room, they have better things to do.

I had a leader once, we will call them Diane. I was in a meeting with Diane when a recent change that had gone awry was brought up. It quickly turned into a blame game scenario. After about 15 minutes (we’ve all been there), it was clear we were making no progress. Diane stood up in the middle of a crowded room and said – “Maybe we should’ve done more work here to reduce the risk, that’s on me. This is already done, what’s our next steps to mitigate this issue and continue with the rollout?”

Immediately I thought, this wasn’t our fault at all. We weren’t even involved. To be honest, it was clearly someone else’s fault – and they were hell-bent on not taking blame. After the meeting, Diane and I were walking back to our vehicles and I asked them, “Why’d you do that? You know we had nothing to do with it. Hell, we don’t have access to do what you said we did!?!” They stopped and said, “Who cares? Everyone in that room knows it’s not my fault, but we don’t have time to play the blame game. By taking “sudo” responsibility we’ve unblocked the project, defined next steps, and the person who screwed up – well they owe us one. And it’s always good for people to owe you one.”

I just stood – astonished. I was too busy thinking about who was to blame that I didn’t step back to see the bigger picture. I would come to find out after working with them for a number of years, Diane never got questioned in front of leadership, and I mean ever.

Leadership: “Diane what do you think?”

Diane: “I think its going to be difficult and error prone, but if you’re telling me we have to do it this way – we are going to give it 120%”

Leadership: “That’s not great, what can we do to get this done, and quickly?”

That sequence of questioning must have happened 10’s or 100’s of times. It became apparent to me that those in leadership positions were doing the best they could with limited knowledge. People like Diane, leaders trust them, because they were effective and transparent.

Diane is not this person’s real name (as you might’ve guessed). This person likely did 60% of the molding of the way I work and how I interact with others. There are multiple lesson’s I’ll probably write about in the upcoming articles, but the one I want to write about here is being effective and transparent.

Let’s start with the first one – effective. Being effective means that your only goal is succeeding as a team. That means those around you, those who depend on what you’re providing. That means progress to me. Look for opportunities to be effective – they don’t have to be self deprecating in nature, but it does mean recognizing “infinite loops”, friction, and fruitless activities. You should be working to remove all of those to help move the task forward. Help others remove them too – Help them see when they’ve gotten into these activities and need to step back.

To me, leaders balance effectiveness with diligence. Recognizing when we need to dwell and when we need to push through.

The second one – transparent. You should never omit something because it is difficult to say, or might look bad. Often the problems that are the most difficult to talk about, or look the worse, are the ones that come out when the train is off the rails. For me, I think about being transparent as a delicate balancing act. Too quick and brash, you’re dismissed. Never spoken, you’re on the hook if what you didn’t say comes back to cause things to come off hinge. I always assume that what I’m going to bring up (or identify) has already been thought of. Approach and framing ultimately will make or break you, take the example below:

Co-Worker 1: We are going to use “widget A” to make sure we don’t get into this scenario.

Now based on your knowledge, you know widget A has super high failure rates because you’ve seen it in the past, and it was written by “that guy” who closes bugs as no repro because “it works in his lab”.

So you could be blunt:

You: Widget A won’t work here, it fails all the time and it will just create more problems then it’s worth.

In a small team with your co-workers who know you, maybe you say that. In a large group you get an F for framing, C- in attitude, and you’ve probably just became a roadblock that others will mitigate moving forward. You don’t want to be frequently mitigated, that usually means you’ll be on the outside looking in.

Instead you could say something like:

You: Widget A sounds like it might work. Just curious on what lead us to choose widget A? I’ve not had a good experience with it in the past and maybe I was just implementing it wrong.

Bingo. No one can argue with other’s on the team wanting to know the why. Also if there is some reason why its the only choice, a constraint you don’t know about, you’re not telling the person their wrong – you are just asking for a bit more information about what led to the decision. You might agree with them based on the conditions and constraints – Decisions that cannot be explained are guesses, and if they don’t have a why their response will show. More importantly, you might just become an advocate for them. First you sought out to destroy their idea (effectively), but imagine you agree with them. Now you’re in their corner – when you’re in peoples corners – your life will get easier. Trust me.

You should feel empowered to question decisions and ask for the why’s. Be transparent about your thoughts and assume others have already thought of it – you work on a rockstar team right? I think I’ve mentioned this before but if I haven’t –

I think everyone is the same level, we all just have different day to day jobs.

This means leaders, CEO’s, CISO’s – whatever. I don’t subscribe to hierarchical compliance or “idea throttling”. If someone asks for my opinion or help on something, I give it 100%. No matter who, what, when, where, or why. My output only changes format, not content as it goes up the food chain. You should feel comfortable speaking up in highly visible situations – and be ready to support your colleagues (if you’re questioning one of their decisions). This doesn’t mean saying:

“Yeah Tom, I know Linda, the VP of infrastructure, is here but this won’t work. We are going to have to start over”.

Those comments will lead to resentment, loss of faith in the team, and possible team issues moving forward.

You should still say something if you have grave concerns about a plan or process being presented (does it really matter? Is speaking up being effective?) – but a phrasing along the lines of:

“Hey Tom, overall this looks pretty good. Before we lock this in, we’ve learned a few things doing “rollout X” and I’m sure you thought of them, but I’d love to just go over it with you to make sure we are good to go”

Tom saves face, Linda feels good – everyone looks like they are doing a good job – because perception is reality.

Sometimes it feels like we are awarded a token every time we prove someone wrong or look smart. That we are going to somehow turn those tokens in for a house. Being effective and transparent means helping your peers be successful, helping your team do awesome sh*t, and being seen as a trusted advisor.

I’m not sure what we’ve accomplished, but to close this out I just want to say you are smart, you’re doing your job for a reason. Take the effective and transparent path, have hard conversations, and help everyone be awesome 🙂

MC