From Player to Pawn? One Engineer’s Perspective (Part 2)

In Part 1 of this series I shared my experience feeling extremely motivated and engaged while working on a project to build a new workflow engine. Reflecting on that experience I discover four things¹ I pointed out in the last article that I discovered to be important for me to feel motivated and inspired:

1. The feeling that what I’m working on is important and impactful
2. Meeting and talking with the people who my work will help
3. Decisions being made openly based off information gathered from and visible to all involved parties.
4. A sense of freedom and autonomy to solve problems and make decisions within requirements.

In this article, I will discuss how changing circumstances led me to feel less motivated and engaged, in an attempt to understand what it means for me to feel like a “pawn”.

One For All and All For One

During the time I had been working on the new workflow engine, I was technically still on the team that would be utilizing the engine and not the team actually responsible for building it. The engine is meant to be used by a number of company products, so it seemed appropriate when I was asked to join the actual workflow team. The plan was to help build out the engine for all of these products once we’d completed the requirements for my old team’s product.

In the previous post I discussed a promise I’d made to our customers that I would do everything in my power to make the new workflow engine a positive experience for them. I soon learned however that we really only had the time to add the features needed for one of these customers, due to the pressing needs of other products. To be fair, this one customer was funding the entire project, so we really had no obligation to help any of the other customers. Nevertheless it was still a disappointment to learn that there would be no way for me to fulfill my promise to help all of the customer in the foreseeable future. First conclusion:

1. I no longer felt the same connection and inspiration to the mission I was working toward and the people I was helping.

I was still determined to meet the needs of the one customer and I think, in my heart, I hoped that maybe if I worked hard enough I could still find time to complete some of the things needed by the others.

In truth, I didn’t necessarily even believe that only focusing on one customer was the wrong decision. I understood that the place where we could make the biggest impact might actually be in helping these other products. However, because I didn’t have that same connection with the other products and their customers, I couldn’t find that same level of motivation and excitement to help them.

Autonomy or Automaton?

Before proceeding I should emphasize that the following examples are not meant to condemn or criticize the people I work with, but are an attempt to understand and explain how I felt.

Soon after joining the workflow team I found that suddenly people were a lot more interested in the details of what I was working on. That by itself wasn’t a concern (I like to show off my work) but in time I started to feel over-scrutinized.

Early on I was publicly reprimanded for forgetting to test a specific use case before pushing a change to production. On multiple occasions I posted in Slack saying “FYI, I finished my current task — I’m going to work on X next” and was asked “actually can you work on Y instead?”. Another time I reported I had spent part of a day helping a colleague come up to speed on a workflow issue. I was warned that if I helped every engineer that asked for assistance, my work life might end up a “living hell”.

By themselves these weren’t major issues, but added up they were starting to make me uncomfortable. In the past these situations would have been handled differently. I would have noticed that I missed testing something and quickly rectified the situation with little fuss. I was accustomed to having the entire set of requirements in front of me and would simply pick up the next thing with little need for discussion. When others came to me for help, I would assist them if I felt like it was the right thing for the project, and ask them to get their request prioritized through the Product Manager if I wasn’t sure.

To be fair, I never felt like I was being ordered to do or not do anything and I always felt like the intent of the feedback was good. Nevertheless I started to feel like every action I took or decision I made was being analyzed and questioned. These occurrences were frequent enough that I reached the point where I found myself often paralyzed by indecision. I would go to make a decision or start on something and question whether it was right. I knew what I thought was right, but I constantly worried that it might not be what others wanted me to do.

In time I found it easier to stop making decisions and wait for them to be made for me. This definitely eased the stress of conflict, but left me feeling a little hollow and uninspired. Next conclusion:

2. I no longer felt free to act or make decisions without first seeking approval.

Previously I felt that I’d been given a huge amount of trust and freedom act autonomously and make decisions. That inspired me to work hard and take accountability for my decisions to live up to that trust. I also wanted to communicate those decisions as much as possible to others to make sure they were the right ones. Now I felt untrusted and unengaged. I was even tempted at times to communicate as little as possible about what I was working on so as to avoid conflict.

You Can’t Handle the Truth!

In the previous post, I discussed meeting with coworkers and customers to gather information and working with my Product Manager to build a prioritized list of requirements. Before joining the workflow team that list had been my “source of truth” for knowing what to do. However, that list belonged to my old team so it made sense that on my new team I would have a new “source of truth”.

I assumed that this new requirements list would simply be fed from my old requirements list and for a time that was true. After a while though I started to see requirements I didn’t recognize appear and requirements I had thought to be important disappear from the list. When inquiring about these differences, I usually discovered the change had come from a discussion that I had been unaware had taken place.

I also mentioned in my previous post that a “Core Workflow Collaboration” channel had been created. In this channel I could post questions for the community of products to discuss together. At some point this channel was removed and I no longer knew where to go to solicit feedback and generate discussion among the community of products. Instead I just pushed my questions “up the chain” and waited for answers to come back “down the chain”.

I think part of the issue was that before I was basically a team of one and now I was on a larger team. I understood that on a larger team not everyone could be involved in every discussion, but I couldn’t help but feel like I no longer had any insight or input into discussions that were taking place or decisions that were being made. At one point I described the feeling to someone as “having my baby taken away by the state and having infrequent visitation rights”.

On occasion I felt strongly enough about a decision that I voiced my opinion against it. Whether it was the intended message or not, I usually felt like the response was “The necessary parties have discussed this and the decision has already been made.”

Perhaps the largest example was a decision to redesign the UI. Simplifying the UI is something that had been hotly debated, even before I switched teams. My feeling was that the solution was to iterate on what we already had over time. Therefore I was disappointed when I learned that a UI redesign had been decided on, and that in order to accomplish the work we would need to double the team size only months before the project deadline. The disappointment didn’t really come from the fact that I disagreed with the decision, but rather that I was unsure of how the decision was reached and I wasn’t certain if all consequences of this decision had been considered. Furthermore, adding more people to the team only made me feel more distant from conversations that were taking place and decisions that were being made. Final conclusion:

3. I no longer felt like I had any insight or input into decisions that were being made.

It is entirely possible that every decision I disagreed with was actually the right one, but by not having insight into how decisions were made it was difficult for me to understand why.

Conclusion

As I reflect on these circumstances these are the things I believe make me feel like a “pawn”:

1. Feeling like I don’t have the big picture of how everything I’m working on fits together and why it is important.
2. Feeling too far removed from the people I’m helping.
3. Feeling like I have little or no insight into how decisions are made and feeling like not all involved parties are considered in the decision.
4. Feeling unable to take initiative or make autonomous decisions without prior approval.

But wait, there’s more!

I just couldn’t leave this discussion on a down note. Besides, what good does it do to present problems and no solutions? In the third and final part of this series I’ll discuss potential ways that I might be able to go “from Pawn back to Player”.

Footnotes:

1 Since publishing the first part of this series, several people have pointed out to me that there is a popular book entitled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us that focuses on several of the very things I’ve discovered about myself.