Do Hard Things
My First Year at Chick-fil-A Part 2
by Gabe Hoffman
This the second part of my series about what it’s like getting to pioneer at Chick-fil-A. In part one, I focused on how staff are encouraged to “create tomorrow together.” That has given us courage to pursue some non-traditional ideas, including beginning a massive transition of our order taking and making systems: the point-of-sale system. By getting “better at together” we are able to innovate as a team and do hard things with kindness so that we can go and create tomorrow.
Do Hard Things
As engineers, we will work tirelessly today so that we don’t have to do work in the future. It’s really the core driver for the best engineers. That’s why Bill Gates is often quoted that he’d give the hardest jobs to the laziest people, because they’d always find an easier way. Engineers enjoy finding other engineers that also enjoy doing hard things, and then love to talk about how hard those things are.
Which is of course a wonderful part about being fed so well at the Support Center. When we come into the office, a couple of days a week, we can eat together (for free), and talk about life, and have some human connection, maybe get a milkshake or a seasonally flavored Ice Dream (again, for free) and then walk back to the amazingly styled workspaces and keep on doing hard things. We can work from home, we can work from downtown Atlanta, we can work at the Support Center, we aim to be flexible as we look to the future of the workplace, but the goal is the same, do the hard things connected to a team, connected to a support system that is nurturing you with human connections. You need a team. You can’t really do hard things anymore without a team. And to be able to do the hardest things, you’ll need a team made of teams. Teams made of a diverse set of skills all putting their energy in the same direction. What we say at CFA is that we are Better Together. Because together we can do hard things. The trouble is that sometimes it’s the together that is the hard thing. Sometimes the energy of the group is spent on efforts inside the group to try and keep cohesion, or maybe the group’s energy is in many different directions. I’m not saying we’ve done this perfectly at all, but I would tell you, most all the energy spent in our program is spent on solving problems that are outside of our teams, not wasted on internal team drama. And the secret to that is kindness.
Do Hard Things, With Kindness
To me, kindness means that you assume positive intent for other people’s actions. It means you focus feedback on the outcome rather than guessing at someone’s motivations. At a people company, kindness is the grease in the gears than makes the systems run smoothly. However, sometimes we mistake kindness for being nice. Chick-fil-A is full of very nice people. You aren’t going to get far in our culture if you’re rude or intolerant. But kind also means that you get and give real feedback.
At NEXT, we were encouraged to find the people that make us better… the “Iron Sharpeners.” These are people that you can count on to give you the feedback to help you get better. Too often, I am unaware of what’s it’s like to be on the other side of me. I need people to tell me. I can get focused on the tasks and lose track of the people. I need the people around me to be clear and call me up instead of calling me out. Clear is kind, we say. We are committed to be excellent not just in our outcomes but in how we get there.
The product owners I work with have done an incredible job of giving me this type of feedback. We meet several times a week to make sure we’re all on the same page and to compare notes. We see if we’re all seeing the same things. We give each other an opportunity to do a little sharpening of the iron. We have a team that allows us to lead with vulnerability, to say how we feel before we even have a chance to figure out exactly what we think. We have enough trust and enough shared experience that, when someone feels like something is off, we can trust that feeling and dig into it. We have built enough trust that they can call me out when I’m making it unpleasant to be on the other side of me. We all hold each other to the shared commitment of being the world’s most caring company. I’m not saying we hit that mark all the time, but it’s the mark that we hold ourselves to aiming for every time. When everyone commits to kindness it means that most of our energy goes outward towards solving our shared problems. By giving frequent small feedback we aim to smooth off those sharp edges. Clear is kind. And by offering kindness we make more progress over time.
Steward Your Story
I was chatting with some colleagues recently about the secret ingredient in the Chick-fil-A culture. We had several ideas, but they all came down to one simple word from our corporate purpose. Stewardship.
Our culture is about taking care of the things that have been entrusted to us from those that have gone before us and to dare to invest those gifts for others yet to come. We don’t own our talents, we steward them. Our code, our apps, our abilities…they aren’t ours to get build an empire with. They are ours to cultivate a culture. I think this ethos of stewardship has been at the heart of Chick-fil-A from the beginning. Every time I hear a story of someone that served alongside our founder, Truett Cathy, I learn a little more about how the family is rooted in stewardship. They pass that on to all of us. They encourage us to invest in our team, to invest in the future, to take care of the shared culture, and keep the fire of what makes this place uniquely Chick-fil-A burning bright. Though they didn’t use this example from the stage, the way it translated to me and my experience was through Dungeons and Dragons. That might take some explaining.
I love playing games. I didn’t grow up playing D&D, in fact our family viewed it with some suspicion. Fast forward a few decades and some of my friends from work invited me to play. We’ve been playing for almost 7 years now. I can tell you it’s been the single best tool for me to learn how to lead a large complex team. By learning how to build an adventure, learning how to make sure all your players are enjoying play, learning how to make them the heroes of the journey, allowing the story to unfold in ways you’d never expect, and simply learning how to actively listen to other people’s story, has been transformative in how I lead.
Let me take you back into the room where I had gathered 30+ people to pitch a disruptive idea. It initially struck me that making a presentation of my ideas would be a giant waste of everyone’s time. It’s a room full of lead engineers who have been at CFA longer than me and know more about their products than me. I can’t tell them anything they don’t already know. But I can take them on an adventure. D&D had taught me that. Players love to play. I could craft a campaign, set up some big bad monsters, and make sure that everyone at the table got to lean in tell how their product’s story would defeat the giant ogres. Now I didn’t actually come dressed to work as a wizard, but that was what was going through my head. What we actually did is that we started with a simple exercise to make a crayon drawing of how an order flows from a guest through the restaurant and turns into hot food for the team member to hand over to them (create a shared understanding and starting point). We drew out the old architecture and the new one, we went over the things that were likely to go wrong in the field (set up the monsters). We brought in outside help (every group needs a few magic items). And we talked through solutions (we battled the trolls). When progress was made, a teammate would create some progress markers (save points) as an assertion of an agreed upon idea. “We assert that ____.” Things that we could revisit at a future point, but for now, we’d all assume to be true so that our story could progress to the next level. I had about 15 minutes of content prepared for the 3 day journey, and I knew some of the stops on the road we’d need to aim for, but I had no idea how we’d do it, and I didn’t need to because we were going to create that story together. I was there to steward the time, it wasn’t on me to be brilliant, it was only on me to make sure we all got to play the game.
Early on in my career I thought my ideas were brilliant. If everyone could just get onboard with this new bit of awesome, we’d all win. I think a lot of engineers like to be the hero of their games. But I’ve learned that winning happens when we remember that the impact on people matters more than any individual outcome we produce because the process is the real product we’re shipping. The roads that we pave from an idea to a feature is real innovation. If we can make a way for other people’s great ideas to reach more people, we all win. I want take down bigger monsters than I can solo, I want more than the best I can produce. I want to see the wins only a team can produce. We are stewards of a story.
Getting Better At Together
Our program lead is a great systems thinker. He was recently telling me about the Aswan dam in Egypt. They built a hydro-electric dam to capture the amazing power of the Nile River. Wikipedia summarizes like this
“As a structure it is a success. But in its effect on the ecology of the Nile Basin -most of which could have been predicted- it is a failure.”
TLDR; The idea is that, while it’s working well as an energy generator, there have been many instances where that same energy has to be spent on fixing the problems it caused. And while the exact tradeoffs aren’t simple to summarize, it’s not hard to think of many teams where the energy we use to implement some new system have the result of causing more energy being spent on the cleanup of our idea than desired outcome. These are the types of teams that engineers find exhausting. More energy going to the meta problems than the real ones. How ideas are intended and how they play out can be very different. Unless your people are willing to be vulnerable you might not even know about how much energy is going into people protecting themselves from the environment that you create as a leader. That’s why creating a culture of psychological safety is so important. You’re not going to get the best ideas if you can’t be vulnerable. You’re not going to get breakthrough if you don’t allow people to show up as themselves. And you have to be able to bring your whole self to work. Our program lead models this for our program. Let me tell you about the day he used the F word. “Feelings.”
We were in the middle of that very long three-day decision-making summit I mentioned previously, deep in the weeds of discussing implementation choices. Our program lead had been listening to the back and forth and made the statement that he strongly felt that option one was the best choice, but he wasn’t sure he could explain why.
We went with option one. Why? Because one of our senior level engineers asserted that his intuition was telling him that a particular set of tradeoffs was better than the other one. We all knew we had many more topics to cover. We knew that we weren’t going to get more from him; he just said he couldn’t explain it. We all know that feeling. What if we trusted it? What if we trusted that in others? Most of us in the room have been doing this for more than a decade or two. Our feelings are now informed by our experiences. Sometimes words are hard, and all you have is the feeling. Use that. We have created a culture that allows feelings to surface to help guide tough choices. Later that day, he also wrote five paragraphs about why. He shared the logic that eventually came to the surface, and it was solid. Using feelings as a shortcut allowed us to move on to the next topic and keep solving problems. It might sound a bit counterintuitive to use your feelings to make engineering choices but for that day we did. We decided those feelings have value. We can trust them for now, and when you have the words, we trust you to share them. You can’t have that if people are not willing to be vulnerable and if the culture you create doesn’t allow people to share things before they are properly packaged.
Having a safe and caring place to work where everyone’s voice is valued leads to better work results. Great ideas don’t come forward if people are scared to offer them, and often the really revolutionary ideas come from people that see things from a different point of view. Everyone has to feel safe to show up and engage if we are going to create a place that allows for the best ideas to flourish. We have to get “better at together.” Our corporate purpose reminds us to have a positive impact on everyone we come in contact with, and that everyone is included in everyone.
How We Win. Together
As I have gotten a few more grey hairs in my beard, I’ve started to appreciate the idea that remembering the lessons we’ve learned might be even more valuable than the unending quest for new ones. I’ve learned that what’s next might look more like something that has already happened. I’m excited about NEXT as a part of an annual tradition of looking towards the future and remembering the past. Mostly though, I’m starting to really buy into the idea that we’re a people company. Our biggest problems aren’t the technological challenges that we’re facing. The hardest challenges are the human challenges that come with doing hard things at a large scale with high stakes, all while remaining kind. At this point in my career, things like languages, platforms, or new APIs are not what scares me. I know how to learn. I’m confident in who I can call on for help. I know what I don’t know. I’ve learned that the words “I don’t know” are not nearly as scary as I thought they were. To borrow a metaphor from the sports-ball world, I’ve learned that as I’m going down the field, passing the ball is a strategically important part of the game. I understand that my dazzling moves that I thought were awesome are more of a distraction. My endurance, my position on the field, and ability to read the team matters more than some fancy moves to get open. When I connect with the other players and we can field a well-balanced team, then we win. Software is a team sport now, at least at the levels that I want to play the game at. I want to tackle big hard problems to empower millions of interactions so that our guests can feel the care that we put into making great products.
Hopefully you’re making that same realization at this point in your journey as well. If you’re in the first half of your career, it’s important to learn how to be as fluent in the tech stack you use as you can possibly be. It’s crucial to be able to have the agility to switch stacks (because you’ll have to, multiple times even), too.
As you see the inflection point begin to emerge, as you begin to enjoy the flow of the game as much as you enjoy the goals, you’re going to want to remember as often as you learn. Remember that it’s the people stuff more than the tech stuff that needs your focus. I’m not suggesting you hang up your cleats. I’m suggesting that when you can dribble the ball without your head being down, and when your individual effort doesn’t take your whole focus, then you can play the beautiful game of development.
We are recruiting those players in Engineering at Chick-fil-A. We want those kinds of ballers that want to work for a people company, to do hard things with kindness, and to win together. We want players that will continually remind themselves that caring for each other and caring about shipping products that delight our customers are not mutually exclusive ends of a spectrum but rather are keys to unlocking a sustainable way of doing both. So much of the tech industry is about extracting as much as possible from the resources they employ. At Chick-fil-A, from the founders to the front line, it’s always been about stewarding the gifts that God has given each of us and investing those abilities in others. We’d love to invest in you. Let’s go win together.
