Learning to Learn at EverestEngineering.
I am fortunate to be working at EverestEngineering and was part of a “coaching experiment” in the company. One of the core values of EverestEngineering is to “help others grow”.
In the same spirit, this experiment was about coaching and mentoring a few people in the company and refining and understanding the process before scaling it to everyone. Daniel Prager was my coach for the six weeks of the experiment with a session of about 1 hour once every week. Dan is from Australia and I’m from India. We had to connect remotely. We used Zoom as a video conference tool. Dan has a consulting firm, you can reach him here.
I want to share my experiences, learnings and a few things that stood out during the sessions. I’ve also put a tl;dr at the end.
Week 1: Self Evaluation. 👨
The target of this session was to find out what my goals were, what I’m good at, and where I can do better. I answered a leadership (which was one of my unrefined goals) quiz about myself for a potential score in 4 categories. Driver, Organizer, Collaborator, and Visionary. It’s generally good to have all the scores balanced than have one too high and one too low. My “Collaborator” score was the lowest and my “Driver” and “Organizer” scores were pretty high. I was a bit surprised but found it to be very true as I later learned. So, now I knew where I needed to improve.
I appreciated two things Dan used to do after every session:
- He used to provide the sources and some carefully chosen articles related to whatever he coached me that day. For example, after the first session, he shared articles about the quiz, why those 4 categories make sense, etc. I’ve shared some resources at the end.
- He gave “homework”. After this session, one of the homework was for me was to read up on the Harada method (for which he already shared an article 👌) to be able to refine my goals.
I was used to reading personality development books before. But in the recent past, I started reading only technical books to learn all the new geeky stuff. This first session immediately made me realize I had fallen pretty behind in leadership and personal skills and that leadership is not just about being technically strong but a lot more things that I haven’t even heard or thought of.
Week 2: Refining Goals. 🎯
“Leadership” or “Collaborator” were very unrefined or broad things to target. So, we needed to further refine the goal. I tried to answer the question “what in my opinion was an example of a perfect leader” so we can focus on the solution. I came up with some characteristics I felt a good leader should have. I just blurted out the first few things that came to my mind. We moved forward because there was scope to improve this later. We noted them down and I rated myself in those characteristics. The next thing was to improve my score in each of those characteristics by 1. So if my score is n in one of them— what should I do to make it n+1?
This n to n+1 question laid the foundation for the next few sessions. I’d come up with an idea to n++ one of the characteristics, try it during the week and share the experience in the following session. Choosing a good idea is often hard and talking to someone with more experience is an easy way to get a lot of good validated ideas. We would sometimes brainstorm ideas. Often, we’d also try to see if an idea would also work towards improving my “Collaborator” score.
As a result of these sessions, I started consciously thinking about everything I do — how I speak with my teammates or when I’m not comfortable doing something. One such thing I was not comfortable doing was giving explicit feedback. When I told Dan about it, he introduced me to Radical Candor which was one of the things I decided to try for over the next weekend for n++.
Radical Candor felt so natural and the exact solution for my problem and I should have been able to find it, yet someone had to spell it out and show it to me. And I think that’s why it’s easier if you have someone experienced to just nudge in the right direction. Sometimes, that’s needed to find relevant information from so many things on the internet.
As usual, homework and articles were shared.
Week 3: n to n+1. 📈
I now had some action that I can take. Some action towards better leadership and not just a better programmer. Some action for making myself better. Focussed actions for focussed improvement. It felt great. I tried a few ideas over the weekend and shared them with Dan.
Sometimes I was not sure which characteristic a particular idea should fall under. Sometimes one idea would fall under multiple characteristics. This was just a sign of a more focussed area of improvement. This also meant the initial characteristics that I chose were probably not very accurate. But this was fine. There was going to be a step where we reiterate on the small n to n+1 goals and characteristics to change them and make them better.
I was all over Radical Candor this week. It is a simple concept introduced by Kim Scott. It revolves around how you should care for your employees and give direct feedback. From the website:
Radical Candor™ is Caring Personally while Challenging Directly.
I also read some articles on code reviews and tried a few ideas from them. I tried to show why a requested change was important instead of just requesting it. I tried to use a more friendly tone instead of a demanding one.
I also recalled telling Dan that “everything feels like time management for me” after the first session. I’d take on any number of tasks and not say “no” to anyone. This also felt like something to improve alongside “collaboration”. Dan shared some articles related to Agile and Kanban.
Week 4: Personal Kanban. ⏲
I saw some videos of Jim Benson that were shared after the previous session. They talk about “quality” over “quantity” and how many items in “Work in Progress” will have an exponential cascading effect on the quality of work delivered. I also read about WIP limits and “Hofstadter’s Law”.
It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
I realized I’m not managing my WIP limits (or even considering them). I also realized the exponential effect of having too many things in progress. I was thinking about everything I had to do even when I was doing only one of them.
I was also reading a book around that time called “The Goal” which shared many things with what I was learning. It felt really good that I was doing something that one of the best selling books talks about.
Week 5: Revisiting the goals. ➰
This week was more reading and reflecting. I tried the WIP limit of just 1 forgetting about everything else (similar to Pomodoro). It was super productive and allowed more focus on one task. I also read up on blameless retrospectives and how they were important when a disaster happens.
After spending about 3 weeks to achieve the goals, I now understood how the leadership characteristics I initially chose could be better. I also felt two of the characteristics were the same thing. I merged those two into one and added a new one. I reevaluated my scores and gave new scores to each one.
This step felt really important as the initial characteristics I set for a leader felt a little bit vague because I had very little idea of what a perfect leader looked like at the time. But as I had some time to learn and think more about leadership, reading several articles and spending time improving those characteristics, I better understood why they felt vague and got some ideas about how they can be better.
It’s important to Just Do It™ and start somewhere with some goals even though they feel vague and uncertain. Revisit them at a later time when you understand what’s wrong with them and then change them and make them better and certain.
Week 6: Feedback and next steps. 👏
The final week was Dan taking feedback and understanding how I felt during the coaching sessions. This article and an “elevator pitch” were part of the last session’s homework.
The next steps were me trying to continue to practice what I learned and make it a habit to always have an n to n+1 goal.
Conclusion. 🙌
When this course started, I thought I was going to get a few tips on leadership and get feedback on some things I can do better. It did that. But it did a lot more.
It taught me the delight in having an experienced coach giving nudges in the right direction. It lets you get to practice your theory quickly.
It taught me that you first need to know what you want to learn, where you stand now and what’s the next step. It also taught the importance of having a process that you can stick to. The process can be any of the so many available. And… the process can change when it needs to. Even the goals can change. And that’s not a bad thing. It just means you are able to better understand what your goals are.
At the end of the day, the biggest lesson it taught me was how to learn anything.
TL;DR
Choose a goal ➜ refine it ➜ find it’s n to n+1 ➜ do it.
Simply put, like Eliyahu M. Goldratt put it in “The Goal”:
For the ability to answer three simple questions: ‘what to change?’, ‘what to change to?’, and ‘how to cause the change?’
Some resources Dan shared with me.
- The FEBI quiz: http://www.milinstitute.se/pub/arkiv/G_Whitelaw_paper.pdf
- Harada method: https://www.isixsigma.com/methodology/lean-methodology/the-harada-method-reduce-the-eighth-waste-part-1-of-2/
- Solution focus: http://coachingleaders.co.uk/what-is-solution-focus
- Radical Candor: https://www.radicalcandor.com
- Good code reviews: https://github.blog/2015-01-21-how-to-write-the-perfect-pull-request/
