Category: Protip

Make Friends – Help a Busy Person

May 2nd, 2023
One of the easiest ways to make friends and allies in business is to help people.

Seriously. It’s often that simple.

It doesn’t even have to be that big of an effort on your part. In fact, the busier the person you’re talking to, the smaller the assistance has to be a lot of the time.

Don’t get me wrong, they’ll thank you for doing huge things for them as well (provided you do them properly), but the busier someone gets, the more small things pile up that need to be taken care of and the harder it is to get them off of their plate.

I say this both as someone who often is a very busy person as well as someone who helps others in order to further strategic goals (and sometimes just because it’s the right thing to do. You don’t always have to have an ulterior motive).

If you take something off of my plate and do it well, you’ll both get my attention and generally a public call out for it in the next group meeting. I’ll make sure that others know that you’re someone who helps out. A lot of the people I’ve worked with are the same way.

Let’s look at a real world example of this in action.

Part of my job is to put my team and the work that we do in a good light. One of the ways that we do this is to demo the work that we do to business stakeholders. These stakeholders can be anything from line managers to members of the C-suite depending on the situation. (No pressure, right?)

In order to do this well, you need to do some prep work. In this case, we were working with one of the business Subject Matter Experts so that we would present the technical aspects and they would speak to the business impact (as a pattern, it’s pretty effective).

This requires setting up meetings which, in a busy environment, can be a challenge because of everyone’s schedules.

Normally, this is something that our Scrum Master (a wonderful and incredibly busy person of whom I am quite fond) would help facilitate. However, since this is my team’s show (as it were), I put it on my list of things to do just to make sure it doesn’t fall through the cracks.

I didn’t state that I was going to do it, I just did it because it needed to be done and I had the ability to get the ball rolling. From a practical standpoint it made sense and I have a good working relationship with all of the people who needed to be in the room for the dry run, so communicating with them isn’t a problem.

So, that morning, I set up a group chat to hash out the timing (if you’ve ever worked with a group of busy people, you’ll learn that their calendar in Outlook usually isn’t their real calendar). We get the whole thing set up in about 15 minutes, meeting invites go out, everyone’s happy, and the world keeps spinning.

The Scrum Master also made it a point to thank me for taking point on it because of how busy things were (in other news, water is wet and Wednesday ends in ‘y’).

By taking a tiny task off of the plate of another busy person I:
- Further cemented my business friendship with the Scrum Master (who I already get along well with, but this sort of thing never hurts)
- Helped the business Subject Matter Expert (yet another very busy person) save themselves time and headache by setting up the meeting and taking the lead of laying out roughly how we wanted to run the presentation.
- Helped the members of my team set themselves up for success (This is always a big deal for me).
- Added another item to the list that shows that I am a person who can both get things done and can easily take up leadership on items without being asked (never underestimate how much impact this can have on your business relationships and career).
Not bad for 15 minutes of work that I was planning on doing anyway. And the great news is that you can do it too and it often really is that simple.
Celebrate Others

April 25th, 2023
It costs you nothing to celebrate the success of other people.

It doesn’t diminish the work you do. It doesn’t negate your own accomplishments. The world won’t end if you give kudos to someone else.

In fact, celebrating the success of others is one of the easiest ways to make allies in an organization or community. The person you’re celebrating will be glad that somebody is recognizing them and the people around you will generally see you as someone who wants to share the success rather than make everything about yourself.

This makes those people more likely to want to cooperate with you because they see that you will share the credit and that you play well with others.

People like to do well. They also like to be acknowledged for doing well. Go out of your way to celebrate the wins that other people have. It can pay dividends years later because those people will remember you and what you did for them (at literally not cost to yourself).

Years worth of upside for something that takes less than five minutes to do. And that’s not an exaggeration.

The greatest piece of personal marketing that you can have is people who speak well of you when you’re not in the room. The most likely people to say positive things about you in these situations fall into a couple of categories:
- People you’ve worked your butt off to make happy.
- People who you’ve helped put the spotlight on when they do something well.
One of these is a heck of a lot easier to pull off than the other. Both are worth doing at times, but making people feel good is much lower effort and much simpler to scale.

The irony is that the second group is, in my experience, actually more likely to say positive things about you. It seems weird, but in a lot of cases, feelings really do trump effort.

That’s not to say that you need to fawn over people (that creates its own problems). Just give credit where it’s due and do it publicly – especially in front of the people in the chain of command of the person or group that you’re praising.

If you do it consistently, you’ll all probably come out ahead. Plus, it’s just the right thing to do.
There Is No Permanent Record

April 6th, 2023

While you were attending school as a child, you may have been threatened with things being put on your Permanent Record any time you did something that an authority figure didn’t like. It didn’t even have to be that you did anything wrong; just something that they didn’t like.

If you’re like most kids, that threat probably hit pretty hard. And it was designed to. In fact, I’d classify it as a type of abuse – instead of a teacher or other authority figure taking responsibility for working with you to help you understand why the behavior was unacceptable, they make a nebulous appeal to authority and essentially threaten to ruin the rest of your life.

That assumes that what you did even actually was unacceptable. Being accused of unacceptable behavior where it doesn’t exist is something that marginalized people especially have to deal with.

And they’re doing this to someone who has limited life experience to know any better and even less ability to defend themselves without the intervention of another authority figure (if they’re lucky enough to have an authority figure willing or able to fight for them).

Even worse, they were conditioning you to accept the vague threat of all of the actions that somebody didn’t like being held against you for the rest of your life. They were setting you up for a cycle of abuse that could be used by the people who sign your paycheck as an adult, and a lot of them knew that they were doing it.

That’s not education. It’s indoctrination. Notice that you never get told something good is going to go on your permanent record. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

You have my permission, and even my encouragement, to disregard every single time someone has told you that something would go on your permanent record. Pull the memories out, look at them for the attempts at abuse that they were, and try to work on moving past them. Seriously.

There is no permanent record. You might have had a file that followed you around in school (and even it likely didn’t contain all the things that your teachers were claiming it did), but even then, that shit ended when you walked across the stage at the end of your senior year.

At that moment, all of the power that they held over you evaporated and all of their threats suddenly ceased to have any influence on reality. Poof. Gone in one moment. What didn’t end, unfortunately, were the scars. Those will take time and work to get over.

Here’s a really neat extension to that fact – the same applies in large part when you leave a job. Your former bosses aren’t going to go around telling every place that you applied to that you’re a worthless asshole unless there is something severely wrong with them (and then you probably have legal recourse).

That isn’t to say that you should go around being a jerk to everyone with no care for the consequences of your own actions. It isn’t even saying that you can’t gain a reputation in your local or professional community if you go around being an absolute asshole to people on a regular basis.

If you consistently do decent things, people will probably tend to have a positive view of you and will probably tell other people that they should work with you. If you consistently do things to hurt people, people will probably talk quietly and you’ll end up worse off for it. However, nobody is writing this stuff down in a mystical, magical file folder that follows you around like an angry honey badger trying to turn your life into an exercise in never-ending misery.

There will be people that will like you. There will be people that will hate you (and some of them will do it no matter what you do). What there won’t be is some accounting of your supposed sins engraved on a stone tablet that people can take off of a shelf and look at whenever they feel like it.

Don’t worry about nebulous authority figures and what they think. Live your life the best way that you can, try to do the right thing (both for yourself and those you care about), and tell the Permanent Record to take a long walk off of a short pier.

You’ll be better off for it.
Stop Using Acronyms

March 29th, 2023

One of the hardest problems in business (right along with all of the other hardest problems in business) is communication. Every industry, and honestly every business, has its own terminology that you need to be aware of.

You know what a lot of businesses also have (and often overuse)? Acronyms. And we need to reverse that trend.

Acronyms make life miserable for people who are new to your org because they have absolutely no idea what they mean. Experienced people often use them without a second thought because they’ve been conditioned to think that they save time (they don’t, really) and because “everybody else uses them” (fitting in with the group is often a survival mechanism).

On the extreme end, you have people who get offended if you ask what an acronym means (because that means you “don’t get it”) or if you suggest that they’re overusing them.

I once had a manager who insisted on shortening anything that he thought he could possibly turn into an acronym and would then whine when people asked him to explain himself. It made meetings miserable and take far longer than they should for the simple reason that nobody knew what was actually being said.

He was by far the worst person I’ve encountered with regard to that sort of thing, and that’s saying something considering that I’ve spent some time working for the Department of Defense (where it seems like everything is an acronym).

Don’t be like that. Language should be accessible. It’s literally created to allow people to communicate. In fact, the metric by which you judge the language you use in business should be how difficult it is for a new member of your team to understand what you’re saying.

Seriously. If you can’t explain what you’re speaking or writing about to someone brand new to your organization in such a way that they’re able to get 90% of what you’re trying to convey, you’re doing it wrong. And the other 10% should be due to things like domain specific knowledge requirements; not having to decode jargon.

Acronyms that are the name of a system are something of an exception, because they’re being used as the proper name for that thing, but when that happens, explain what it actually means to new people. Another possible exception is widely understood acronyms, though you’ll still want to list the meaning of those the first time in a written document and offer to explain them when you use them in conversation.

Other than that, leave the acronyms out of it when you can. The less cognitive load you place on people trying to understand a topic, the better off everyone generally is.
What Are You Waiting For? A Different Take on a Trite Question.

February 6th, 2023

If you’re anything like me (or many of the people I’ve known), you’ve gotten asked “what are you waiting for?” more than once in your life.

In these instances, the emphasis is put on the word “waiting”. “What are you waiting for?” – as though the act of waiting is, by its very nature, offensive to the person asking the question. And, truth be told, it probably is offensive to the person asking the question because they’ve been conditioned to think that you have to always be doing something or else you’re a sinful waste of flesh (the Protestant Work Ethic strikes again).

The thing is that it’s a perfectly valid and useful question – just not the way they ask it, so we’re going to ask it in a way that may actually be of some benefit to you.

What are you waiting for?

Taking the emphasis off of the act of waiting and putting it on the thing that will cause you to stop waiting hits a little differently, doesn’t it? Almost as though you are waiting for a valid purpose.

Here’s a hint – you usually are.

Waiting (or at least appearing to wait) is sometimes a perfectly valid option. There are even times when it’s the wisest option.

You may be taking a break after having done a lot of work. You may be waiting for a long running process to finish. You may be waiting for political infighting to get to a point where it’s to your advantage to act. You may even be performing actual work (thinking, for example) in such a manner that it only looks like you’re inactive.

These are all valid reasons to wait, and are by no means the only valid reasons. Some of them are even covered in classic written works on strategy.

The real question, however, is what will get you to stop waiting?

Have a criteria that will cause you to start being active again, otherwise you run the risk of falling into indecision (also known as analysis paralysis). When that criteria is met, act with purpose and at a pace which makes sense. You don’t always have to be “busy” doing something, no matter what a lot of people in this society may try to tell you. Waiting can be a useful choice as long as you know why you’re waiting and know (roughly) what you’re going to do afterward.
Git – For More Than Just Source Code

January 25th, 2023

At this point, the majority of developers are using some sort of version control (or at least I hope they are). It’s widely used for a reason – it helps save our butts on a regular basis.

Modern version control systems like git allow us to roll back uncommitted changes or check out previous commits, which let us try approaches to problem solving that are much harder without that safety net (provided we commit frequently). They let us have multiple people working on the same program at once with less of a risk of people stepping on each other’s toes. They even help us with deployment strategies.

What if I told you they can help you do a lot more than just that?

For me, git has become kind of like Frank’s Red Hot Sauce – I use that shit on everything.

Seriously. I obviously use it for source control, but I also use it for the majority of my writing, for maintaining workshops and talks that I create, and a myriad of other purposes. Leveraged properly, it can be an amazing tool with the added bonus of giving you an off-site backup of whatever you keep in it.

All of the writing for this site is kept in source control. Just like with my code, I make regular commits with (generally) meaningful commit messages. This allows me to keep multiple pieces of writing in flight at once as well as lets me edit my drafts without any worries – if I don’t like how an edit comes out (if it feels clumsy, for example), I just revert my changes.

Workshops and talks are another place where I leverage git, for many of the same reasons that I use it for my writing – it lets me try different approaches to things. If I need to make changes for a specific presentation, I can just make a branch off of main and make the changes there. If I decide I want to make them part of my base talk, I can just merge them back in. No pressure.

Where it really shines, though, is in keeping my resume up to date.

I edit my resume fairly regularly, and sometimes those edits are significant. With source control, just like with my regular writing, I can make changes without worrying because I can always revert back to a previous version. Even better, if I want to tailor my resume for a specific company or job (or to accentuate a specific type of experience that I have), I can just make a branch and do the edits there.

I name the branch after the position or company and drop in a text copy of all of the artifacts for that position (description, correspondence, etc). It helps me keep things organized and lets me refer back to older copies if I talk to the same company at a later date.

Version control systems like git have honestly become one of my most used tools for coordinating and editing non-code work. Hopefully this has given you food for thought on how to leverage it (and possibly other tools that you already use) outside of your normal coding practices.

Category: Protip

Make Friends – Help a Busy Person

Celebrate Others

There Is No Permanent Record

Stop Using Acronyms

What Are You Waiting For? A Different Take on a Trite Question.

Git – For More Than Just Source Code