management - Dan Van Tran

Making each other better

I had spent a large part of my life teaching and mentoring others. It has always been a theme in my life. Much of this is due to the help that my parents and I were given, which gave us the opportunities to build a life in America (I shared some of those personal details here). Here are some examples of how I taught and mentored through my early lift:

In elementary school, I helped teachers in the earlier grades by being a TA for math and science. I also taught students and teachers how to use computers.
During high school, I taught AP computer science for a few weeks while the school found a short-term teacher for the courses.
In college, I tutored students from non-technical majors so that they could pass their programming courses and graduate.
At this time I also started helping some of my friends through their decisions around navigating their academic careers and their college/summer jobs.

I realized through these experiences that I really loved helping people to become better versions of themselves, or gaining clarity into what their next steps for success were. When I first started my professional career, I wanted to learn how to do these things in an unstructured work environment. There was only one problem…

You’re not ready

Like many companies, mine had a policy that you needed to reach a certain career level before you could start managing people. It would likely take at least 4 years for me to reach that level. I totally understood that — you could cause some pretty serious damage to a lot of parts of an organization if you aren’t well-equipped to handle people management challenges and discussions. However, I really felt like I could grow those skills quickly and wanted to be given a shot to do so.

So I decided to be a little tricky about it. 2 or so years in, I started looking for engineers that were interested in helping me out with some of the projects that were on my backlog. Specifically, I wanted to find people interested in moving on from building apps with the XML-based inhouse language that my team created, and developing in C++ proper. I found an engineer who was both interested and who I knew was a hard worker. We asked our managers if we could work on this side project — creating a build and deployment system for the inhouse language — and they approved it as long as it didn’t affect our main work.

Over the next 6 months, I worked with the developer and we had weekly 1:1s, adhoc project meetings, and set up a few stakeholder project syncs. It took a lot of upfront teaching and mentoring, and a good amount of initial handholding, but she was a quick learner. Eventually we were able to deliver the new build system. The new system had far fewer incidents and rollbacks, and also allowed us to apply optimizations which allowed us to scale faster.

Thanks to the success of that project, that engineer was allowed to start branching out into C++ projects, and eventually leading her own C++ development team. For me, this 6-month project was enough evidence for my management chain to believe that I could be an effective manager. Just about 3 years in I was fast-tracked to take on my first two direct reports, which quickly grew into a team of 18-20.

So… What does this have to do with influencing?

This experience taught me a lot about how to convince someone to do something that seems high-risk, low-reward to them. Looking back at how I was able to do it, I think there were three main things that were important in helping to influence the outcome I was striving for:

I brought them along on the journey from the very beginning: I started by telling them what I was looking to do, how I was thinking of doing it, and asked for them to help me to improve the plan and sign-off on it. This created alignment from the very beginning.
I looked for the overlap between my incentives and their incentives: I made sure that I answered the WIIFM — What’s In It For Me — for everyone involved:
- For our managers: They would be involved in shipping a “free” project that would have a big impact on the company’s success
- For the engineer: She would be able to get her career to the next level and take on bigger roles in the company
- For me: I can determine if I can manage people or not, and potentially make it happen faster
I showed my work: We gave frequent updates to our managers and the stakeholders of the project to let them know how things were going. We built transparency into any pivots we were deciding on or making in the plan, and made sure that we were all continuously aligned on the success criteria. When the project was complete, we gained a lot of trust from our leadership team, which helped with future influence.

Find the overlap

In any situation, the easiest way to convince someone of anything is to find that overlap between what you want and what they want. If you want someone to be influenced, it’s less about making someone think like you do and more about helping them to see why your perspective makes sense. Pushing someone to think differently will often cause them to hold their ground — no one likes to have their values and opinions challenged. Instead, understand where they are coming from and how your decision/opinion/etc. aligns with that.

Although it took a bit of trickery, I was able to work within the system in order to become a manager sooner. If it weren’t for the support of my leaders and the talents of that engineer, my career might’ve taken longer to accelerate. I’ve used this system ever since to help to align entire organizations to common goals, and I hope it helps you out too!

Change the World,
DVT

(Er, I don’t think that’s right…)

Many of us avoid direct conflict with others, especially in the workplace. We don’t want to come across as abrasive, and we certainly want to make sure that our colleagues recognize how much we respect them. However, sometimes by avoiding what we perceive will be a confrontation we are missing an opportunity to help make something better — an idea, a project, a person, or even an entire team.

There are very few examples of what healthy conflict looks like in mass media. Outside of some exceptional role-models like President Bartlet from “The West Wing” and President Obama from… real-life…, it’s actually difficult to think of someone who can present a conflicting value or perspective in a fully-authentic way without trying to turn the conversation into a black-and-white situation.

However, if you’re fortunate enough to have worked at an organization that had peers or leaders with this trait, you’ll have seen firsthand what it could look like. You’ll have seen how amazing they are at navigating the line between being too harsh or too subtle. It was always a skill that I admired, being someone who historically would rather find gentler ways to provide feedback that were honestly much less effective and timely.

Over the years, I took some time to analyze my difficulty in providing real-time feedback. I started noticing a few habits and self-confidence gaps that kept me from being more effective during meetings and conversations. Much of it came down to three main things:

Not being 100% sure that I was right: This was something that really kept me from making a big impact early in my career. I was afraid to speak up unless I was completely certain that my point was valid and worth bringing up. If it had even the slightest chance of making me look dumb or uninformed, I chose to stay silent.
Wanting everyone to like me: I worried that by not agreeing with someone or making them feel that I was on their side, I would lose them as a friend and advocate. The fewer people that liked me, the less likely I would have people I could learn from, ask questions to, and hang out with (I *really* liked my lunch group, okay?!).
Being introverted and wanting to find the right time to speak up: I hated that one of the most common ways to contribute to group conversations was to cut other people off. I wanted to let people finish their thoughts before I shared mine. This often led to not finding any gaps in the conversation to take advantage of.

These three things were prevalent in nearly every single group meeting I had. I found that I was effective enough in 1:1s, but my ability to speak my mind almost completely vanished in group meetings. I knew that I had to figure out a way to address these problems if I wanted to have a bigger impact.

It’s easy to stand with the crowd. It takes courage to stand alone.
– Mahatma Gandhi

I addressed each of those three items individually:

It’s rare to be 100% confident in anything in this world. However, that never stopped any of the effective leaders I worked with from challenging the team’s perspectives. I realized that instead of simply pushing a conflict idea or viewpoint, they often would frame it as an open question. “What if we used X instead of Y?” “How would things change if we did X instead?” “Why are we assuming X?” This would force a conversation that incorporated the idea, but didn’t assume that it was necessarily the right way to move forward.
Wanting everyone to like me was a more subconscious thing, so it was harder for me to break this one. I had to ease my way into feeling okay with the fact that people didn’t have to like me. I only needed two things to preserve positive relationships: they had to respect me and feel that I was competent. I found that the best way to do this was to act as a genuine thought partner for everyone. I challenged their perspectives (with open questions!) but made sure to word everything in a way that showed that I wanted to help make them and their ideas better.
This was by far, and still is, one of the hardest things for me to do. Being in a videoconference with other people who are remote is a bit easier, since we all have the same delay disadvantage. However, being in a room with everyone, or being remote with people who are in the room together meant that I had to confront the fact that there will be times where I need to talk over others. Not only that, but I would often have to keep talking over others, even if they kept going, so that I wouldn’t get steamrolled. This is still not easy for me, but we live in a world where people will talk over each other. As much as I want things to change, this is the reality we’re in and I need to adapt.

Healthy conflict is something that I continue to actively work on everyday. It’s still too easy for me to keep things to myself and avoid confrontations. However, more often than not, I now catch myself doing it and correct it. As a result, my impact has grown dramatically and I’m consulted frequently as an agent of change. With these improvements, I’ve become closer to the role models I looked up to over the years.

Change the World,
DVT

Tag: management

Introverted Leadership Series: Influencing Gently and Genuinely

Introverted Leadership Series: The Importance of Healthy Conflict