Never lose touch

I hesitated when it came to publishing this blog. I like to remain somewhat emotionally detached from what I write, preferring to give opinions or insights, and to hopefully convey some interesting ideas to be mulled over.

This blog is a little different.

As I write this, for the first time in my life I’m truly transitioning away from being a developer within a delivery team¹. The shift clashes with one of my most deeply held, driving beliefs: you can never truly understand a job unless you’re actually doing it. It may sound obvious on the surface, but it has grown into one of my most important guiding principles when it comes to leadership. As the scope of my responsibilities grow, I am genuinely fearful that one day I will lose touch with what it’s like to be on the frontline, and on that day I will cease to be a good leader or role model².

In this blog, I want to explore what happens when those in positions of power become disconnected from what it means to be at the coalface, and the impact their decisions have on the people just trying to do the job. Unlike other posts to date, I’d like to do so by sharing some personal stories. I hope you’ll indulge me.

With the benefit of hindsight one begins to search one’s past for such turning points

Small moments can have a profound impact on our lives, but often we only recognise their significance in retrospect. It’s only with hindsight that we begin to search our past for the moments that quietly shaped how we think and act - there were several such moments that shaped the way I feel today.

The previous company that I worked for was a large US-based technology firm. I spent six years of my life in the company’s largest UK-based development lab. Yet only once during that time did the CEO visit the site where I worked.

When I originally joined as a graduate, the executive world felt a long way away from what I knew and what I did on a daily basis. I remember the build-up to the day in question once the CEO’s visit was announced - each week there seemed to be some new, absurd restriction. The corridors and rooms that she was to walk through when visiting the lab were renovated, despite little renovation of any kind being made elsewhere during my tenure. The canteen would be closed on the day because, purportedly, the CEO hated the smell of food - this was despite the fact that it was the only place on the entire site where you could get anything to eat. A large area of outside space would be closed, as would sections of the car park. Posters of our products were plastered everywhere when previously there had been nothing.

When the day came, the CEO arrived on the lawn of the main building via helicopter. A helicopter! She entered the main building and gave an hour-long talk, after which she disappeared off with a small set of senior management. For most of us, that was all we saw of her. All of this was done less than three months after we were told that budgets were tight and there would be no pay rises or bonuses that year.

The CEO was clearly completely disconnected from the people doing the work that sustained the company. That distance would have consequences. For me however, this whole charade laid the groundwork for what would become one of my most central work-life tenets.

One is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives

By the time I’d moved to my next job, I’d been conditioned to expect a great deal of distance between me and those who ran the company. That expectation shaped how I interpreted everything I saw - and how surprising it felt when that distance suddenly wasn’t there.

After spending the first few weeks settling into my new surroundings, I found myself in a relatively quiet office on a Friday afternoon. One of my new colleagues had an exercise ball that I’d spied him sitting on in place of his chair on many occasions. He was on holiday that day, and he had said that I was welcome to use it if I liked.

A sleepy Friday afternoon seemed like as good a time as any to finally give it a try! At least there wouldn’t be many people to see me looking a little stupid…

About half an hour later, as I sat contemplating a particularly tricky bit of code and slowly bouncing up and down, I heard a gentle voice from behind me say: “Do you find that helps your back?” I turned around to see a tall, older man standing behind me. A flicker of recognition ran through my mind, but not enough for me to place the person I was speaking to.

We carried on speaking for a little while, until a few minutes later I clocked my boss’s boss standing at the end of my bank of desks, speaking to another man. I had the same nagging sense of recognition, but couldn’t for the life of me work out where from.

Then the penny finally dropped.

I’d done a fair bit of research into the company’s history as part of the interview process, and it was all still fresh in my memory. I knew the two men from their pictures on the company’s website, under the section about the founders… I was speaking to the CEO! And I was doing so whilst bobbing up and down on an exercise ball.

The idea that the person running the entire company would casually wander past my desk and take the time to stop and chat was entirely foreign to me³. I appreciated it at the time, even if I didn’t understand the implications or the reasoning. The moment lodged itself firmly in my memory nevertheless. Looking back, I recognise the sizeable investment made by someone with thousands of employees. Clearly he saw value in forming those one-to-one connections with people, and in seeing how things looked from their points of view. It wouldn’t be until later in my career that I fully understood why.

One is not struck by the truth until prompted quite accidentally by some external event

Prior to my exposure to working life, the seeds of my world view were planted not by intention or instruction, but by something far more incidental. What made the experience memorable wasn’t just what happened, but how unexpected it was.

For the vast majority of my life, my dad has been a lorry driver for a major supermarket in the UK. I owe absolutely everything I know about the practical side of life to him, and his proclivity towards night-time working is certainly something I inherited, but I think it’s fair to say that he doesn’t exactly share my enthusiasm for computers.

A constant source of pain in his working life was how poorly shift patterns were organised for drivers by the head office. Drivers would be unfairly put on long stretches without a gap, miss out on holiday days they’d requested, or given late finishes into early starts. The manager in charge of these rotas was widely despised by the drivers, my dad included.

I remember him gradually venting his annoyance more and more frequently, until one day I came home and found him uncharacteristically parked in front of our family computer. He was puzzling over a fairly chunky book and an Excel spreadsheet. I didn’t think much of it at the time, aside from how unusual it was - but it was that very incongruity that made it stick in my mind. Over the coming months, seeing my dad sat at the computer became an ever more frequent occurrence, with his spreadsheet growing increasingly more complex and elaborate.

Then one day, I finally understood what he was working towards.

The supermarket had offered to buy his spreadsheet. It was a fully-working shift pattern management tool. Not only this, but they’d sacked that much-loathed manager and offered my dad his job. I know he thought long and hard about what to do, but eventually he took the offer. The determination, driven purely by sheer annoyance at someone, to learn Excel from nothing and build a fully working system in a matter of months was always something I’d admired. However, it was what happened afterwards that became the key lesson for me.

I know office work was not something my dad enjoyed. Yet where the previous manager was hated, I noticed that he was widely liked by the drivers and valued by his bosses. I have found myself coming back to this at various points during my working life, and dwelling on why. The divide between those on the ground actually driving for a living and those in head office was stark. They came from different backgrounds, had different values, and barely ever even came into contact with each other.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this divide explained everything. Those in head office usually didn’t understand the drivers and didn’t care to. My dad was different. He’d been in their shoes. He had built the relationships with the people he looked after, and genuinely knew what it was like to do the job.

That explained why the drivers liked him, but what about his bosses?

It turned out that by keeping the drivers happy in this seemingly small way, the supermarket had fewer no-shows, sickness absences and late deliveries. This persisted over the several years my dad stayed in the job. He even tried to leave and go to back driving several times over that period; each time the management paid him to stay. I think my dad would forgive me for saying that he’s never been one for office politics or mincing his words, yet those in charge saw enough of an improvement in their drivers that they refused to let him leave the role because of how well he did it. It seems pretty clear to me that this was rooted in how well he understood what it was like to do the jobs of the people he managed.

Do you have any idea of what sort of place the world is becoming all around you?

I used to say that those who couldn’t code didn’t know what it was like to be a developer, but that was far too simplistic a viewpoint.

Using that as a basis, it’s easy to assume that because you were once a coder, you still know what it’s like to be one. But things change and technologies move on. The surface area of what it means to deliver code evolves. Consequently, it’s often those that have been developers in the past that are most susceptible to assumption - it’s all too easy for them to think that because they once knew what it was like, that they still do. As the world around you changes, understanding is not something you can retain indefinitely without practice.

So for a while I held the view that those who weren’t currently coding didn’t know what it was like to be a developer - but even that was too reductive.

The truth is that unless you’re doing the same role as those you lead or manage, you can’t fully know what it’s like to do their job.

You don’t know what it’s like to juggle the competing delivery pressures. You don’t know how wider initiatives get in the way of delivery. You don’t know how many processes are difficult to navigate or understand. You don’t know what it’s like to have to manage the support burden of the things you produce.

For decades, I continued to put myself in a position of doing the job of those I lead or managed, because not doing so would mean losing touch with their experiences. And losing touch would mean making ill-informed decisions which impacted them negatively. But now, as I finally give up delivering features as part of a team, I’ve understood why my dad was valued in his role, why the founder of my current company walked the floor and spent time talking to people like me, and why the disconnected CEO of the first company I worked for oversaw the longest consecutive period of declining profits in that company’s history.

Knowing what it’s like to walk in the shoes of those you lead is paramount. You can’t make good decisions without it.

Never lose touch.