You do things at work pretty well. You’re to the point where you know the context, you have the skills, and you can add value without a lot of guidance.
Let’s say you’re a software engineer, and you just made a change to the code. You run it through some automated tests…and it fails.
The proactive person has a choice here. You can have so much confidence in your work and your abilities that you start looking at what’s wrong with the test. Or you start looking for problems with other code that was changed around the same time. Or problems with the code that’s been there for 3 years.
Well it works on my machine.
Every software developer ever
Or.
You can suspect yourself first. You were the last to touch it and now it doesn’t work. I have found that suspecting yourself first – in this case looking at your own code changes first – has a lot more upside than downside.
First, you’ll build trust with your team, or at least not destroy it. Imagine you started looking at the test setup or other people’s code first. Maybe you ask some questions. Then, let’s say you can’t find anything wrong with their stuff, or worse – one of your teammates finds the issue with your recent changes. You wasted your time chasing phantoms. Your teammates wasted time trying to track down the problem. Now they don’t trust the changes you make. Or, they don’t think you’re all that competent.
Either way, it’s not good.
I have found that even if you think it’s impossible that your changes could have caused the test to fail, check your stuff anyway. Once you have confirmed your changes didn’t cause the issue, start looking at other possible root causes.
The only downside I see is a blow to the ego. It’s kind of hard to consider that what you just created may be the root cause of some issue. But if you can get over this, or at least learn to live with it, you will be better off.
I still practice this principal today. Back when I first became a project manager, I would moderate a lot of design review meetings. We had a tool that would create an email to the reviewers. I would use this list of recipients for the design review meeting invite.
At one of the first meetings we are all gathered in the conference room. Well, all of us except one.
“Where’s the author?” one reviewer asked.
Yah, where’s the author? I put this meeting together and all the people are here…doesn’t that guy know he needs to be here to respond to questions? I’ll be honest, I don’t remember if I said any of that out loud, but I know I thought it.
Luckily something kicked me in the brain and told me to check the meeting invite. Sure enough, our author wasn’t on the invite. The tool, it turned out, only provided a list of reviewers, not reviewers and author, and I never checked. So, in as apologetic a tone as I could muster, I asked the author to join us for the meeting…the meeting that was in progress.
I’ve practiced suspecting myself first in this meeting situation so many times that now when someone is not in a meeting I instinctively open the invite. No blaming people for disrespecting me. No thinking they are unreliable. I check first to see if they are on the list. Jumping to conclusions has never worked out well for me. And, if I do mess up and forget to invite someone, I admit it to the people in the meeting and try to salvage their time (i.e. make it right).
A follow-on, then, to suspect yourself first, is if you’ve made a mistake, admit your mistake, and then make it right.
Making it right may be fixing your mistake, like in the software example. It might also mean apologizing to someone. Making it right also means making an effort to make a different choice in the future, either by preventing the issue from occurring in the first place, or by addressing the problem as soon as possible.
I heard once that they tell medical doctors learning to diagnose the following:
“When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.”
Dr. Theodore Woodward
In our case, suspect yourself first, not others. Not others, not the test rig, or the change that other team made. Once you’ve eliminated your work as the possible cause, then go look for zebras and find the true root cause.
If you make sure you suspect yourself first, you will build trust with your teammates, and you’ll have a lot more peace about your work. And that should make up for any punch in our ego’s gut.
tl;dr
If you are in a situation where something isn’t working right, start by asking yourself if anything you could have done would have caused the issue. Suspect yourself first. You’ll be glad you did.
engineer your life
This week, monitor your thoughts and actions. When something isn’t going right, put some space between that realization and the action, and choose to suspect yourself first.