In today's episode we're talking about a behavior that's gained a lot of traction lately and that's being radically candid with your co-workers.
In today's episode we're talking about a behavior that's gained a lot of traction lately and that's being candid with people. We're going to talk about why this can be counter productive as a developer and how we can practice a transparent work culture in a more healthy way.
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And the last episode of Developer Tea and a few episodes before that, we talked about how to become a terrible developer, a terrible manager. And it seems that these episodes have kind of resounded well with people who have had these experiences. Some of the behaviors that we described in these episodes, they feel like the right kinds of behavior. And we're going to talk about another behavior or a class of behaviors, maybe an attitude or approach that has gained a lot of traction recently. And that is the attitude of radical transparency or candor being incredibly candid with people, always telling the truth, never hiding anything. But there are some problems with the way that the average person might see this practice, this ideology. We're going to talk about this problem, kind of dissect why they are problems and how we can practice this ideology, perhaps a little bit better. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and you're listening to Developer Tea and my goal on the show is to help driven developers find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers. And so if you've encountered this idea, this idea that we should be incredibly candid with our feedback, with our thoughts in any interaction, we should be radically honest. And this idea of making it radical is that it might shock someone. You might have a moment where the receiving end, whoever you're talking to, whoever you're communicating with, they're taken aback by whatever your honesty, your transparent answer was to the question or whatever your transparent question was to them. And it kind of makes sense why this is growing in popularity. Generally speaking, in many cultures, including in American culture, we've moved away from a control and dictation style of management where someone essentially gives the orders and everyone follows them. We've moved away from that and we've moved more towards a relational management. And theoretically, this is better. If we understand each other, if we understand our motivations and our personal interests and cares, then we can probably do better work with each other. We can hand each other things that we think is going to energize the other person, is going to provide them with motivation and appreciation for their job, happiness with their job. And hopefully we can work together more. We can continue kind of making each other's lives better and therefore want to stay working together and become more productive together. And so all of these reasons are good reasons for this shift in management style. But it could be argued that what is lost is the clarity of intention. In other words, when you have a relationship with someone, you might be incentivized to protect the relationship even if it means that, for example, productivity or profitability might suffer. And so this ideology springs out of this situation where we're becoming more relational in the org structure, the management structure, and now we need to deal with when we are perceiving a very clear problem. And so now we kind of merge the ideas together. The idea that we can be incredibly honest with someone in a way can be seen as the most kind thing, the most relational thing that we can do. Because by being totally honest with that person, we are presumably doing what's best for them. So hopefully we can see the value in this honesty in approaching each other without much pretense. So where does this go wrong? What happens to turn this kind of ideology sour? This is where it gets pretty interesting because the problem is fairly subtle. And that is the idea that one person is delivering truth, perhaps a capital T, should be put on that truth, to another person. That in a moment of candor, in a moment of honesty, in a feedback session, one person is providing someone else a moment of reckoning with truth. And the problem with this is that at a fundamental level, when we talk to another person, we're speaking from our experience, from our own perceptions. And in these scenarios where we're sharing this incredibly candid feedback, when we're exposing some raw version of what we think to another person, it's easy to believe that we have some kind of stringle hold, some kind of access to a truth that that person is blind to. Often to the person that receives this feedback, it feels like a self-righteous jerk is delivering it. And this ideology tends to empower that kind of mindset. And because you are now lowering your guard and you're doing away with some level of pretence, that you can be jarring, that you can hurt someone's feelings because you're doing it for their own good. And I guess the idea is that if we're all truthful for long enough, then our feelings will not get hurt as often. And so the same problems that we had before turn into a new version of that problem, where we intend to have radical transparency or where we intend to have these very clear feedback structures, what we've actually created is a more tense and fearful workplace. On top of that, those who are providing feedback to those who are receiving the feedback, particularly if you have some position in the organization where a lot of your job is about providing feedback, they tend to feel emboldened by this new license to be totally transparent. So how do we fix this? How do we maintain this idea, this good intention of being more honest, dispensing with the pretence of being able to provide clear feedback to each other without creating these bad habits without emboldening jerkish behavior? That's what we're going to talk about right after we talk about today's sponsor, Blue Madora. With Blue Madora, you get monitoring, integration unlocked. You can easily access metrics and logs from over 150 on-premises, hybrid cloud and multi-cloud technologies and bring them into your favorite monitoring tool, whether that's Google Stack Driver, New Relic, Azure Monitor, Wavefront, or DataDog. You can achieve a single pane of glass of your entire stack. It's all in one place and there's frictionless integration between these things. So you want to deal with open source configuration or managing any more monitoring agents. You get a single place, a single pane of glass. You also get a visual health dashboard of your monitoring integrations. It's free to install and upgrade your Google Stack Driver monitoring. You only pay for the more metrics that you end up streaming reflected in your normal GCP bill. You can get $200 worth of GCP credit, which can also be combined with the free trial credits when you upgrade Stack Driver with bind plane at bluemadora.com slash TEA. Thanks again to Blue Madora for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. So how do we fix the problems that we have with this radical transparency concept where we embolden people to be truthful and honest with each other, but unfortunately people take that to mean that whatever their perception is is somehow the truth that they have to deliver. Well, instead we need to roll back some of this language and remind ourselves that we're constantly approaching other people from our own perception. And our perception is warped all the time by a hundred different things, a thousand different things that we don't necessarily even know about. We have, as we've talked about countless times on the show, all of those perception warping things like biases and our own lenses, our own experiences, our own motivations, even the things that we are feeling that day, perhaps even unconsciously, that change the way that we communicate. So with all of this, we have to recognize that our communication is always through a highly filtered lens. So when we provide feedback, when we are radically transparent, instead of making our statements about the other person, about what they should have done or about what they did wrong, what they could do better, instead of making it about some judgment call on what the other person did, we should instead opt for radical transparency, opt for the total truth giving of what's going on with us. In other words, explaining our feelings thoroughly, explaining our perception, explaining our beliefs or our thoughts about what could be true, explaining our fears and our doubts about what may not be true or may not be beneficial. This kind of transparency is not focused on fixing other people. It's also not focused on really even fixing ourselves. Instead, it's focused on seeking truth together. Don't use this concept of honesty as a weapon against other people. Don't use it as a crutch or as a step up on the ladder in your career. Use it as a tool, a guide, a compass towards truth. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to Bloom Madora for sponsoring today's episode. We wouldn't be able to do what we do here on the show without our sponsors. Head over to bloommadora.com slash T. That's bloommadora.com slash T.E.A. to get started today. Today's episode and every other episode of Developer Tea is available on spec.fm. But there's also other awesome shows that I highly recommend that you check out and find in your favorite podcast app that you use, whatever you're using to listen to this episode, subscribe to those other podcasts. If you haven't subscribed to Developer Tea and you enjoyed today's episode, don't just subscribe because I'm telling you to. If you actually enjoy this episode, that makes sense, right? Go ahead and subscribe so you don't miss out on future episodes like this one. Thank you again to today's awesome producer, Sarah Jackson. My name is Jonathan Cutrell and until next time, enjoy your tea.