Don’t Keep It A Secret
When I was younger and working at my first real job as a sonar “system engineer”, I was tasked with designing a set of digital filters to process a multiplexed stream of audio signals from a sonar microphone array. During a weekly status meeting, the best manager I ever worked for asked me if I’d written up the design and had it peer reviewed. I told him that I hadn’t and then he hit me with the first of many wise zingers over several years. He told me “Don’t keep it a secret. Write it up, communicate it, share it.” Being the dumbass and naive engineer that I was (and still am?) back then, I hadn’t thought of doing that. I was just gonna slip the resulting design into the system specification, let the software and hardware and test dudes deal with any mistakes/errors downstream, and move onto my next joyful assignment.
When my mentor said “don’t keep it a secret” to me, a terrible fear gripped me: “What if I screwed up and someone points out a major flaw in the work? What would people think? People might laugh at me.” Instead of thinking about adding value to the company and helping others do their jobs better, I was dwelling on self-important thoughts about ME – poor ME. Alas, such is the conditioning that is innocently but surely foist upon us from the moment we start disassociating ourselves from our true being and we start welding ourselves to the “I” thought. This freedom-squelching conditioning process starts with our parents and continues relentlessly throughout school and throughout our working lives.
From what I remember, the writeup and review process went much better than I anticipated. However, even after that first jolt, it still took me a long, long time to overcome the fear of exposing my work to others. Even today, many years later, I sometimes relapse and must fight the fear instinct associated with exposing work to others for scrutiny – especially managers.
How about you? Have you ever experienced a similar feeling? Do you still experience it? Is your goal to jump into management as quickly as possible so that you can escape the fear and transition from scrutinizee to scrutinizer? Have you already successfully done this? Dudes and dudettes, don’t be shy and please gimme some blowback. 🙂
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Showing your design/work to others is always a hard thing to do. There some comments that are helpful and insightful. Then the others that seem to miss the point and wind up causing more grief than benefit. Good companies teach how a good review should be done and what should be covered. Others just throw the people into the coliseum and let them fight it out.
Hi Ray,
It’s always good to get your feedback (good or bad). You said:
“Good companies teach how a good review should be done….”
In these good companies, who specifically *takes* responsibility and *actually* does the teaching? Are good and bad reviews videotaped as teaching examples? How else would one teach effective technical social interaction without a tool such as a video? Know of any other teaching aids/tools?
I’d love to see an unstaged video of a “good” review. Do you think one exists?
In my work, I am constantly tasked with taking a blank sheet of paper and filling it up with ideas. In the process of development, I will throw 6-8-10 or more loose concepts up on the wall, like tossing tomatoes at a clown. Some hit the target, others just make a mess, but every one of them exposes my thought process to scrutiny buy the Simon Cowell’s of authority, as they harrumph and hobnob their way along behind the table of judgment, sipping their diet cokes and making faces.
I’ve learned not to “own” an idea, as ownership involves an emotional tie that can be painful when criticized. If you are effective in communicating the solution so that the boneheads from above can get it through their thick skulls, then that’s all you can do. But personal detachment is always a requirement–it’s just an idea, there are probably 30 more out there that are better.
I’ve also learned that regardless of how willing you are to ‘lift your skirt’ on a project, quite often, the decision makers never read beyond the first 3 words of any bullet-point, paragraph, or call-out. If you can’t say it in 9 syllables or less, it doesn’t go anywhere.
I like this approach:
http://www.productdesignhub.com/articles/35-design-insights/105-putting-innovation-at-the-heart-of-your-business
And this sums it up:
“Good and bad, is not the same as what you like or don’t like.”
http://www.scottberkun.com/essays/35-how-to-give-and-receive-criticism/
Great stuff fish face. I see that you are an unattached Buddhist. How long did it take you to “get it”? It took me a long time. Even still, I often relapse. Especially when I sense/perceive that a reviewer is trying to play the “I’m smarter than you” game. I’m a sucker for getting drawn into that no win situation.
Berkun rocks!
haah. not un-attached. I still desperately grasp that umbilical cord at times. Then I beat myself senseless for grieving when my idea gets smushed into something else like a play-doh figurine you meticulously craft, only to have the playground bully crush under his steel-toed boot of change.
calm blue ocean.
Here is an interesting article some what on the topic. Even when new ideas are encouraged none are accepted.
http://www.theengineer.co.uk/the-hired-hands/1002468.article
It’s sad. Once people get smart to the fact that they are being ignored, and it may take awhile for the epiphany to occur, the idea spigot stops. There are no winners in that sad situation.
“It’s a sad, sad situation, and it’s gettin more and more absurd” – Elton John
“…In my experience my ‘rejected’ ideas that are any good come back into existence as my boss’s idea after a reasonable period when he maybe thinks I forgot that I suggested it.”
HAH!!! Ain’t that the truth.
‘but I did it like THIS.”
Yeah, it’s the human knee jerk tendency to “auto-reject” any new/different idea upon hearing it. It seems like managers are afflicted with this malady more so than non-managers. After it seeps in, an auto-rejected idea might morph into a good one worth stealing from its creator. Managers tend to do that more than mere mortals too 🙂