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Being Kind
- 期号: SRE Weekly Issue #224（2020-06-21）
- 作者: Tanya Reilly
- 链接: https://noidea.dog/blog/being-kind
简介
This article opens with a great story about how to help someone feel better when they are a contributing factor in an outage.
正文
Look, we all have our bad days and bad situations, but most of the time people are nice. Sure, there are exceptions — If someone's being an ass, it’s brutally exhausting to stay pleasant to them (and I will not claim I always succeed.) But most of the time someone being nice is unremarkable. It’s not something I usually notice, at least not until they stop.
Image: Jude Beck via Unsplash
Someone being kind, though... that jumps out at me. I notice that every time and it always makes my day.
The inevitable first outage
I was thinking recently about one of the first mistakes I made in production. While updating a customer record, I’d somehow deleted their entire account. I was 22, new to the team (and the industry) and absolutely petrified. My coworker Tim cleaned up my mess and I’ll never forget his reaction: he said “It’s always interesting to see how new people handle their first screw up. We've all been there.” It was such a relief! Of course I was still upset, but the sick feeling in my stomach was gone. If every one of my coworkers had survived their first mistake, I would too.
In the middle of the annoying task of having to recover the customer data, Tim took the time to be kind.
Kindness builds culture
Culture is built every time someone causes an outage and other people are reassuring about it. It's built every time one person apologises for asking a basic question and others jump in to insist that “no, it’s a good question! It’s a complicated topic!”. I see this a lot on some Slack channels I'm on: someone says they don't understand something and there’s a chorus of reassurance from others about how they used to not understand it either, and what their path was to learning it. I love that.
I love it because kindness isn’t free. It always costs something. You spend social capital when you tell stories of your own mistakes, or when you admit you don’t know something. You spend emotional energy when you think about how you can make someone feel a little better after making a mistake. It takes time and mental effort to figure out how to even be helpful. Because the most intuitive way to help might not actually be helpful.
The right sort of helpful
Image: John Benitez via Unsplash
When someone starts describing a difficult project, for example, the easy, intuitive response is to say what you would do in the same situation. Offering this unsolicited advice will make you, the sage advice-giver, feel really good, but that might not be at all what your friend or colleague needs[1]. It's kinder (but more difficult) to figure out what they’re actually looking for. Maybe they want confirmation that they're on the right track. Maybe they want reassurance that other people would also find the problem or situation difficult. They might be doing rubber duck debugging, explaining something to you so they can unpack it for themselves. They might even just want to tell a war story, to hear commiserations and congratulations for what they’ve navigated so far. Unsolicited advice derails all of those things.
Solicited advice is different. When someone asks you to review a lackluster document or pull request or do a dry run for a conference talk, sure you can be nice and say it’s fine. It’s kinder to be gently honest about the parts that don't land and offer suggestions to help make them better. Again, it costs something to say you don't think the work is as good as it can be. It takes effort to tease out exactly what isn't working and find the words to explain it. It's a more difficult conversation too. But if you spend the effort, you’ll help the other person be more successful. (Call out the sections that you think are great as well, of course.)
Another example: it’s super nice to say thank you when someone’s excellent work helps you. We should all do that all the time. But it takes longer to also go enthuse to that person's boss, or make sure their name comes up at promotion time, or suggest them for opportunities they weren't being considered for. That's a much kinder way to say thank you, and they don’t need to know it ever happened. (Everyone should read Lara Hogan on sponsorship, by the way.)
Being kind at scale
Image: Jude Beck via Unsplash
If you’re a senior person in an organisation, you can be kind at scale. Every time you publicly ask a question, you make asking questions feel safer for everyone else. Every time you admit you don't know everything and let people see you learning, you make it normal to continuously learn. And when you’re open about the things you’ve broken and the outages you’ve caused, you take some of the terror out of every junior person’s first mistake.
I mean, be both. Be nice as much as possible! Meetings and work and life and everything go better when people are trying to be friendly with each other. But, again, that should be the default.
Once you’re senior, a huge part of your job is to make everyone else successful and being deliberately kind will go a long way. Making your coworkers better makes your organisation better, which makes you all more likely to succeed at whatever it is you're trying to do. So take the time to help people in the way that they need.
Stay safe, everyone.😷
[1] Especially on Twitter. If you take one thing away from this article, take this: don’t offer advice on Twitter unless the person you’re replying to has said they want help. And even then, think about whether you’re suggesting something obvious that anyone with half a brain would have already thought of and/or that fifteen people have already said. Twitter’s annoying enough; don’t make it worse. Thank you for your time.