Giving encouragement/advise with limited information!

From Oct 8th to 10th, 2010, 7 students from the school where I teach participated in a student racing event known as Formula Varsity. A few months prior to the event, these students studied the rules, secured sponsorship from Red Bull, designed, built and race a car against other students from around the nation. Their story can be found in the team's Facebook page. As this is a wheel-to-wheel race I was very worried about the safety of these students, especially the driver. Though I was not at the event a few of my colleagues were and I kept calling them for status. I even spoke with the driver a couple of time reminding him not to take risk. See this student is so focused on winning we were all concern he may take chances. I even told the driver the story of how Boris Becker once came from behind to win at the Australian Open back in the 90s to encourage him to take one position at a time etc etc.

Our students won the race. Won the most outstanding team award and the overall title. They, however, lost one other award due to a blown engine during pre qualifying and was not able to compete in the qualification race. How they worked overnight to fixed the engine and to win the race laps ahead of the closest team is one amazing human story. I really over estimated the competition! This team was so good they don't need reminder to play safe but encouragement and motivational words to charge them up when they are confronted with the uphill task of having to fix a broken engine overnight.

Pieces of information then surfaced days following the event that allowed me to piece together what happened over the 3 days. It made me so embarrassed of myself. Even with all the information I got calling my colleagues who were at the event and them calling me, it was still not sufficient. My advise were not timely nor appropriate! I was not there, how would I know what they need at the time when I spoke to them.

How often have we advised others or others us from a position of incomplete information. Yet these advise may have been "prescribed" as though from a position of authority. I have done that and have also received them. If we care enough about someone, perhaps we should first seek to understand how we can be of help to them before we offer our words of "wisdom." Then deliver it in a way most effective to them.

Creating a safe working environment where people can freely talk about their mistakes

Several years ago, when I was just an engineer, I found myself being assigned the task to run some 640 tests to verify a design. As I recall, I had the Friday and the weekend to do this and we had a release dateline to meet come the following Monday. These 640 tests will need a good part of the weekend to complete and we are not expecting any problem. Come the following Monday, we had a clean results (i.e., it passed all the 640 tests) but i realized when I checked everything just to be sure, I had ran some tests with incorrect parameters. Worried that this mistake may delay the release and not wanting to be the person to cause the delay, I lied and declared that all was fine and that we are good to go. While my colleagues prepare to release the design, I worked franticly to re-run those affected tests with the correct parameters. I was very lucky that the design did pass all the 640 tests passed when ran against the correct parameter settings.

About a year after that, I became the project leader for a very similar work but at another company. In the first meeting I had with my team, I told everyone that it is absolutely OK to declare their mistake(s) in my team. Everyone were either puzzled and/or poking fun at what I said. I explained that only by doing so, will the team have the necessary information to know how best to channel resources when something goes wrong and that will allow the team to meet it datelines in the most effective way without impact on quality. The idea here is as follows. If you are the project leader/manager, you will want to know if there is anything that can have an impact on the project. And the easiest most effective way to know about it is to make it safe for your colleagues to tell you about it. It is better to know about these problem(s) earlier where you can channel your resources to rectify them than to allow them to stay hidden where they can bite you at the most embarrassing moment.

To be honest, a strict review or quality gating process to validate the test results of the 640 tests could have done the job as well. However, neither of these approaches on their own is 100% fool proof. I will employ both if I were to find myself in the same position again. Creating a safe environment for people work and even to declare their mistake, free them from having to spend time looking over their shoulder and to focus on doing what adds/creates value.

As usual, this is a real story, but the identity of the person may have been altered and I may not have remembered all the details correctly.

Same goal, different methods and different implications

A discussion between 2 managers recently gave me this insight. One of this manager has a vacancy to fill and he has made an offer to a very good candidate. This candidate has asked to extended the period she has to response a couple of times indicating that she is interviewing elsewhere and wants to wait for the reply from the other companies. She possibly also has a preference for some other organisation/role. The other manager suggested calling the candidate to find ways to secure her service - a very typical approach for someone from an American MNC! The rationale here is that even if the candidate were to reject the offer, he would go down trying. The hiring manager's opinion is to allow the candidate to make up her own mind. This seems so passive until I was told the rationale behind this inaction! It seems that this hiring manager is of the opinion that if the candidate were to accept the offer, she accepted the job on her own free will and this can give him leverage later. This inaction has a much longer term view of the situation than I first perceived. I am aware at this point that I have left a lot of details out and may not paint the full picture!

The difference between the thinking/philosophy of these 2 managers struck me as a short-term versus long-term or even a western versus eastern management philosophy/strategy. What I learned from this is that a person may do things in a way that disagree with our own belief or philosophy and possibly with a rationale potentially more superior than our own!

Information may be power, but he who holds the money has control

I once found myself promoted to a fairly senior position at an organisation where I was still fairly new - compared to many of my subordinates. What amazes me very quickly at the time was the information I had privy to allowed me to make sensible decisions while my subordinates were clueless. It really brings home the point that "information is power." As I was fairly new at the time, I was not given access to the budget of the unit yet. I didn't know how much budget we had left and has no signature authority. That really made me feel powerless each time I need access to the budget. I virtually cannot do anything even when I was able to make meaningful decision for the organisation. I can't approve anything that requires money and things just cannot progress until my manager agrees and approves these requests that require money from the budget he controls. So ultimately, even if access to information empowers you, access to money is what gives you control.

Patronizing a restaurant with only a few customer

Often when given a choice of 2 or more restaurants for a meal I would patronize the one that is less crowded or even the least crowded. The thinking is not about avoid crowded places but more of supporting a struggling business and I have always been disappointed! If a restaurant serves good/great food it will be more likely to be busy than not. I would frequently provide suggestions for improvement for these places and had never made a difference! A typical example is as follows. There is this pie store at a food court where I used to have lunch several years ago. Most of their customers were foreigners as pies are not a Malaysian favorite. A pie lover myself I gave them a try and was not impressed. Like a food critique I spoke to the manager offering him what I belief would make a good pie. His pies were dried and sold without gravy, ketchup or sauce. He thank me for my comments and a minute later he came back with a bowl of chili sauce! This store closed not long after that.

I have given up thinking that I can make a difference to these people. My random support once or twice will have no impact on their bottom line and if they have the ability to improve with a couple of comments from a customer or two they will not be in such a position.

Do not ask a Kurd to do the work of a Jew

I heard this story from Mushtak Al-Atabi, a colleague from Iraq and Dean of the School of Engineering at Taylor's University College. He was using this as a means to explain how he got the "burnt mark on some of his fingers!" It seems that this is a true story too.

Movie subtitle in Iraq sometime ago was supposedly controlled manually. In other words, it is not part of the movie and someone had to watch the movie and change the subtitle accordingly. The story goes that there was this cinema where a Jew was doing this job. Unhappy about his pay he quits after he was unable to get a pay rise and the owner of the cinema replaced him with a Kurd. For one reason or another this new replacement were not doing his job properly and the subtitle was not in sync with the movie and the audience started hurling abuse at him. Frustrated with the abuse the new subtitle-man started an argument with the audience. It was so bad they had to stop the movie and the owner of the cinema, in his quest to control the situation, apologized to the audience saying that he is to blame as he has given the job of a Jew to a Kurd.

When my family moved to our current residence a few years ago, we redesigned the whole kitchen and had a set of new kitchen cabinets and tops installed. Happy with this vendor's work, we asked them to design and build our shoe cabinet at the entrance. The person told us "we do kitchen cabinets and don't know much about shoe cabinets!" Thinking that it would be cheaper an easier to go with one vendor than to source for another and beside, how different can a shoe cabinet be? We now have a fairly large shoe cabinet where it can't hold shoes. One is in danger of being struck by one of my wife's heel when opening that cabinet. Similar to asking a "Kurd to do the job of a Jew," one should also not ask a kitchen cabinet maker to do the job of a shoe cabinet maker!