Slow burn – Changing things takes time
Slow burn – Changing things takes time
One of the things that we’re not always taught, so can be under prepared for, is how speed of change and measurable impact of your work becomes slower at more senior levels. How do we reconcile that and also explain that to our managers? As a quality coach embedding into a new organisation, here are my thoughts on my pace of change.
Gotta go fast!
When you work in an engineering team we get taught that velocity matters. We’re being tracked on how quickly and how much stuff you can deliver in a sprint by our managers, team, project managers and the organisations. This feeling can be reenforced by the idea that training, working on tech debt or thinking time is a waste and that we only want to work on features; deliverables that make money.
This leads us to internalising the thought that as engineers we’re measure on what we deliver of value. It also can mean that our managers might have an expectation on us that we will deliver incremental small change frequently and quickly.
But what happens if our job is cultural change?
People are not machines, you cannot frequently reprogram them with behavioural changes and expect that to stick in short order (sorry Pavlovian psychology). People take time to change their mentality and groups of people take even longer; you have to unlearn existing behaviour, embed the new one and then reenforce it over and over…. and that’s if people want to change in the first place.
People might just not be in a place where they want to (or can) change:
- They might be busy and not in a place where they can take the time to try and learn new things.
- They might have an emotional blocker to change or just think their way is best.
- They might just not get along with how you coach and mentor.
This all leads to a slow down in being able to measure the outcome of our job as someone embedding in cultural change. It also *really* makes it hard to show a return on investment for our roles as a coach or change agent.
The feeling of failure
Where we may internalise, as engineers, the expectation that we deliver something of value frequently (and that this can be measured) jumping to a senior role can be jarring. Suddenly our rate of change is likely to take MONTHS (IF NOT YEARS) rather than a few days. This can be a really big thing to navigate emotionally, that if it doesn’t feel like you’re delivering and completing work then you’re failing.
I don’t think that engineering / technologists are trained and prepared for this shift (I know that I wasn’t) and that suddenly we can pick up a role where our expected time to impact changes. This can be through a promotion or applying for and getting a new job. In these cases we probably know that things will be different from our previous roles, but the emotional impact can still hit hard and unexpectedly.
When I first started roles as a dedicated quality coach, I found the slower pace hard to deal with. My expectation was that unless I was answering questions and pairing with people all day, every day, then I wasn’t succeeding. I ended up with a feeling of imposter syndrome and that I was failing at these jobs or wasn’t cut out for them. I knew rationally and intellectually that you can’t change people overnight, but I felt that I had to deliver.
So what did I do?
Embracing the slow burn
I have had to retrain my expectations of my role as a quality coach / senior tester. Now that my role means working through people and providing training I’m having to adjust my expectations of what I deliver and how quickly my impacts will be.
SETTING EXPECTATIONS WITH MYSELF – Speaking to others in the same role, quality coaches and agile coaches to double check that this is normal. That it’s okay that some days maybe I won’t be actively training and mentoring people and that I can use that time to work on materials, or do community work. Reaffirming that change does take time by reading about the experiences of other successful coaches (all of this is why having a community to talk to is important).
SETTING EXPECTATIONS WITH OTHERS – Talking to my boss and the people around me to explain my role and that the impacts I will have will take a long time. Helping the organisation to drive out how we measure impact (through surveys) of this kind of role and what they can expect as a return on investment.
TRACKING ACTIVITY – I created a brag doc detailing all of the things I’ve done and the interactions that have happened. Where I could, I’ve added the outcomes of these, but mostly I’ve been tracking “these are the awesome things I’ve done”. This not only helps me to explain to others what I’ve been doing, but helps me to see that I’m doing things and having an impact too.
CHECKING IN – I’ve chatted to managers, team members and teams through conversations and running surveys. These are just to take a temperature check of “have I been helpful” and “has my input felt useful to teams”. This is less about feedback and more about ensuring that it’s percieved that what I’ve done has been good enough (or helped).
PUTTING MY EGO ASIDE – This is a hard one. I’m working on remembering how my job as a coach is to help others and NOT TO PROVE HOW CLEVER (OR GOOD AT TESTING) I AM. I’ve got the coaching role, people assume I’m good at testing, I don’t need to prove anything! This means letting go of what I want in favour of letting others go at a speed that helps them.
DELIVERING OTHER THINGS – Posting content in Slack (for the likes) or creating blog posts, hell even decorating the office Christmas tree helps you feel like you’ve finished and delivered things. I’m normalising to myself that not every moment of the day means delivering internally and that external professional work is also helpful.
What can the industry do?
Generally I think we all have an expectation of coaching roles within software development, but probably less understanding of what that means day to day for the individual. I think more awareness and more openness about the role is needed, especially since more people are heading into those types of jobs now.
PROVIDING TRAINING – on topics such as how we measure success in coaching roles, what signals of impact and change look for and how to track them. How to remain motivated when things seem quiet or even to manage your own expectations would also help.
EXPERIENCE REPORTS – we need more quality coaches to be providing more details of their day to day work and what that looks like. Doing so will help people to know that what they’re doing now will yield results later and maybe support the idea of being patient with the process of culture change.
EDUCATION FOR MANAGERS – around how to support your coaches, set goals for them and measure ROI over the long haul. Training them also to provide the support that a change agent needs, through reenforcing when conflict is healthy and agreeing when a slower / softer touch is needed.
When we take roles in quality coaching we needs to adjust our expectations for the speed we can enact change at. it’s normal to have to wait longer to see that what we’ve done has resulted in something.
it’s also normal to not know if your speed of change is acceptable, because there’s limited training on this. We have to keep at it.
