Building trust — with people and software - Tal Joffe

This resource first appeared in issue #6 on 14 Feb 2020 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Becoming A Manager: One-on-ones

Building trust — with people and software - Tal Joffe

Tal uses technical analogies to management-of-humans concepts. I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good idea! but the basic concepts are important enough that it’s worth trying a lot of different approaches to reach different audiences. Here, he addresses one of the key goals of one-on-ones; building trust with direct reports. The analogy is between say testing your alignment and agreement on a number of topics in one-on-ones with running tests on code bases; in both cases, the trust people have grows as the inputs are frequent and consistent, which is easier if they are small and lightweight. It is much better to have weekly 30min one-on-ones with people on your team than to have quarterly 4-hour meetings - in terms of building trust and finding out if something is wrong quickly.

Maybe a more successful use of that sort of analogy is an earlier article of his on Microfeedbacks - breaking the monolith. Here the comparison is between monolithic code and modular or micro services code on the technical side, and on the people side, yearly or quarterly performance evaluations versus lots of small frequent feedback. Again, lots of small inputs is much more valuable - and easier! And less stressful! - than waiting three or twelve months and having a Big Deal conversation.