I recently was declined for a job interview. Not because I wasn’t qualified, but because one of the managers turned out to be a manager that I had worked with in the past, and they felt that I would not be a good fit for their team. They didn’t think I’d be a team player.
You see, back when we worked together, I questioned him.
A lot.
I questioned everything from task prioritization (shouldn’t the ability to login and have user roles be ahead of 90% of the heavy work we need to do which is role based and not three months down the road?), to team selection (why are we putting PHP developers on a Ruby on Rails project when we have enough Ruby developers to spare?), to just about anything else you can think of. Yes, I challenged some of it because I really did think they were poor choices, and I didn’t want to be held accountable to an impossible delivery schedule. However, the majority of it I challenged and questioned because I wanted to learn more, and at the same time I wanted to share my knowledge and experience with him.
The manager saw my questions as challenges to their authority; a lack of respect. Where I thought I was being a collaborative team player, I was being seen as a trouble maker. A subversive employee whose goal was to make the manager look bad, and promote their own self-interest. I tried changing tactics to ask questions in email and in private meetings as opposed to in large meetings in front of their peers and subordinates. Unfortunately, by that time, I was still deemed a threat.
My wife was recently in a situation where a new manager came into her company. My wife has been there for nearly 20 years, and rather than take the questions she was asking as guidance, the manager took it as a challenge.
A good manager knows that not only should they surround themselves with people smarter than they are, but they need to utilize them. My wife’s situation is a perfect example of that… someone who is new to a company should want to leverage the knowledge of someone who has been there for a long time. You cannot become a truly effective manager without fully leveraging your team and their abilities. Some of these “smart” people will have very specialized knowledge. Others will have a broad knowledge base to draw from, or they always look at the problem from a different angle. A good manager fills out their team with people which will fit the gaps in their own knowledge and experience, as well as people with different viewpoints and problem solving skills. The total of their knowledge and experience will greatly exceed the sum of their parts with a wise manager leading the way.
If an employee comes to their manager with a question, particularly one regarding the current project, processes, or even staffing, the manager should listen and respond accordingly. Sure, sometimes it will just be an off the wall question, or just someone having a grouchy day. More often than not though, the question is an opportunity, not a threat. It could be an opportunity for the manager to help mentor the employee (help them see the bigger picture, not your view of how things “should be.”). It may be an opportunity for the manager to learn something new (especially with new technologies and tools which could speed up development or delivery time).
The CTO for the company where this manager and I worked had a habit of sitting back in meetings and listening, and then just asking one question. Granted, it was one question that sparked a series of other questions by the team. He didn’t point out the holes, or the flaws in the plan, or come across as challenging the process – instead he simply would ask “Why? How? When?” I admired his ability to spark discussion and his openness to listen to questions from the team. He encouraged questions, and I asked him a lot of questions. He would constantly tell me, “You’re not asking the right question.”
Returning to my prior blog post about Who Owns the Scene, I want to elaborate on why asking questions should be taken as a compliment, and not a challenge by a manager. When people ask another individual questions, it’s generally because they want to gain something from them – besides the answer. It could be, as I’ve pointed out already, to learn something new, or to understand a process – both physical and mental. Through asking my brother-in-law questions about who owns the scene at an accident, I learned more about the processes and regulations that are behind law enforcement. He not only got to “show off” his knowledge, but he gained a bit about IT processes in the conversation. Amusingly, both of us sat down with my father-in-law to ask questions of him due to his expertise. My brother-in-law needed to understand some accounting rules as he was reconciling the books for the fire department, and I needed to understand some tax law implications as I was working on a project to try and compute tax depreciation differently. Through the conversation, I learned what I needed and more, as did everyone else sitting around with dessert and coffee. While my mother-in-law was a little bored, she made comments, which made us think differently.
If it’s the right question (you’ll know it when you hear it every time), then it gets both the manager and the employee (or the team, or in the prior example, my family) collaborating together. This results in a better understanding of the issue from all sides, and a solution which now has full buy in from all parties. If that collaboration isn’t a win for the company, then I don’t know what is a win.
I guess being shot down for an interview by a former coworker in a new company (at least this ex-colleague in particular) isn’t such a bad thing after all. Once I found out that I would have been working with him I probably would have thought long and hard about whether or not I should accept the position. The question would be, can I work with someone who is not open to questions? Can I accept that by asking questions I could be seen as difficult? Again, my intent is not to make my manager look bad, whether it’s a line manager, the CTO, or even the CEO when I reported to one. The intent has been, and always will be, to learn and ensure the project is successful.
What do you think? What is the right question to ask to make a project, manager, or employee successful?
