Team Leaders: Empathy in Reviews

Senior team members can make a huge difference on a team. I count on my team leaders to model good behaviors for other engineers and teach them how to hone their craft. You can make or break how the team will react in a tough situation. As more junior team members start proposing project ideas and designs, how you react will determine if they come into the next proposal looking to grow or looking to hide. So how do you make sure you’re growing a team that will be willing to take risks, pitch ideas, and iterate towards a strong plan? That’s where the real innovative work comes from.

Bring The Energy You’d Want

If you treat design review as boring or painful, so will they. If you treat design reviews as an opportunity to improve a critical skill and come together as a team, they will, too. I like to remind my teams that reviews are part of having each other’s backs. You want to walk into reviews with a “let’s see how far we can take this together” rather than “let’s check this box so Steph leaves us alone.”

Collaborative Feedback

Some teammates might be sensitive to feedback. Responding to feedback well (a newsletter for another time) is a skill, but so is being mindful of your teammate’s growth areas. There are a few ways to get people to focus on the feedback at hand, rather than trigger a fight or flight response that causes them to shut down.

Examples:

• Focus your feedback on collaborating on the document, not the design. “Can you rephrase this sentence to make it clearer?”
• If they’re missing something, ask them to add a situation to the document. “Can you write about how we should handle <this breaking situation>”

• Tie it back to something you’ve seen the person or another teammate do well before. “Hey, Illia did a really creative thing on his last design. Do you think that could work here?”

• Have them coach the group on something they did well. “Gabe, can you explain how you thought this part through so that others can do the same in their designs?”

If you have someone on the team who is really nervous about having a review in front of their team, offer to review it privately with them in a 1:1 first, and reassure them that if someone gives poor feedback in the meeting, you will step in. I’ve usually found this gets the nerves out, boosts confidence, and I’ve never actually had to step in during the meeting. The large majority of the time, people are worried about the low probability event because of the high impact it will have on them, and as a result, their courage shrinks. Just like in software systems though, having a plan for High Impact, Low Probability events often makes you more successful in the long-term.

If the person is still nervous after their first team-wide review, pair them with a different private pre-reviewer each time until they no longer need it.

Connect With Experts

Remember that while all of your teammates are learning from you as the lead, they’re also learning from other people, too. In fact, part of making sure you aren’t a single point of failure in your team is making sure the team has a network of other co-workers they can lean on in case you get sick, take a vacation, or accept a new role. This can also remind them that you don’t know everything either. It can be easy for especially junior team members to put their senior team members on a pedestal. Make sure you’re showing them you’ve just been doing this longer, not that you’ve been granted magic.

Examples:

• “Have you talked to Kristine? Her team launched something similar last year and she might be able to help.”
• “Adam’s team tried something like this last year and it failed. Have we asked if they had a retrospective from that? If not, let’s ask them to review our design and see if they think we got it right this time.”
• “I don’t have the most experience in this area, but Maxine has three decades. Let’s ask her for help here.”

Looking Left and Right

What already exists? At Google, SRE often talked about this concept as Looking Left And Right. It basically boils down to: before you build something brand new, does a solution already exist?

I often compare this to baking. Do you really need to make that puff pastry from scratch, or is store-bought fine? If you are on the Great British Bake-Off or a professional pastry chef, you should probably start from scratch. Otherwise, store bought is probably fine. If it’s not your the central part of your product, maybe don’t waste time when a standardized solution is better and more resilient for you.

That can be easier said than done. Sometimes we get nerd sniped by interesting problems and that takes away from the work that actually adds value. Are you churning butter when you already have some in the fridge because you think it’s fun? Or are you learning how to do something complicated when there is already an expert around who could save you some time? Is the point to get the thing done right, done quickly, or done cheaply? Your reviews should reflect thinking about those trade-offs.

At the end of the day, you were hired because you’re probably not a robot; you’re there because you can work through problems and make reasonable decisions. Remind your team that you’re all doing the best you can as a group, and while there are definitely wrong answers out there, there’s also not a definitive answer key. You’re all doing the best with the information you have at the time. Leading by example and with empathy will make sure you grow a team who has the psychological safety to bring you their best work.