The hidden reason your manager gets mad at you
It’s not about the incident report. It’s about trust.
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Now, let’s go to today’s topic: Surprises are your enemy.
Let me ask you:
How many times have you gone to an operational meeting with your Engineering Manager or Engineering Director and ended up punished?
This is the picture:
Your weekly operational meeting with your Engineering Director to report on the highlights that she/he needs to be aware of and understand the progress.
But the meeting doesn't start as usual; the Engineering Director kicks off the conversation with an angry face.
Yeah, she/he is pished off because has been told that your service lost data 2 days ago, and the Incident Report has not been filed yet.
Your brain is telling you: Why is she/he so upset about a problem that we solved out in 10 minutes?
You try to explain the situation, but it’s too late.
Summarizing: Because something you knew that happened and, in your vision, had low impact, you got a hit from your Engineering Director.
Spoiler: the problem isn’t that you didn’t fill out an Incident Report form.
Why is that? It was a surprise.
Upper management doesn’t want surprises.
Upper management doesn’t need surprises.
Let me tell you what happened under the hood.
There was another meeting where your Engineering Director was invited with other upper management (CPO, CTO, other Engineering Directors, or similar).
There, your Engineering Director was asked: Hey, one of your teams owns a service that had an incident by which we lost a significant piece of data, which was critical for our group. What happened?
And your Engineering Director had no idea… at all.
So, she/he could just say:
I’ll check with the team in order to understand the problem and I will come back to you.
Meaning:
I don’t have f*ck*ng idea what are you talking about, you got me, I should know, and I will find it out ASAP.
👉🏼 Surprises put upper management in difficult situations. Without an explanation, the only thing they can do is put the shield on and wait for the hit to end.
I can tell you, I’ve been there a few times. Lucky me, I managed to understand the problem, so I could work on the solution, and now I’m sharing it with you to help you avoid the same struggle.
🎯 So, what’s the problem here?
Here we are talking about a misalignment about what is important:
You thought the problem was neither important nor urgent. Or you just forgot to report it!
Somebody in upper management considered the opposite.
Your upper management should be able to trust you to get notified when something she/he should know. Once that, your Engineering Director will know exactly what to do in the next meeting with the rest of upper management.
👉🏼 Trust is built through clear and straightforward communication, no matter the issue.
💡 What’s the solution for this?
It goes through two points.
1️⃣ First, you have to clearly understand what is important and urgent in your ownership.
👉🏼 Everything urgent or important must be reported.
When it’s related to the input & outputs of your team or services, it will most likely impact others, hence it’s important or urgent. For example:
A commitment in the roadmap during a meeting with the other team, sure, this is important.
A production incident, for sure, it’s urgent.
In the scenario I’ve described, the missing data was actually a problem for more people than just your team, which means it was important or even urgent, and your managers needed to know about it.
I can recommend that you use the Eisenhower Matrix to help you organize by importance. I wrote a template for you to copy/paste and use. You can freely download it here 👇🏻
2️⃣ Second, you have to communicate as soon as something important or urgent happens.
How to do this? I recommend a chat, but this depends on how your company works with the communication channel.
If we are talking about an incident in production, my template for you is:
Open a chat with your Engineering Manager + Engineering Director, indicating:
The problem.
The impact. Are customers affected?
Current status.
Next steps.
Keep the chat up to date, with 1-hour recurrence (less, if the impact is high), until the problem is solved.
Many times, we are not sure what we have to communicate. If this happens to you, my advice to you: Overcommunicate.
👉🏼 It’s better to overcommunicate than have information not reach the people.
Hope you find this email useful. If you have similar tales like this one, I would love to hear from you. Drop me a message or leave a comment.
Thanks for your support and feedback, I really appreciate it!
You’re the best! 🖖🏼
𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘦𝘯𝘫𝘰𝘺𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘰𝘴𝘵, 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘤𝘬 𝘵𝘩𝘦 💜. 𝘐𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘭𝘱𝘴!
𝘐𝘧 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸 𝘴𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘦𝘭𝘴𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘣𝘦𝘯𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘵 𝘧𝘳𝘰𝘮 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴, ♻️ 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴