That Good Morning Cup, by Wespionage on Flickr

I once worked for a manager who did a great job of smiling and saying ‘Hello’ to his employees every morning. He then spent most of his time in meetings during the rest of the day… he was a manager after all, and managers are busy people.

When he was available for his employees, he enjoyed having discussions with his senior staff members to make decisions, decide on new directions, and figure out how to handle challenges.

Sounds like a great person to work for! … Right?

Perhaps so…

… But perhaps only if you paid attention to WHAT they were doing…

… and not HOW they were doing these things.

For instance, you might begin to notice that while your manager made the rounds saying ‘Hello’ every morning, their tone of voice and the words used changed depending on whom he was speaking to.  You might even begin to notice a trend amongst your fellow colleagues in those differences (but what does it all mean?!).

Now let’s say you were one of the fortunate few to be a senior staff member to this manager.  Wouldn’t that be cool?!  To be on the inside track, working closely with your manager to set the direction of your team / department, and getting opportunities to take on more responsibilities.

That sounds like fun to me!

The opportunity would become less fun as you begin to notice that your ideas are rarely considered or used for making decisions or improving the team.   Now you are beginning to wonder what is going on… your ideas and perspectives have been highly regarded by others in the organization.

So what gives?  Why isn’t your manager respecting your ideas or supporting you?  Is this happening to everybody?

Upon further observation, you find that this manager does in fact appear to take ideas from a couple of your peers.  But wait a minute, those peers are just reframing something that your manager said!  They are repackaging his comments to simply agree with what he wants to have happen.

Your manager doesn’t want new ideas, or someone challenging his (obviously perfect) ideas.

Your manager wants ‘Yes’ Men!

People who will agree with what he says and not challenge his ideas.

Aha!  That explains why your ideas are rarely considered or used – you don’t blindly agree to whatever is thrown on the table because a particular somebody said it.

Thinking back to those morning greetings, you realize that the ‘Yes’ Men on the team get meaningful interactions with your manager in the morning… and the people who aren’t?  They are getting a syrupy-sweet-so-you-can’t-actually-complain-about-me-fake greeting that lasts all of one second.

Moreover, you realize that your manager thrives on a dictatorship.  He is happy when he tells people what to do, and they do it.  He supports the senior staff who continue that behaviour with other team members.    So, opportunities on the team for growth and advancement are only given to those ‘Yes’ Men.

Not so nice anymore, is it?

This type of person does exist!

I did in fact work for someone like this after a good manager left.  I ended up leaving the team when I pieced together what was going on.  To say the least, it was a toxic environment, and I stayed in it much too long.

I learned a lot from that experience though, such as:

• Recognizing when I am working with someone like this
• Understanding myself and my own limits better
• How to view painful experiences as valuable learning opportunities
• When to try to work past differences with other people, and when to move on
• How NOT to behave if I wanted to be a good (or even great) manager

On the Flip Side

I did have a manager who did all the things I described in the first two paragraphs who was very sincere in their discussions and greetings, who truly valued their employee’s input, collaborated often to make decisions and generate ideas, and empowered their team to be responsible, creative, hard-working, and have fun.   Paying attention to HOW she behaved, not just WHAT she did, made this obvious.

I have even been this positive manager myself over a number of years in managing teams… but more on that in another entry.

Now, I would like to hear from you!

Have you worked with or for someone who is a dictator-type who thrives on working with ‘Yes’ Men?  What has your experience been like?  Were you able to find a way to work with them, or to deter their behaviours?

Please share your stories!

It was beneficial as I was able to help employees learn new concepts and improve skills,  in a manner that fit for them.  The added bonus for me was that I learned something new from them as well.  What powerful experiences those were!

Now, as a manager for 18 testers who are spread across several different agile teams, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to coach testing skills one-on-one.  On a weekly basis I also spend time coaching the agile teams, management-level initiatives to improve company-wide practices, and the usual management administration.  Such is life in a ‘start-up’ type of company.  As a result, my one-on-one time with each person is limited to 30-60 minutes over two weeks.  This seems a miniscule amount given they are working a minimum of 80 hours in that same time period!

I am someone who is motivated and energized in working with others to learn new skills, to understand and be able to apply new skills appropriately, and to have those ‘light bulb’ moments where things just click.  Given my work situation, I have been frustrated with how little I have been able to do this.  This left me with a problem!

How can I increase the amount of coaching and teaching time each individual is receiving?

Solutions:

• Forget about it: Nope! I’m too invested in helping others learn and grow.
• Clone myself: Not feasible, as in I don’t know how, and it is kind of icky to think about.
• Shift responsibilities to other people: The possible people to offload to are just as overloaded as me.
• Find additional ways to teach and coach skills so each individual gets more opportunities to learn and improve: There are lots of ways to do this!  I just need to invest some more time to create these opportunities.  Some possibilities:
  • Coach a smaller group, and have them coach small subsets of the larger group.
  • Direct them to other people who I trust will coach them appropriately.
  • Move our 1:1′s to their work space & turn it into a paired testing session.
  • Create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.
  • Coach other people to create workshops where they can learn and practice skills.

What I’m Doing:

Ongoing learning and growth are important to me.  Happily, I discovered that they are important to my department as well.  They requested regularly scheduled workshops/training sessions to be reinstated after being cancelled during the agile training the entire engineering organization went through over the summer.  They missed them!  They missed the learning, new perspectives, and much needed ‘down time’ at work.

So, regular department workshops / training sessions were reinstated on a biweekly basis.  We are currently shifting to make them weekly.

Our first workshop back was a brainstorming session to come up with a list of loosely prioritized workshops the team members would like to have provided.   They came up with a lot of great topics, which we are adding to on an ongoing basis, and are adapting priorities as needed.

The workshops we are doing are typically 2 hours long, and are created by myself or a team member, and contain both teaching of concepts, and time to explore, practice and apply concepts.  We customize workshop focus and content based on the people involved, what they want to learn about, and their current knowledge-base and skill sets.  A blend of ‘teaching’ time and ‘experience’ time are proving vital to help people go back to their day-to-day work and integrate new learnings – which when applied to hands-on work become new-found skills when they invest time in practicing them.

The workshops also allow me to engage with everyone both as a group and individually, and determine how I can add more value for them when we have our regular one-on-one conversations.

Final Thoughts:

I am not yet satisfied with the amount of coaching and teaching I am able to provide to each individual. However, I am happy with the progress I am making in increasing the amount of learning opportunities they are getting from me.  These workshops have allowed me to stretch the limited time I have to teach, coach, and add more value for all of my department members.   This is an improvement, and a step forward to incorporating other learning opportunities for my department.

I plan to share some of the workshop experiences in future blog entries, so keep an eye out for those!

On Teaching Software Testing:

My thoughts on this have been bouncing around in my head for a while – how can we improve on how testing skills are taught?  What is the best way to teach and coach them?

For myself, there are things I am doing now which are helpful, but there is so much more I would like to do, and I’m sure could be doing that I haven’t considered yet.  I know I am not the only person in that position.  So where do we begin?

Matthew Heusser recently blogged on this very topic.  He invited people to comment on what types of teaching and training are wanted by organizations for their employees, and what would be most effective for the employees.   I added my comments to that entry, alongside some brilliant thinkers in this field.  Thank you to Matt for starting a great conversation thread!  You can read it at http://blogs.stpcollaborative.com/matt/2009/11/18/you-say-you-want-a-revolution/.

Your turn!

What are your experiences and thoughts on how to coach and teach software testing skills?  As a coach/teacher/trainer, what have you done to do this when you have had little time to do it well?  As a tester, how do you want to be coached and taught – what would be most effective for you?

I welcome your comments, and encourage you to share them both here and on Matthew’s blog.