Since I started this blog for my Capstone cource, it’s about time we dive into an update on how the project is going! This week, I want to get a bit vulnerable and call myself in to be a bit better as a teammate.
One of my teammates had an “Aha! moment” this week, which is what I usually call it when a programmer just has a break through on how to fix a really complex problem. You may get it in the middle of the night, during work, taking a shower, etc., but it comes out of nowhere. All the sudden you have a breakthrough on how to solve a really complex problem and it’s time to hit the keyboard.
For my teammate, that came this week in solving some of the key requirements for an input parser on our text based adventure game. He went above and beyond to knock out hours of coding to bring the team forward weeks in our progress simply on pure motivation and excitement to fix the problem.
Where I’d like to call myself in, is in my response to that. My group mate was so incredibly excited to have built our input parser to handle all the scenarios, but all I was focused on what the length of the solution and how it could be done better to minimize it.
As I spoke through recommending that we try going with a different solution, I quickly recognized I was deflating my group mate’s excitement. Though I was trying to help us forward the project by making recommendations, I was not being a part of the solution and rather info dumping ideas back on someone who had done incredible work to remove a potential roadblock for our team.
I was practicing a behavior that I myself hold as one of my biggest pet peeves: delivering criticism over feedback.
My “Aha! moment” on Criticism vs. Feedback
A few years back during my undergraduate degree, I was participating in an engineering challenge at CES (the Consumer Electronics Show). There was just six students participating, and I lucked out in landing on of my good friends from another school on my team. Incredibly exciting, as I knew we already worked well together.
The challenge was to find a technology at CES and present that as something that would revolutionize cars by 2025 (yes, just 4 years from now). We spent a day just wandering the show, then came back to our booth to brainstorm as a group with our group mentor. For hours, we sat and debated without making much progress. It was an incredibly frustrating experience filled with research, several pitches, and several ideas tossed in the recycling bin.
It felt like we as a group were spinning our wheels with no real progress while the team up against us was chugging along on their presentation. Finally, after about that 25th pitch of the day, I recognized that my group mate was consistently the one shooting down ideas for being “silly” or “unfeasible” or “not that interesting”. Whether it was intentional or not, it was clearly getting to the group morale.
Finally, our group mentor, tackled the problem head on saying to the critical group mate, “Your feedback and concerns are completely valid. However, let’s try not to be overly critical without providing a solution or recommendation on how to move forward.”
That moment has stuck with me ever since. It felt harsh at the time, but it completely changed the group dynamic. The teammate that had previously been slightly difficult quickly got our team on track, and honestly completely led our team to create a fun and engaging presentation that had the entire judges and executive team from our company sponsor laughing out loud and actively participating in our project.
The contribution this group mate was capable of giving to the team was incredible, but she needed that push to reframe the way that she was contributing. She needed to take off her criticism hat and put on her feedback hat.
Feedback over Criticism
Criticism is calling out the problems where feedback is also calling out those problems but helping the receiver work towards a solution. Feedback is inherently intended to be constructive and solution-oriented.
The scenario I shared about my bad behavior with my group mate is something I see almost every day in my workplace between cross-functional teams. Feedback is collected or given to the team trying to solve the problem, this team comes to the solution, and the other team complains about imperfections in the solution either privately or directly back to the problem solver.
I see it a ton from my sales reps unhappy with certain product updates. Their concern is obviously valid, but often their criticism is far from productive. Often this criticism lacks context or recommendations of solutions. We simply hear things like, “this does not work for my customers as it leaves out this scenario.”
Though this seems helpful in the moment, the receiving party, the product team, is likely not privy to every single scenario that a customer can face. Product relies heavily on our teams interfacing with the customers to source those scenarios and either recommend their own solutions or share more about how they are solved in current state in order to help the roduct team come up with their own solutions.
Again, the people with some of the best solutions need to be helping the broader team work towards those solutions. If you have your best players just cheering on the team from the bench, you’re missing out on having you’re MVPs dunk on the other team. Having a strong communication between product and sales where both teams trust each other to come with constructive, solution-oriented recommendations is so important to positioning your team to come up with the best solutions.
Where Does that Leave Us?
Let’s bring it back to the Capstone project. As I witnessed my group mate slowly get a little more sad each time I tried to brainstorm ideas with the group, I quickly remembered that CES project team.
What I was trying to deliver feedback on was certainly something I’m incredibly talented at doing. In several group projects, I’ve been tasked to clean up code and help our groups’ solutions become more efficient. However, the way I was trying to deliver that value was incredibly misplaced.
I had spent several minutes essentially playing this back and forth with my group mate where he would share his solutions and excitement, and I would recommend ways to make it better. Instead of giving him the space to share and matching his excitement on this incredible feat, I was too focused on my own agenda and where I wanted to help.
Once I recognized this, I called myself out and immediately apologized for being inconsiderate. Instead of sitting and criticizing, I should have applauded my group mate’s progress. The time he had saved us for future weeks was actually time that I could easily spend working on a separate branch to consolidate before asking the group to review.
That was my final recommendation. I shared my specialty and also excitement for my group mate’s hard work. I offered to be part of the solution and take a look offline before our next team meeting in order to prepare some updates for my group mate’s to review, which was much more welcomed than my consistent “we should do more” comments prior.
My biggest piece of advice is catch yourself when you’re in this pattern. Whether it’s well intentioned or not, it can be hurtful to your team’s dynamic and prevent you from really putting your own skills to good use. Don’t be part of the problem, be part of the solution. Give feedback, not criticism.
