Some time ago one of the engineers in my development team reached out to me to talk about his productivity. More concretely, he wasn’t happy with how he was handling pressure on a given project and felt it was keeping him from achieving his best.
I was very happy that he took this route. It showed pro-activeness, trust in leadership, humbleness and will to improve. I also know the project and since I take an interest into everyone that I manage, I knew exactly where the conflict lied.
“B” (let’s call him that), is a very capable programmer, an amazing individual, and a “humble perfectionist” of a developer. Both traits can be amazing, but combined into one task are a recipe for failure.
Being a perfectionist, a job will take more time to do than usual, which can already be a challenge; Being insecure about which implementation is the most perfect one often froze him at his job. B was managed by a very capable Tech Lead, who was usually used to unlock his mental blocks, but we agreed that we would all work towards growing B into being less dependent.
The scenario was as follows: B needed to be more confident about his work so he wouldn’t question his own judgment too often, and this comes with experience. Experience, however, comes by experimenting and acting, which he wasn’t doing with fear of implementing a less-than-perfect solution. He would in turn use our Tech Lead to help him make a decision.
Two people are involved and zero lessons are learned. Barry Schwartz calls this the “maximizer” trap in The Paradox of Choice — people who obsess over finding the perfect option end up less productive and less happy than those who just pick something good enough and run with it.
When in this scenario one doesn’t learn from mistakes because one simply won’t make them. One also doesn’t gain any confidence because one didn’t actually succeed at anything.
In the end, I made clear that:
- We are a very forgiving and supporting team;
- Mistakes are part of the job;
- After 1h in doubt, pick randomly and go with it;
- Progress lies outside of our comfort zone.
In this case as many others, specially if you’re a slow starter or an insecure profile, when blocked just start.
It doesn’t matter if it’s at picking a stack for a project, a next article to write, or which training routine to follow. Just start, everything else will fall into place.