Cat Hicks is a social scientist at Pluralsight and the VP of Research Insights. She examines employee responses to their workplace, colleagues, managers, and senior leaders. During this breakout session from Pluralsight’s 2022 Navigate event, she and
Start by getting comfortable with the topic of work culture
You’ve probably attended a few panels about empathy and developer satisfaction if you work in an engineering team. You probably came away from the sessions feeling inspired and motivated to create an environment where developers thrive.
Even the most inspired leader may struggle to translate their inspiration into action. Mike has pointed out that these presentations are adjectives, not verbs. Leaders need the plan to improve the developer experience.
You can improve the experience of developers by looking for “magic levers.” By talking to developers and finding out what affects their life, you can make positive changes.
Make space for meaningful conversations
Cat’s reflections on the code review process of one company. They had a great strategy. However, they still needed to work on convincing everyone to make changes. The team tried different schedules for code reviews and new targets, but something needed to be fixed.
Her team found that when they spoke directly with the junior developers, even though the Feedback was positive, it was presented in a manner that discouraged them from implementing the changes. Unnecessarily harsh Feedback from someone you don’t know does not build trust.
The junior developers were primarily resisting the social aspects, not the actual process. The team needed more trust and not negative feedback delivered at the wrong time.
Move the quality to the left
This type of situation can be avoided by teams “moving the quality to the left” or, as Mike explains, making a series of minor course corrections at the beginning of the process. This change management is a critical component of the process and has a profound impact on the quality of the final product.
Cat said that she is often asked to make interventions after it’s already too late to make a difference. By moving the measurement to the left, leaders can track the developer’s experience over time. They can also make minor strategic adjustments (instead of massive changes all at once) along the way.
This streamlines the process and reduces errors that can accumulate at the end of the project. It also builds trust within the team.
Plan developmental conversations
Take a strategic approach in communicating with junior and senior team members to further enhance trust. Developers, for instance, receive Feedback during code reviews that are often linked to their job performance. They may feel uneasy if they only receive Feedback that is related to performance. It can cause developers to be risk-averse, and this can negatively impact innovation.
Senior developers are rarely available to junior developers for one-on-one discussions. Junior engineers should have more chances to talk about growth and development outside of work sessions that are performance-oriented. Are your junior and senior developers able to communicate outside of feedback sessions with each other? If not, then the culture may not be set up in a way that encourages junior developers to feel inspired and supported.
Understanding and accepting productive failure
Cat and Mike’s definition of productive failure are what good leaders should focus on. “One thing I noticed about those engineers that make an impact was their accurate understanding on productive failure. We have to transform our failures. “We have to stop thinking about being stuck in the present and muddled by it; we need to start thinking about the future,” Cat stated.
Leaders who are open to productive failure will help their team thrive. In the end, mistakes are how people learn. Risk and loss is inevitable when you experiment, innovate, or use creativity. Making mistakes and testing is a good thing because it helps people to know what they should do next.
Mike said, “Our leadership responsibility is to create an environment that encourages new, interesting mistakes.”
Find out what you can do to make a difference
Cat and Mike agree that leaders cannot start from scratch. They must find opportunities to change their culture and adapt from there. They suggest that you speak with your developers in order to learn about their culture, experience, and workflow.
Asking teams to share what is going well can change the tone of these conversations. A panelist said that in his organization, developers are asked to provide Feedback every three months on what is going well, how they can improve, and the performance of each member. Feedback is then incorporated into the company’s processes moving forward.
Cat praised this strategy, and pointed out that leaders can also benefit from a data-driven approach. This type of exercise is not beneficial to anyone if you don’t use developer feedback as a way to implement change.
Setting goals using failure as a guide
For a cohesive developer’s experience, teams need incentives and metrics that are unified. You need to set clear goals for the entire organization as a leader so that everyone can work together towards a common goal. Developers will not understand the value of their work without clear communication. Developers may not understand how their work fits into the overall picture, even if they are meeting their targets.
Uncertain goal structures can also make it difficult for developers to understand how their mistakes can lead to better products and growth. Some developers may be tempted by negative Feedback to dismiss their failures. Cat said, “If you don’t learn from failures, then you’re losing valuable, interesting information.”
Mike also agreed that “organizations struggle to close a circle of quality improvement when failure is not part of the process.” If you want to improve your organization, your teams need to do post-mortems and track their learnings using issue trackers.
What is an intervention
It’s your job as a leader to create a culture in which failure is not a deal-breaker. Cat and Mike have outlined the steps that leaders can take to create a space where innovation is encouraged:
If you are unsure of what you would like to change, you should first determine how you will measure it. Then move whatever you can left.
Understand the problem, and its history.
Use good survey tools to collect the correct evidence.
Implement your changes. Implement your changes. The people need time to adapt and experience the changes.
“Once people experience work in an environment where [they] have a positive experience of learning from failure, where values and incentives are aligned with [their] own personal values as well as with goals as an organization…people don’t go back to not having that,” Mike said.
Teams who feel comfortable discussing their successes and mistakes will build better software and teams.