photo credit: Jonathan D. Blundell

Working as a team lead in any company is especially challenging. A lead developer straddles the gap between the coders and management, forced to take communication from one side and relay it in a manner the other can understand. It’s tricky business, and it’s not something you learn in school.

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up in the last few years, some of them learned the hard way. I hope they’ll serve you well.

1. Provide Solutions: Management is looking for your expertise, even when they think they know better. Temper your speech. It’s easy to get into the habit of saying “No, that won’t work because…” Don’t throw up barriers. You’ve gotten this far in your career because you’re good at what you do, so use your experience to find the creative solution.
2. Accept Input: Listen to your developers. There are days that they’ll know more about the current state of the codebase than you well. If you are lucky, you are leading people who are talented in disciplines that you are not. Listen to these people, accept their input.
3. Make The Call: Eventually, the discussion has to end. Take the data and make the best decision you can. That’s your job.
4. Play It Straight: Be honest. When you screw up, take the blame. When it’s your team, deal with it.  Trying to hide errors just compounds the problem. Without honesty there can be no trust.
5. Share Knowledge: The most fun I have with my team at Mahalo is when we are talking about tech, sharing ideas, new code, and new methods of getting the job done. This is real team-building. As developer, we prize knowledge above most other things. Share it with your team. Learn from them as well. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to teach you a skill you’ve wanted to learn.
6. Keep It Short: Management doesn’t really care how an HTTP Request Handler works.  Keep your explanations short and to the point. Ask if they want more detail. Understand that speaking techie will alienate non-techies, and will cause a slight distrust of what you’re saying. If you cannot avoid giving a technical answer, keep it short and sweet.  It’s not their job to know how it works, they just want to know it works.
7. Choose Your Battles: Your development team will inevitably want things that management cannot provide, and management will always mandate things that are not easy to do. It’s your job to find the middle ground. That will usually mean compromise, and while it’s not pretty, it’s how the sausage is made.  Save the digging in of heels for when you really need it.  An extra button or a different way of processing a form is not worth the trouble, in general, but a new form that causes the entire database to change is worth the fight. You’re not just there to take orders…you’re the caretaker of the project. Give feedback, and if you are overruled, determine how far you’re willing to take it. Be realistic in your assessment: is it a true battle to be fought or merely an inconvenience?
8. Keep A Journal: Keep a journal of the projects you run. Take notes, so you can remember why decisions were made. There will be times that you’ll look at some piece of code and you’ll have no idea why it’s doing what it’s doing. Your journal will save you from the ever-embarrassing “I dunno.”

Newton’s first law states: “A body continues to maintain its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted upon by an external unbalanced force.”

The same can be said for people. We try to stay in the comfortable, safe spot, and anything that seeks to move us from that position is viewed with suspicion.

And yet…we want to create. Stories, poetry, song, software…all manner of creative pursuits. We crave the thrill, the rush of being in the flow, swimming along with the current and seeing where it will take us.

We love it, but we fear its power.

Inspiration is an unbalanced force. It whisper, sings, shouts at us to move in a particular direction, write a certain thing down. And yet…we resist.

Why? Comfort? Fear? Guilt? All of the above?

Steven Pressfield, author of The War of Art, sums it in a single word: Resistance.

Have you ever brought home a treadmill and let it gather dust in the attic? Ever resolved on a diet, a course of yoga, a meditation practice? Have you ever felt a call to embark upon a spiritual practice, dedicate yourself to a humanitarian calling, commit your life to the service of others? Have you ever wanted to be a mother, a doctor, an advocate for the weak and helpless; to run for office, crusade for the planet, campaign for world peace or to preserve the environment? Late at night have you experienced a vision of the person you might become, the work you could accomplish, the realized being you were meant to be? Are you a writer who doesn’t write, a painter who doesn’t paint, an entrepreneur who never starts a venture? Then you know what Resistance is.

Resistance is the shadow, the Dweller on the Threshold who challenges you to a duel. It will always be there, and the more you need to do something, the stronger the Shadow will be. Ironically, that’s a good thing…it shows you what you need to do the most. The more it scares you, the more you need to challenge it.

It doesn’t matter what you do…writing code, playing music, painting. The unbalanced force of Inspiration will give you the push you need, but you’re the one that needs to stand before Resistance, challenge it, and ultimately, cause it to yield before your might. It will mock you, taunt you, reason with you, and do anything it can to divert you.

DO THE WORK YOU ARE CALLED TO DO.

Push onward.

Charge!

As I said in a previous essay, I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves. Along with that, I’ve been considering the way we see other people’s stories. How we watch then, listen to them, and if they have something we feel we need, how we try to adapt their stories to fit into our own.

This is a useful exercise. When we see a person’s life through the lens of history, such as a personal hero from the past, we do not see all their failings, all their personal struggles. We see an idealized version of them, and we take the qualities of their life that we seek to emulate and attempt to graft them on to our own psyches.  We learn and grow this way, trying on stories as we would garments, and when they do not suit us, casting them off.

These days, we live in an information-rich climate. The stories surrounding us, bombarding us at times, all seem to carry something that we’d like to make part of ourselves.  I’ve found this to be especially true with the people I’ve met through my work in the podcasting community, where tales of individual drive, perseverance, and passion have turned normally shy people into the writers, musicians, and broadcasters we know and love.  There’s much that’s worthy of being emulated there.

There are times that we select beliefs or qualities that make sense to us, only to have them cause dissonance with other, more deeply-rooted attitudes. In my life, that’s been Skepticism vs. Spirituality.

To explain: I know a number of atheists and skeptics. I’ve had a number of discussions with them, and to a great degree, their arguments make a great deal of logical sense to me. My own belief in a God (capital G) has been wavering for years now, and as I make my professional life in a world of logic, the arguments put forward by my skpetic friends are appealing to me. Facts make sense, and believing in things you cannot prove makes none.

However, on a deeper level, my inner life has always been one of mysticism, symbol, and faith.  I was raised Catholic, and when I hit the point in my life when I wanted to break out of the Church, I gravitated toward other mystical beliefs: neopaganism and the occult being a major part of that. In retrospect, I can see that I moving from one ritual-based practice to another because it was the motion and poetry of the rituals that I fell in love with, not the actual theology.

In the past three years, these two systems have been causing me some serious internal dissonance. In trying to find a way to make these things work together, I’ve worked myself into a cycle of doubt that has been crippling.  One side, the logical side, tells me that all my beliefs that I cannot prove with facts are bollocks, and the other side reminds me that humans work on a deeper level than mere logic, and that Significance is not fact-based, but instinctual and symbolic. It’s a battle that is deeply troubling.

The effect of all of this is that, when I take the skeptical path, I tend to be bitter and angry, and when I take the spiritual, I’m insecure and full of doubt.  I do not like the way my life tastes when I am purely skeptical, but I worry that I will float away into a never-neverland if the spiritual should take over.

I do not know where the balance point in my own life lies, but I’m reasonably certain that I’m not the only person fighting this internal fight.  If you are one of those people with this same inner turmoil, how do you balance it? What beliefs have influenced you, shown you where your strength lies, and how did you come to your decision?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the stories we tell ourselves.

Each of is the sum total of the stories we’ve been told, that we’ve lived, and that we’ve told ourselves. Some use these stories to grow, some use them to hide, some just use them to fool themselves.

I’ve been witness to some very different stories since moving out here. I’ve met some very rich men, some very poor struggling artists, and some people who are just skating along on the thin ice of this failing economy.  I’ve seen a great number of people who seem to espouse the “fake it until you make it” mentality. Bigger, better, faster, more…people are being driven by the basest instincts and the most primal of urges.

I’ve seen all of the Seven Deadly Sins in various forms.  Babylon isn’t a place, it’s a state of mind.

We’re all told morality tales when we are going up. Fairy tales, Aesop’s fables, religious stories meant to show the path to a lasting happiness. We’re shown, over and over again, that virtues are to be treasured, and that the easy way is generally bound to fail.  Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to Dark Side.

It’s only taken me sixteen weeks to realize the truth of all of these tales. I’ve met a great number of people with their angles.  They are like caricatures. They really seem to think that they can cheat their way to the top, to happiness, to Nirvana.  Pride…there is so much unearned Pride here…it’s a disease.

If there’s a problem in the economy, you’d never know it by the sheer number of Jaguars and BMWs driving around my apartment complex. This is the illusion of success, leased cars when you cannot afford to get your kids new winter coats. I’m not making this up. This actually happens out there.

I’m not sure what stories these people are telling themselves. Maybe these are stories of entitlement…they deserves the big cars, the new iPods, the Next Big Shiny because of how hard their lives are.  There’s always a justification, always the safety hatch of rationalization.

Illusion. Kool-Aid.  They actually BELIEVE these things.

Now, I was raised differently.  My parents may not realize that I was actually listening, but I was.   I find myself falling back to the stories that I grew up with. Compassion, honor, humility, common sense.  I was not raised to feel that I was entitled to any of the toys these people revel in. I was raised to know that I had to work for things, and nothing worthwhile comes easily.

There is a place in our hearts for Virtue, and I rely on it every day to guide my interactions.  The more I rely on Virtue, the more secure I feel in my decisions. I know that I’m operating from a place of sense, not from ego or id.  I lean on these old stories, the ones close to my heart, because I believe that we should expect more from ourselves than Enlightened Self-Interest.

If you can take anything away from this rant, it would be this: Believe in the old stories, the ones that appeal to the Better Angels of our Nature.  Business these days is a trap, the banking crisis has taught us that. If there is evil in the world, that’s where you’ll find it, amongst the people who can justify any action, any injustice because “it’s just business.” Cling to Honor, Honestly, Justice, Compassion, Valor, Humility.

These things are True. Don’t fall prey to Illusion in the New Year.

Kris Johnson and Jason Penney have tagged me. I must obey.

1. Link to the person that tagged you, and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird facts about yourself.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs
4. Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.