How to work

You need a motor and some professional skills...

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Let me start this week’s edition of Wednesday Wisdom by apologizing to our younger readers because this episode has a high “old man raging at the sea” factor. However, I feel somewhat justified in its content because one of my much younger friends expressed exactly the same emotions as the ones that I am about to lay on you, over some coffee and cakes at Kensington Palace (London, UK) last week.

By the way: Totally worth a visit.

Here is the thing: I have done a fair amount of work with underperformers and the one-line summary of all that work is this: It is rarely a matter of tech knowledge or tech skills. Most underperformers I worked with knew computers reasonably well and could code. However, they mostly were either not motivated to, or didn’t know how to, work.

“Why not?”, you might ask. “What is/was lacking?” I am glad you asked.

One of my all-time favorite colleagues used to be a major in the US Army Rangers. This probably explains his extraordinarily calm and confident demeanor: If you spend your twenties and early thirties jumping out of helicopters, armed to the teeth, on covert missions to achieve missions of strategic national importance, then meeting a software release date is clearly not something to be overly upset about.

“Jos”, he told me one day, “you know what it is? You really can’t teach effort.” He then continued to explain that whenever he got a new lieutenant, straight out of the academy, he would load up the poor young man with tons of work that he didn’t know how to do. Then, as the new officer failed left and right, my colleague would shout at him on an daily basis; for morale, I guess… “But,” my colleague explained, “during that time you find out if someone has a motor. If they have a motor, I can work with that.” 

Here’s another story: I once had an intern from ETH who had gotten there the long way. This requires a bit of understanding of the Swiss education system, but in short there are two ways to get to university: One is the direct way, from primary school to a selective secondary school and then up- and onwards to university. The other is the longer way, through a different secondary school that comes with apprenticeships under the watchful eye of an experienced “master” and then optionally to university.

Our intern had done it the long way and I loved it because not only did he have excellent tech knowledge and skills (courtesy of the ETH Department of Computer Science, which by the way gave us a few phenomenal programming languages), but he also knew how to work, courtesy of the apprenticeship. This intern knew how to show up on time, dress, attend meetings, take notes, work down to-do lists, ask for help, and generally get stuff done.

Schools are great at teaching “dry” knowledge and skills. Some of them try to throw in some team work, presentation skills, and other professional competences, but I rarely find that to work very well. That’s kinda weird because all things considered, these are much harder to learn and, at some point, more valuable than learning just another programming language. It took me years to learn how to become a decent coder, but it took me decades to learn how to be an effective team member.

Two years ago my daughter, who at the time was leading a team of people in a distribution center of a Dutch supermarket chain, called me and asked: “Dad, does it ever happen to you that you have a meeting and you agree that people are going to do certain things, and then by the next meeting nobody has done anything?” Cue an instructive father-daughter talk where I explained my system for dealing with that, which she subsequently rolled out at her place of work, much to the surprise of her colleagues 🙂.

When dealing with underperformers I typically find that they either don’t have a motor or they just lack effective professional skills and can’t get stuff done.

Lacking a motor is a real problem because, as I mentioned earlier, you really can’t teach effort. Whenever I am dealing with a motor-problem I try to find out why people are even in this field to begin with. Often the answers to that question are very enlightening: “My father gave me three options: Doctor, lawyer, or software engineer”, one colleague told me. Another explanation I heard was: “I wanted to become a doctor but medical school was in the next town over and my parents didn’t allow me to move to another city.” The most heartbreaking one I ever heard was somewhat similar to that last one: “I wanted to become a doctor, but where I am from, people from my ethnic group were not allowed to go to medical school.”

WT flying F!?

It is of course not surprising that if your motivation to be in this profession is: “Not my fav, but better than any of the alternatives” it might be somewhat hard to concentrate on the work, which sometimes can be quite boring. I am strongly of the opinion that all work sucks (which is why we call your salary “compensation”), but given that you need a paycheck, you’d better do something that actually interests and excites you.

There are many other causes for motor-problems. On top of the aforementioned there is also depression, being bullied at work, not aligning with the core mission of the team/company, or maybe a somatic or mental-health issue. Fixing these problems is often beyond the capacity of the well-meaning casual mentor.

Though recognizing them is not!

If you are mentoring an underperformer and you think there is anything like that going on, refer the case to HR so that actual specialists can get involved. Also: Keep meticulous notes because on occasion I have been contacted by a company lawyer after the fact because lawsuits were happening and the (by now) former colleague claimed that I had said something that supported their case (whatever that might have been). When that happens I send my notes to the lawyer and typically do not hear from it again, which really is just as well.

If the problem at hand is not a motor problem but a “does not know how to work” problem, chances of coaching the underperformer back to acceptable performance are much better. However, it often does require a few uncomfortable conversations about acceptable professional behavior and the consistent application of professional work techniques.

A lot of people who come out of school have some problems adjusting to corporate life and implementing the standards of behavior that allow for success in the workplace. I know I did. I can recall many embarrassing moments where colleagues looked at me disapprovingly or, on occasion, remarked upon my unprofessional behavior. Fortunately, in my case things never got out of hand, but over the years I have been on the receiving end of my fair share of experiences that were worthy of a frown, to say the least.

One young woman I mentored had a habit of taking our early morning (9am-ish, so not too wild) mentoring video chats from her bed while still in her pyjama. These were somewhat loose fitting and to make up for that she used to draw her blanket up to just under her chin, covering the bits of her body that really no colleague should ever be exposed to. Given the constant and, in this case, insidious effects of gravity, the blanket kept slipping. As a gentleman of a certain age this is obviously a no-win situation, which left me with no other option than to disable her camera feed,

Another noteworthy incident involves a younger colleague who had to receive some coaching from me about his regular joke references to the WW2 national socialist party when addressing colleagues from Germany or Austria. It is probably needless to say that if I have to tell you your jokes are not done, they are so far over the line that you need a pair of binoculars to see how far out they really are.

Fortunately, most problems with how to work are a bit more mundane, such as being on time for meetings, taking good notes, following up on action items, dressing appropriately, asking for help, or, sometimes, how to use soap or deodorant regularly and effectively.

An old friend of mine ran a startup with a handful of employees in a somewhat crowded office space. One particular colleague was apparently emitting a lot of molecules that offended the olfactory senses of the other engineers. Finally, my friend had received so many complaints that he had to do something about it. He called the colleague into a meeting room, sat opposite him, and just looked at him. When the colleague finally asked my friend what was up, he stared at him for a few uncomfortable seconds more, reached down into his bag, took out a bottle of 48-hour extra strong antiperspirant and slammed it on the table between them, still saying nothing. The colleague looked at the bottle, then at my friend for a second, and finally said: “Ok, yeah, I get it.” Mission accomplished, and one of my all-time favorite ways of dealing with this particular problem.

For the fact that professional working skills are so important, schools typically do a terrible job of teaching them. Sure some do team-based projects and some might even throw in a presentation skills module, but they rarely teach the necessary techniques and skills to be an effective team member. Sure it is cool that you know how to write a formal proof for a piece of code (something you will never do in your actual job), but that is kinda useless if you haven’t internalized that you need to prepare for meetings and show up on time…

A motor and work skills are important, but unfortunately our current interviewing techniques do not unearth whether a candidate is in the proud possession of these essentialia so it might be up to you to teach them. The sooner you do that, the better!

Note: This week’s episode might be turned into a book called “How to work”, by yours truly and the friend mentioned in the opening paragraphs. It will contain chapters on “Reading clocks”, “Shaving and showering”, and “Minimal dress standards for beginners”. Coming soon to an airport bookstore near you.