One of my team members, and a long-time friend, committed suicide. We were a small team of five, then of four. Although we were a fully distributed team, we were close.
I called each of the team individually, and broke the news. I will never will get out of my head the inconsolable moans of his junior engineer he had been mentoring.
There was a fair amount of pressure from “leadership” not to divulge any details, but fuck that. They needed to know he was an recovering alcoholic and on-and-off-again manic depressive, and that there was nothing they could have said or done that would have made a difference in the final outcome.
Transparency that builds trust has never failed me, whether why a coworker committed suicide or why our backlog priorities changed overnight, or why we chose to use GraphQL over REST.
Listen deeply to your people, so you can understand them deeply, so you can empower them fully,
I failed with my friend because I wanted to believe the lies that addicts tell so well. If you are listening closely enough to your people’s words and actions, and you put aside wishful thinking and blind optimism, as well as lazy skepticism, then you’ll know what they need. Then your job is simple: get them what they need. But I missed his warning signs because I was more focused on the success of the startup than on the success of his life. Never again.
Management is an important role in many organizations. But in a small startup people need to manage themselves. What they need are leaders who listen carefully, communicate clearly, and create a culture of transparency and trust by exemplifying both.
People talk about transparency in the same way people talk about a just-war: that the rules only apply up until the point your principles may cost you victory. But what’s the point of transparency — of pro-active honesty — if “well, in this situation discretion is more advisable” is actually the principle most valued?
Human beings matter the most. If the choice is between your company failing and the well-being of your people, a decent person and a good leader chooses their people every time.
This doesn’t mean you can’t fire people. If they aren’t performing, then they are in the wrong place, and deserve to be somewhere else where they can develop. Firing a person means we made a mistake in hiring, and it’s incumbent upon us to see what we can do to rectify that mistake,
I could go on, but you probably get my point. A company is nothing without people. So take care of them, even and especially when it hurts.