Character: Being in Touch with Reality

This post continues on the theme of Character; see the introduction here.

If you're reading this, I bet you're a generally honest person. Basic honesty is at the core of integrity. Despite that, being in touch with reality means more than that. It means you're oriented toward truth, even truth that's hard to take, personally shameful, or contradicts your instincts.

One of the clearest examples I know of how we (as technical leaders) fudge reality is our estimates. Everyone knows the most accurate way to interpret an engineer's estimate of project completion is to multiply it by a factor of 3 or more. Is it because we're all liars? Certainly not. But we all fudge reality because the optimistic movie of how things will go that plays out in our minds isn't realistic.

Or consider being involved in a post-mortem meeting about an incident affecting your production service. If you work with honest people, a root cause will likely be identified. If a team owns up to a bug they deployed, that's honesty level one. If they admit how their testing failed to find it and that their testing process needs remediation as well, that's another level. If they're willing to recognize how they never get ahead of these kinds of problems, they're always reactive and need a deeper change to their quality-related practices, that's a more profound level of facing into reality.

What makes this so hard to do?

The obvious reason is the embarrassment and discomfort that comes with facing reality. In the post-mortem example, an honest analysis reveals 3 or more failures going on, not just one. And these failures may be of a more embarrassing type: not just a technical blunder, but an inadequacy in the culture or character of the team. Very few people want to invite that (which is why many post-mortems end with less embarrassing and more convenient explanations). We fear for the effect on our reputations or frustration of our pride.

Sometimes we go so far with this, we paint an optimistic picture while making ourselves a secret self-promise that we'll make it so. You tell the manager, "yes we have automations to ensure that can't happen," while only about 60% sure that's true, then you double-check and improve the situation if you were wrong. You think you can get the best of both worlds: looking good to higher-ups in that status meeting when you share how smooth everything's going, while making sure you get caught up to what you've said to others.

When we do this we fail to accept this truth, as Henry Cloud puts it: "Reality is always your friend." (Integrity, p. 106)

Early in Cloud's book he illustrates character with the analogy of a boat leaving behind a wake. While a boat travels you can always tell where it's been by the wake it leaves behind, no matter what it appears to be doing in the moment. So it is with the character of people: when you look at their impact over time, you can see their output (task wake) and effect on other people (relational wake). That wake speaks far more than the person's current words and actions.

In other words, no matter what you say, your character will emerge somehow. Reality asserts itself. You can either experience the immediate pain of embracing it, or the far worse future pain of ignoring it.

I like the phrase, "trust the wake." It comes to me when I feel that temptation to be less than honest, to omit facts that might look bad or paint an optimistic picture of reality. My experience is that when I'm facing into reality with brutal honesty, but then produce a good wake (good results and positive working relationships), it leads to a far better outcome than living with any kind of deceit.

Cloud expresses this when he says, “In the end, people get to where they are supposed to. If they make it, there was a reason. If they don’t, there was one too.” This is something to ponder when everyone else looks better because they're fudging reality while you are not.

So how can we all get in greater touch with reality?

First is what I'll call probing. As technical people we use all kinds of sensors and observability mechanisms to know how our systems are behaving. If it isn't monitored, it might as well be offline. Probing is lifting up the rug to see what junk there is down there. I believe we frequently pass up opportunities to probe for truth because, for reasons given above, we'd prefer not to know.

Probing (seeking out "the brutal facts of reality") means seeking feedback. It means having an attitude of really wanting it, seeing it as a gift. It means you want it in full and don't assume you know it. For example it might mean you actually survey the teams your team serves, asking them how you're letting them down.

Team retrospectives are meant to be a way of probing one another, grounding your team with reality. So often I find retrospectives accomplishing nothing because the team has a culture of avoiding the negative. As a leader it is your responsibility to calmly and gently bring up the negative, to ask people for it and encourage it. More than a few times we've had retrospectives with nothing negative and I said to my team, "Hey guys, this is great stuff. But I'm sure there are ways we can grow too; we must have lacks, and we're just not seeing them. So please don't be shy to post those as well." This is seeking reality.

When we do receive feedback, there's room to debate and disagree with it. The key is not to simply deny or avoid it. We need to own it, then incorporate it. When a leader has a negative reality to deal with on their team, what they do with it will be a trust-making or breaking; they will assimilate and accommodate it, making some kind of change, or they'll lose their peoples' trust.

Questions to consider for yourself: