A Time When I Was Tricked Into Being Honest — Bringing Facts Into Work Discussions
Moving discussions from emotional interpretations to facts and metrics can move a group from conflict to problem-solving.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
Free members can read some amount of each article, while paid members can read the full article. For some, part of the article is plenty! But if you'd like to read more, I'd love you to consider becoming a paid member! This article was originally written in 2021, and I’ve re-written today as the topic deserves a better article.
There are brief, subtle moments in life which teach you surprisingly sticky lessons. At that moment, you might not even realize how much that short interaction would mean to you over the years. But something about that moment stays in your mind, and ends up influencing you far beyond what you’d expect out of something so trivial.
That’s what happened with a brief one-on-one with my manager years ago.
My career at Amazon had been going well. I was ambitious, and wanted to get promoted to a Senior Manager (Level 7 at Amazon). I’d recently started managing my second and third teams, which was a fairly momentous moment. Being trusted to manage more than one team was a critical career hurdle many managers never pass.
What wasn’t obvious to me at first was that having multiple teams, particularly managed by junior managers, meant a magnification of certain types of work. I suddenly had three times more personal conflicts to resolve, resource constraints to manage, and political disagreements between teams.
I would eventually figure out how to scale, but my career growth had outpaced my experience. I felt the stress of growing and learning, and the gaps in my personal toolbox were becoming more apparent to me.
What doubled my stress was my ambition. I deeply wanted to be trusted with these teams. Imposter syndrome can cut in multiple ways. Considering my insecurities, the last thing I wanted to do was tell my manager I was drowning.
I understood that successful senior managers were independent. A junior manager says, “What should I do now?” while a senior manager says, “I got this, don’t worry about my stuff.”
I felt that I needed to project confidence and independence to my manager. He would continue to trust me with larger projects as long as he felt that I had things under control. If I let him know that my personal stress level was increasing to unsustainable levels, I worried that it could throw the brakes on my career growth.
The critical one-on-one.
At the time of this incident, one of my largest areas of stress was a peer manager in another group who was dragging his feet on an important project. I needed his group to do a small amount of work, and I hated the political work of trying to convince him to do it.
As a side note, that’s a common Amazon issue. While the independence of individual teams means a lot of autonomy, it also means a huge amount of political battles at times.
This political battle was added on top of my list of employee relation problems, and the continued stress of staying on top of multiple groups worth of work.
My manager and I had our weekly one-on-one, and he asked how I was doing. “Fine” I said. I always said “Fine”. I had no intention of complaining (see the confidence and independence points above), and I felt I had no topics I needed him to be aware of.
Then he asked me a critical question.
“Don't think about your answer too much, but on a scale of one to ten, where one is ‘I am quitting today’ and ten is ‘I've never been more happy’, what number is your job satisfaction right now?”
I shrugged and said "Five". Which is interesting. Because I had no intention of complaining, but it was easy to answer this number question honestly.
He nodded, and asked if we could please discuss the issues which were dragging my satisfaction down. I said I could deal with the issues myself, I had things under control.
He prompted me to share anyway, as he’d like to see for himself if there was anything he could do. I ended up going through my list of stresses, including the political issues with my peer team.
He nodded, and said he would leave my inter-team issues for me to deal with. Those were within my control, and I had demonstrated an ability to grow and figure things out.
As for the political resourcing issue, he said that he’d deal with it. It was easier for him to solve the problem considering his position in the organization. A simple escalation to his peer, and the work I'd been asking for was scheduled to be completed that week.
While there are many interesting lessons here (for example, the serious value of escalating more often), I wanted to point out the awesome experience of my manager tricking me.
If he had asked, “Do you have any issues you need me to deal with?” I would have said no. Because I was filtering my answers through my fears and emotions.
However, he switched this question to a metric. Once we were talking metrics, the answer became honest. Actually, I think honest isn’t right because I wasn’t intentionally lying. What the answer became was transparent.