Chapter 10
Humans Are Hard

Your team is getting it in the neck today. After months of technical exploration and prototypes, they’ve been unable to produce anything that looks like it will make the back end of the new product work in the way that it was imagined. The team is frustrated and is convinced that without spending potentially millions of dollars in hardware and annotator time, they’re never going to be able to deliver anything of value.

This isn’t sitting well with the VP engineering and the sales director. In fact, they’re completely livid.

The sales director is first to interject. “You’re honestly telling us that after six months you have nothing that is going to get this thing built?” Your engineers aren’t used to this kind of intense confrontation, especially from such senior people. It makes them feel like they’re pretty stupid.

“We tried. It’s just a really difficult problem.”

Their nervousness makes them fail to say they’ve produced some interesting prototypes and insights into tangential problems along the way.

“Six months and six people and we have nothing? That’s the problem with this team. I just don’t think you’re working hard enough, especially when compared to the sales team. They often work from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. When are you all going to step up and take ownership?”

“I’m sorry. It just doesn’t seem possible,” replies your data scientist sheepishly, again failing to mention that they’ve produced a number of useful prototypes that could eventually make their way into the product.

Your VP engineering is gripping her pen tighter, as one of her teams is making her look stupid in front of her peers. “You do realize that other companies are just solving this with machine learning now? It’s all off the shelf. Should take a couple of weeks tops. I’ve seen our competitors launch stuff really quickly this way. Why can’t you?”

“It’s not that straightforward; it’s really hard to get right.”

“Others are doing it. Did you not see Compusoft’s press release last week? I’ll be blunt: I just don’t think you’re working hard enough. I reckon we should have just outsourced this problem. That would have got it done in half the time.”

Everyone is angry and at loggerheads. Senior management are disappointed with performance, and the team on the receiving end feels dumb and unable to demonstrate they’ve done worthwhile work.

How did you get here? Why are people acting in this way? What should you do as a result?

As you may have begun to discover, humans can be challenging. More challenging than software. Even more challenging than a computer science degree. Not only are the humans on your team tricky, the humans that are outside of your team can be even trickier. This chapter explores the difficulty of working with humans and digs into why situations like the one you just read occur.

Here’s what we’re going to look at:

• Scrutiny and judgment: Your increased visibility as a manager invites increasing scrutiny from others. We’ll look at what it means to be a leader and what it exposes you to, and how you may find yourself scrutinizing others.

• Wobble: Your company is like a Jell-O. If everything goes wrong at the top, it wobbles all of the way down. We’ll look at this concept and how to contain it.

• The whip and the carrot: Those outside of your team and department might want you to make your team go faster in the same way jockeys whip a horse in the final furlong. Instead, you’ll want to let them lead themselves toward the carrot in a way that promotes their growth and happiness.

• Mount Stupid: Regardless of their true intent, humans can do and say things that are unintended, misinformed, or sometimes just plain daft. We’ll look at common misconceptions and the psychology behind them.

Let’s kick things off with the perils of the limelight.