Chapter 30. Babel Fish
I don’t remember much from my first day as a team leader. It could be I was entranced with being anointed with a title someone else had left behind, or simply because it was many years ago.
Since then, I’ve learned many things that I should’ve done on that fateful day and in the following years. I didn’t realize it then, but on that day I became a Babel Fish. For those who don’t recognize the term, a Babel Fish is a fictitious animal from Douglas Adams’ books, which performs instant translations. That wasn’t on the job description. As a new team leader, communication and translation of information is your most crucial role, and from now on your task is to improve as a Babel Fish.
A team leader needs to communicate through multiple channels
Up, down, and sideways—information about business requirements and needs, risk, and stability issues—this all needs to be communicated to interested parties. Suppose a new business requirement is added to the project. Your team can work off a spec, but it’s better if you communicate the motivation behind that requirement, in a language that the team understands. Perhaps the team identifies a risk when implementing the requirement. You can update the status to, “We’ll be late by two weeks, sorry,” but it would be more effective to communicate the reason behind the delay, in a language business people understand. Most professionals in a field don’t understand that specialists in another field don’t speak their language. Team leaders provide translation services to ensure everyone heads in the right direction. That’s you, buddy!
Awareness is the first step. The next step’s harder: to become a successful Babel Fish, you need to learn more languages than you now know. That means business language, technical language, tester language, marketing language, sales language, HR language. In order to do that, you need to go out, converse, and learn.
Get out of the development silo, and talk to other humans. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
In addition to your team benefiting from better information, including the “why do this” factor, you get a bonus: better relationships with people from other departments. You’ll need it in order to improve your team. Imagine what it’d be like if the HR guy let you skip a few forms when you interview a star you don’t want to miss out on. You can benefit your team outside the confines of the project by having trusting relationships with everyone else. If you make this your priority, everything else will fall in line. To better communicate with your team, you’ll need to talk with them more. This way, you’ll know how to improve their effectiveness and challenge them with the tasks that benefit them. Your team will earn respect because they have a team leader normal people can talk with. It’s like relationship inheritance. Most of all, you’ll grow as a person, as a team leader, and as a communicator. As everyone knows, it’s all about communication.
Congratulations on your new job, Babel Fish!
Roy’s analysis
From the perspective of the influence forces, this note deals with the personal motivation aspect. A Babel Fish is a translator, which means they understand how to say things to the other side of the equation in a way that matters to the other side. Understanding what marketing folks care about and speaking on the same level with them shows that you empathize with them enough to learn their language.
Yes, this is politics. Good politics leave everyone better off in the long run.
Another interesting observation is that, in our Team Leader Manifesto, we emphasize working with people and understanding humans at least as much as we do machines, because all problems are people problems at their root. In my mind, a Babel Fish is someone who’s mastered the art of understanding where the other side’s coming from and can put themselves in their shoes. It’s a priceless skill to have, and I urge everyone to master it.
GIL ZILBERFELD has been in software since childhood, starting out with Logo turtles. With almost 20 years of developing commercial software under his belt, he has vast experience in software methodology and practices. Gil is the product manager at Typemock, working as part of an agile team in an agile company, creating tools for agile developers. He promotes unit testing and other design best practices, down-to-earth agile methods, and incredibly cool tools. He speaks in local and international venues about unit testing, TDD, and agile practices and communication. And in his spare time, he shoots zombies for fun. Gil blogs at www.gilzilberfeld.com on different agile topics, including processes, communication, and unit testing.