Managing Ourselves Managing Each Other

So, who here thinks that the most difficult part of our jobs is something like code reviews? Or maybe handling office politics, finding a mentor, negotiating a raise? Well, guess what all these things have in common? Other people.

Hello, I'm Rachel Lee Neighbors and I have spent 20ish years of my life in Fang, startups, open source, did some work with the React team and Mozilla. I could go on about that, but let's talk about you. In these 20 years, I can say that the hardest part has always been people. And that includes myself. And this is actually true for most people in programming. Did you know that we would have had the computer revolution 100 years earlier but Charles Babbage was really bad at people? Ada Lovelace, the world's first programmer, she was actually good at people. But unfortunately, he had nuked his financiers and the relationship he had with him before she could intervene and we had to wait for Silicon Valley. This is a debugging talk. Who knows what scientific leaps forward. Our soft skills have been delaying and will delay. So let's talk about debugging our human interactions. I wish there were a debugger for humans.

So today, I'm going to give you this personal human toolkit, some debugging tools that I use in my day-to-day interactions. These skills have helped me. And I have learned them in some of the most interesting ways. And I'm going to save you all the pain that I've been through in my life to learn these skills. We're going to learn about depersonalization. How to give a good apology, how to see hidden power dynamics, emotional regulation, boundaries, and rupture and repair. Perhaps the most important of them all. Let's start with depersonalization.

The first thing to know is that it's not about you. It's about them. It's hard not to take things personally. I mean, it's the world and you're in it. And you have a valid opinion about the things that are happening. It's easy to frame other people's actions as a reflection of our own worth. Getting laid off could be seen as the world saying, you're not good enough. Didn't get that second date? Not attractive enough, right? Your proposal got turned down. Maybe your manager hates you.

But you can't be 100% sure why other people are behaving the way that they are. You can make any interaction 100% about you, like all this me-me-me mode. It's a disservice to the other people in your world. You assume that you know them, you know their intentions, their motivations, but you can't.

Now I hate the expression, don't take it personally, because it's very flippant and I've heard it a lot, as you can imagine in my life. I prefer the phrase, relationships are 50-50. You bring your half and the other person brings theirs. You can only be responsible for your behaviors and reactions. You have no idea what their inner state is. To get out of this me-me-me mode, I try to ask, how might this possibly not be about me in some way?

Let's try that again. Getting laid off, the company ran out of funds and they had to let someone go and for whatever reason your name came up at the top of the list. You know, maybe it was last in first out. Didn't get that second date? For all you know, her childhood sweetheart moved back to town and you had no chance because they are fated to be together for all time. That doesn't speak anything about you. Your proposal was turned down. Maybe there was somebody else in the meeting who was arguing really fiercely for their grandma or their best friend and your manager had no choice but to capitulate for reasons that are beyond either of your control. Don't make it about you. Only own your half. Only own your 50% of any situation. You did the best you could in all those situations, I'm assuming and well, the other party, they contributed their 50%.

Now, at Amazon, we had this thing called a correction of errors. If a failure impacted customers, we had to file and act upon this COE, correction of errors, in front of the entire engineering team, which was super embarrassing, but it was important because it made us accountable for our part of that 50%. Apologies are kind of like that. I find that a good apology is structured a lot like a correction of errors is. Now, once again, the process requires taking yourself out of it. You want to describe what happened objectively, without emotion or adjectives, because these are all subjective. These are all inferences that you're adding, you know. You were really sloppy. Sloppy is kind of a value judgment that you're making. There were more errors than I anticipated, takes out the judgment that you're making about this person, and makes it more about your perception, it makes it more objective.

Always remember that the impact of what you're doing, of what's happened, outweighs intentions. You may have had the best intentions, but if the other person was hurt, or the entire eastern seaboard went down, it doesn't matter that you didn't mean for that to happen, it happened, and you have to own that part. You have to own your 50%.

So, first, state what happened. The entire eastern seaboard went down. What was the impact? A lot of people didn't have access to their Netflix, and there was a lot of Netflix and chill that did not happen. What was the root cause? My cat walked across my keyboard. What did we learn? I should not have the cat in the same room, and maybe we should install some fail-safes to make sure that such a thing doesn't happen again.

Apologizing, it was a lot like that correction of errors, but for interpersonal failure. So, I'm sorry, much like a no or a stop, is a complete sentence. You can just add a period at the end of it. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry that you, I'm sorry if this, I'm sorry. No, no, no, no conditionals, just I'm sorry, mea culpa. There was a failure. I'm sorry. Then, you start the correction of errors. What happened? I took credit for an idea that you shared earlier. What was the impact? Well, I was put in charge of that project. And what was the root cause? No one, not even I, noticed your idea when you originally shared it. What did we learn? Well, I need to make sure that I'm actually hearing you when you speak, and maybe we all could learn to listen a little better. Maybe we need a proposal process, or we need to have a moment in the meeting where we do a proposal every week, you know, like where you bring it into the meeting and everyone actively listens so that we slow down and really attribute ideas to their sources. And there you go. You get to that part where you can even find solutions.

Now, one of the biggest causes of altercations that I've seen is not recognizing the power differential between yourself and another. This is really hard for me. Sometimes there's situational power dynamics, for instance. Maybe you are the most junior on the team, but you know everything about how to use Discord. In that case, you are probably more authoritative, even though the power dynamic might be different from other viewers. I have a trick for this one.

I think of people as dogs. I imagine the power difference between people like you would imagine this difference in dog sizes. When two people are in a room, you can think of the third person as being their power dynamic. It's there. No one acknowledges it, but it's listening in and breathing heavily over your shoulder. So think about little dogs. Little dogs have the most to lose in any situation. They're weaker, they're on the back foot. They could lose their house or their kids or their reputation. They can't take as many hits, and so they're more nervous, more anxious. They can be defensive, and they have a right to be. They're little dogs. Children are always the smallest dog in the room. They don't have as much agency as the adults do. This means that all of us at one point in our lives have been little dogs, so we can empathize with other people in this situation.

Big dogs, on the other hand, are the people who have the power, the means, the control, the privilege. They can lose their job, they'll be fine for a year, they got savings. They have a great reputation. They have a lot of sway in a meeting. It's not pretty when big dogs act like little dogs. This happens. We all start as little dogs, but some of us don't realize when we're the big dog in the room. Imagine a powerful executive ruining a woman's career because she turned him down for a date. That actually happens. If you think I'm exaggerating, I am not. Me too happened for a reason. That is what I like to call some little dog bullshit.

Now power dynamics, they change throughout your life. As an open source maintainer, for instance, fighting for resources and sponsorships and sticking up for your community is considered a great trait. You're the brave little dog going out there and speaking truth to the bigger dogs in the the world, to the fang companies that rely on the technology and defending your community.

Now imagine this maintainer joins a fang company. Now they have power and authority. And this same behavior that used to warm the community and bring them behind their banner is now seen as ham-fisted, over-the-top, pushy, throwing their weight around. It changed. They're the same person. They're doing the same things, but now they're backed by a gigantic company. It changes.

When things are getting tense, ask yourself, am I the big dog or the little dog in this situation? This is a way to catch yourself in little dog thinking when you might become defensive, when you actually should be acting like a bigger dog, being big, magnanimous, calm, chill. Think about how big, happy dogs act at the playground. They can't act like little dogs because they could hurt other dogs. So always imagine what would good behavior look like in this situation.

We are taught that as long as we can timebox our time at work, we should have lots of time to spend on real life. But the truth is that we spend five days a week with coworkers and on projects. Once you throw in sleeping, we only get two days and maybe some evenings to sort our life out. That's not work-life balance. There's no balance there. What you're doing is carving out large swaths of your lifespan for a company's use. And you're getting reimbursed, of course, but let's call it what it is. You're basically letting them rent your lifespan.

Working hours, in a way, you can think of them as, like, checks for ever-increasing sums of hours. They tend to take more than you originally allotted for them. Now, boundaries come in two forms, emotional and temporal. These are erected around your finite lifespan, and they force you to balance your checkbook by prioritizing what's important. Emotional boundaries, on the other hand, they're erected around your finite capacity for emotional labor, privacy, and they protect you from sharing too much of yourself, taking responsibility for other people's emotions. Now, I find that in the EU, people struggle less with emotional boundaries than they do in America, but I wanted to mention them here nonetheless, especially because women tend to do a lot of emotional labor.

Now, boundaries come in two forms, emotional and temporal. We're going to start with temporal boundaries. These are erected around your finite lifespan, and they force you to balance your checkbook by prioritizing what's important.

Emotional boundaries, on the other hand, they're erected around your finite capacity for emotional labor, privacy, and they protect you from sharing too much of yourself, taking responsibility for other people's emotions. Now, I find that in the EU, people struggle less with emotional boundaries than they do in America, but I wanted to mention them here nonetheless, especially because women tend to do a lot of emotional labor.

Now, first, I want you to think of lifespan instead of time. Time is overuse. Time is just lifespan, but we use it as a form of currency. When we say time, we're undervaluing our most precious finite resource, our lifespan, our limited period of time on this planet. What you're really spending is not time, it's lifespan.

So how does that work? Well, you can think of finding time as like writing a check for span. Getting out of time is like overdrafting your lifespan account. And work is a capitalist exchange of your lifespan for money, goods, services, and goodwill. Now carving up your life into eight-hour work days breaks down with more responsibility. If you're responsible for a power plant and it fails, you're going to have to go take care of it, whether it's on the weekend or your son's birthday.

An executive friend once shared with me how always-on people managed to carve time by setting boundaries, like dinner hours where they're not reachable, where they spend it with their family, and scheduling doctor appointments according to the doctor's availability. They set rocks, immovable chunks, into the moving river of their obligations, and they defend them mightily.

You can help set boundaries around your time by limiting these span withdrawals. Setting blocks of time aside, for instance, for things like an emergency fund. You can block off vacation time months ahead before you even know what you're going to be doing. You can give yourself a span allowance to take control of when you're able to spend time taking care of yourself and those you care about. Weekends are an example of span allowance. You can consolidate span withdrawals for advice and opinions by setting up working groups, for instance. Instead of giving the same advice to 10 people, you have 10 people come to a Q&A session. Of course, you can create a span charity fund with office hours that people can queue for. Employers often encourage us to bring our whole selves to work. Oversharing is a part of modern culture. I'm an overshare. My comics back in the day, I used to make them for teenage girls, they were super popular because I shared too much. People loved that.

But it wasn't so great. Now that I look back on it, it's like, so many people knew so much of me. And I learned the hard way that the open read access on my internal state was kind of dangerous. I once had several losses in a row. The company felt like a family. I shared what I went through, bringing my whole self to work. Only a few years later, the things that I had shared showed up in a review. It made me deeply uncomfortable to have that information come back to haunt me.

You can't know how other people will judge you by what you share. So before introducing any vulnerabilities to your workplace, obviously, you're going to need to file an app sec report or an application security report. Ask yourself the following. How is it going to help the other party to know this thing about you? And if it's going to help them, ask before you share, may I share something personal with you on this matter? And express whether or not that information is confidential. Please don't share. Not everybody can infer what is private and what is public. And lastly, thank them for their confidence.

Managing our emotions. This one's a lot of fun. Struggling to keep your emotions inside isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's a sign of empathy and connection to internal state. But what happens when those feelings overwhelm you? Under normal circumstances, we can regulate our emotions. Challenging situations feel manageable, negative emotions pass quickly, you can be comforted. But when you're dysregulated, challenging situations feel overwhelming, hopeless, getting stuck in mad, sad, bad, or hyper feelings, and what I like to call feeling inconsolable.

Perhaps you've said something like this or heard somebody say, you know, they're so emotional, or she takes things too personally, he threw a tantrum. However, emotional dysregulation isn't a character flaw. It has its roots in psychophysiology. Under all of these circumstances, PTSD, grief events, even things like spectrum disorders and ADHD, which are congenital and not situational, the human brain will start functioning differently. None of these situations make a person bad or good. When people are dysregulated, this guy right here, the amygdala, it short circuits all reasoning and takes command. This is a sort of a fight or flight moment that you've heard so much about. We can never know a person's internal state, but it is safe to say that dysregulated people need our compassion.

Everyone gets dysregulated at one point or another, and we don't need judgment or escalation in those points. It is no one's job to comfort you or make you feel better. That's not possible. No one can make you feel anything.

You want to own your 50%, take responsibility for your own feelings. If no one can make you feel better, and if you can't make yourself feel better, what do you do? Well, first, you want to listen for changes in your mood and emotions. Practicing mindfulness is a great place to start here. Learn to identify what you're feeling. Call them by name. I'm feeling X. I'm feeling sad. I'm feeling excited by that.

Give yourself buffers around situations that you know are overwhelming, like funerals or difficult meetings. And ask a trusted friend to spot you and let you know when you're getting worked up or you're in a bad state. You want to hear it from a friend, not a manager. Sadly, when we are dysregulated, it's the worst time to take control of ourselves. So I recommend having an emergency procedure on file to follow until you are regulated again.

First off, go be alone. You want to minimize the negative impact you're having on others by isolating physically as well as electronically. Get active. Burning off steam with activity processes any lingering adrenaline and cortisol from that fight or flight response and can even fool your amygdala into thinking, Oh, the danger has passed. I mean, check in with reality. Keep a file of objective truths to pick through. Letters from loved ones, positive reviews, you know, anchor yourself in the things that are true and real. Go out and walk through the grass to remember you're in a real world, not an LCD screen.

These are similar steps to follow when dealing with others who are dysregulated. You want to minimize the damage, identify the emotions and address the problem. You have a plan. You know, if you're in charge of somebody and they're dysregulated, tell them to take five, take time off, reschedule the next meeting so that they can minimize the damage, identify the emotions, label the behavior, not the person. Dan was upset.

Not damn is an asshole. And address the behavior and the trigger. Once they've calmed down and they're regulated again, maybe in the next meeting you have with them, you know, we're going to talk about this. Whatever you do, don't escalate. And sometimes that's mirroring. Mirroring a dysregulated person's emotions can escalate the situation. Getting angry at a person who's angry is going to make them angrier. This goes for grief too, though. Getting sad with a person who's sad can make them feel worse.

All relationships, romantic, personal and professional, go through something called rupture and repair. If you're a parent, you need to be good at repair. If you're a manager, you have to be good at repair. Says something that those two are kind of related, right? So have you ever gone silent after a disagreement? Or maybe never apologized for something you feel bad about. Or avoided having to make a decision between two disagreeing parties? Possibly overlooked aggressive behavior between two reports indefinitely rather than addressing it? Well, congratulations, you suck at repair! I'm kidding. When we fight, we disagree, we butt heads.

When trust is damaged, this is rupture. If never repaired, it will fester and explode. To repair a rupture, you must expose and address its source. This takes a number of tools from your toolbox. You want to excavate the source of the rupture. To make the other person feel like their intentions are seen. You want to hear them express back to you, that's right. So you know you've really figured out what they're going through. You identify the power dynamic first. Which one of you is the big dog? Which is the little dog? Are they feeling threatened? Are you feeling threatened? Can you get them to a place of calm? Are you calm?

Depersonalize the conflict. Can you see through yourself to the other person's unmet needs? Do you know what their unmet needs are? Can you ask them? Confirm how they feel by asking, it sounds like you're feeling... is that right? Now repairing that rupture, share how you're impacted when you feel this, I feel y, or when you do this, I feel y. Reflect on how the other person feels and you feel z, right? And apologize for your 50% of that. Ask what is needed to move onward. What do you need? What would help? Leaders, you can always coach your reports to do this if you can't do these repairs for them.

You can help them do it. It's important to remember that we don't avoid rupture, we embrace repair. Rupture is healthy. Disagreement is a natural part of problem solving. Many small ruptures are better than one big explosion.

So rather than tiptoeing around each other, invest in your human debugging tools. All right. Once again, your relationship debugging tools look like this. You got depersonalization, a good apology, spotting those power dynamics differences with big dog, little dog thinking, getting emotionally regulated, setting those boundaries around your time and your emotions and using all of these to repair ruptures as they occur.

At one time I had none of these tools and I hope that by sharing them, I can spare you some painful lessons. You won't be perfect. You will goof up, but it's not the end of the world. We are all learning how to be better humans. So please be kind to yourself and to others as we all learn how to be better humans together. And maybe we can have that next revolution on time.

If you enjoyed this, I write about how to survive your tech career at my sub stack, and I do some consulting and development on the side. Just hit me up if you'd like to chat about these things. Cheers.