Good leaders praise publicly and discipline privately.

A few jobs ago I was on an email with my team, my direct manager, and a design vendor we were using. We were exchanging ideas and critiques. My manager asked me to basically make a bunch of design changes – something I could do, but not nearly as efficiently or quickly as the vendor, especially since it was in a design tool I had just started learning. Noting this was a non-ideal solution, I recommended we allow the vendor to instead as it would save a lot of time.

The next morning my manager got on a call with me and expressed displeasure that I would bring that up in front of the vendor. I’m not sure if they felt it sacrificed leveraging power or what the reason was. I listened, took accountability, apologized, and said I’d take care of it the way he originally asked. Then I went back to work.

A few minutes later we went into standup. After our usual initial rapport my manager took the floor and proceeded to very aggressively admonish me in front of our entire team for the same thing we had just talked about privately. It was demeaning for me and uncomfortable for the rest of the team, as they reached out privately to me after to express and console me.

I immediately started to reach out to my network and left the company within a few weeks. 

No matter how experienced you are, you are going to make mistakes. It’s important to take accountability and learn as an individual. But as a leader it’s even more important how you address those mistakes. I have left more lucrative jobs due to poor leadership and stayed at less lucrative ones because of good leadership.

As a developer you are also likely giving code review. As a senior developer often to junior colleagues. This also applies here. Make it a conversation, not a directive. You don’t have to make their code perfect (as subjective as that even is) but simply try and steer them towards incremental improvement and growth – understanding that code review is seen by the entire team as well. Things like: “Why did you choose this approach? Did you try [this other approach] and ran into an unexpected tradeoff?” or “That’s an interesting solution. In the past we’ve done X, what is different in this case?”

Sometimes you learn from a colleague who in their passion found some new tool or approach you hadn’t seen yet – so you level up and they build confidence. Sometimes you “rubber duck” it when they have to explain it a little further, and they see something they missed and fix it earlier in the process without having an issue in QA and more eyes seeing it.

Be the kind of leader you’d want – kind, empathetic, and patient. The world, and especially the corporate world, could always use a little more kindness.