Recently, IBM President ran an internal challenge to promote growth mindset, entrepreneurial spirit and radical candor. I want to share my experience; how growth mindset helped me overcome the challenge of frequent team changes and kept me positive.
One of the difficult experiences I had in my five years at IBM is frequent management changes. On an average it happened every year. The frustration of frequent change is obvious. As a developer, you tend to go deep in the code to understand it. One year is just the right time frame when you feel that you know enough about the large code base. You get confident that you can answer the queries and run the scenarios in your head. You start getting good at troubleshooting issues without having to print logs and put code in debugger. You feel that you now are an expert in your area (to some extent) and are being productive in the team. So just when you are about to enjoy all the hard work you have put in place, a reorganization at that time is not only disturbing but unproductive.
You are moved to a new team, new manager and you have to now start from scratch. You have to setup your environment (my least favorite thing to do) and know all the tricks and hacks to get going. As a developer you want to jump on the code but it’s a bumpy road ahead. There is no way to move fast.
I have experienced this over and over. Looking back, I feel all that frustration was not wasted. These forced moves pushed me to come out of my comfort zone. The involuntary job changes introduced me to some of the best developers and technical leaders. There is no better way to expand your network than actually work with number of people. By virtue of changing teams, I know a lot of people across different teams. It helps me reach out to an SME directly when I need help in my new job.
Besides a wider network, I acquired the breadth of knowledge about our vast enterprise portfolio. I better understand our customer’s requirements and use cases. I feel I am in a better position to support our clients. I developed empathy for clients from different aspects. Many times, new squads were closely related to previous squads. The accumulated knowledge helped me propose better designs which will be interoperable with other squads. The experience boosted my confidence. Now, I am not afraid to try something new or recommend a new practice to the team. I saw that different squads mostly have similar challenges and how some of the tricky technical problems are solved with simple solutions.
Frequent team changes provided me the opportunity to work in different cultures. That made me understand the different management philosophies. I worked with teams who take Agile methodologies seriously and others where everything is reactive driven by customer requirements without long term strategy in place. I understand the virtues of different approaches. I understand how shortcuts eventually backfire.
In retrospect, there is no doubt that experience of working in different teams was valuable and worth the temporary disruption and frustration. Even though it was hard in beginning, it challenged me and helped me grow professionally and personally. It forced me to get out of my cocoon and provided me a broader prospective. I am ready to take up new challenges. I am not afraid to speak my mind. Ultimately, I believe this experience made me win the challenge and resulted in being honored with the people’s choice award for radical candor and growth mindset.
