"Not good. Not bad. Context."
I remember a time when the pressure from above was building to speed up delivery, ship faster, catch up. We had a big, aging codebase to contend with, and my boss started asking hard questions about whether certain people were “the right ones” for this new direction. One individual was singled out. They were responsible for making sure the codebase got deployed safely. Incidents had been piling up, tests were constantly failing, and to my boss it looked like chaos. “What is this person even doing?” was the question hanging in the air. I had been frustrated too. I’d asked them to put together a plan for performance testing, but they struggled with anything strategic. They were great at tackling what was right in front of them but faltered when the work was vague or long-term. From a distance, it looked like failure. But when I dug deeper, I found something different. This person was working tirelessly, manually running and re-running our platform tests. The environment was flaky, tests kept timing out, but instead of giving up they sat there patiently, making sure deployments of the legacy code still went out tested. It wasn’t elegant, it wasn’t sustainable, and in some ways it let the teams off the hook, but it kept us safe in the moment. That’s when I saw it clearly: they weren’t “bad.” They had a weakness in one area, but they were showing real strength in another. Both were true at the same time. It’s tempting in leadership to see people as either good or bad, capable or incapable. But most of the time, what we’re really seeing is the fit, or misfit, between someone’s strengths and what the situation demands. People aren’t good or bad. They’re context-dependent. Until next time, ✉️ Enjoying The Messy Middle? If someone sent this email your way and you’d like to get it direct, you can sign up here. |