It's not enough to be right

Early in my career, I was rewarded for being right. As a data scientist, I worked hard to understand some business processes, make predictions, model some outcomes, and help forecast some future states. As a data engineer, my ability to properly forecast future usage of a system and build systems that are resilient and scalable to that future state while being easy to maintain helped me grow in my career.

The better I was at being right, the better I was at my job. Many people can get stuck in this, and I’ve seen too often people frustrated with the fact that simply being right is not sufficient to propel organizational change.

Adding images to a post is an important part of being effective

As you progress in your role, you will be responsible for a greater impact on a business with ever-increasing complexity. So today, I want to explore all the other aspects of your career that are important to a business.

First, note how I speak about career progression. Often, we talk about career progression in a vacuum: “What do I have to do to get promoted?” What I find helpful, instead, is to frame your goals alongside the goals of the organization. Instead of asking how to get the next promotion, ask yourself, “Why would an organization promote me?”

For one, promotion can be a means of retaining top talent. More often, promotion and growth are how an organization recognizes your ability to have a greater impact on the business, so you earn a title and salary commensurate with that increased impact.

While being right does have some marginal impact on a business—it is important for a business that the forecasting of models be accurate and that the systems that are built be resilient—these are not the primary goals of an organization.

As organizations grow in complexity, the needs of the organization aren’t that people be right. If you hire well, many people may be right about the same thing. The hard problem of a business is affecting change, and the bigger the organization, the harder it is to affect that change.

This—being effective—is what separates a senior engineer from a lead or staff. It is the reason that being a lead, a staff, or a manager is hard. It is hard to affect change in organizations. You are fighting competing interests and priorities, varying levels of optimism and engagement, difficult personalities and entitlements. Even something as fundamental as communication is hard and only getting harder with remote and hybrid work.

I’ve seen too often many people who all agree that a particular system needs an upgrade. Being right about that is not a fundamentally useful feature for the system. Agreement about some fact does not result in a prioritization exercise; it does not communicate the value of that fact in terms of business outcomes: are we losing customers, are we not able to sign new customers, are we losing revenue, are we losing customer goodwill?

It takes a lot to affect change. First, you must understand the business objectives and how a particular change will help drive better business outcomes. Second, you must be able to navigate resourcing and prioritization. There are a million potential projects. What makes this the right one to do? Third, and most importantly, you must be accountable and own the change.

Ownership means many things to many people. I have seen a naive view of ownership that believes ownership means deciding who gets to do what within a particular domain. This is the least interesting version of ownership.

Actual ownership is a double-edged sword. I warn everyone who asks for ownership and accountability to be careful what they wish for. Ownership means being accountable for the success and failure of what you own. It means you set goals that are measured by metrics, delivered through milestones, and regularly reviewed and reported on.

Ownership does not necessarily mean you are writing the code or changing the system. You can own a project without deploying a single line of code. But ownership means refusing to allow the ‘that’s not mine’ line of thinking to affect your responsibility to see things through. It means committing to a change and seeing it through.

If this sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. This is where I’ve seen frustration, especially from engineers, who have seen their ability to be correct about something as the thing that drives their success until it isn’t. If being correct was all that mattered, the world would be ruled by pedants. Instead, their frustration boils over into arguments about a workplace being “political,” which is the naive way of admitting you lack interpersonal skills.

You build political capital by being right, but you also build trust and influence. These are harder to measure, but it helps to think of who people want to work with: kind, empathetic people are far more fun to work with, especially if they are ruthlessly effective.

Earning trust is slowly won and quickly lost but can often be recovered. It means delivering on your commitments. It means having good taste, which is the only way (other than good vibes) that I can describe the intangible character that makes some people’s decisions better than others. It is not something I have ever been able to teach, but I can always find it in those who have it.

If I were to summarize all of this, I would say that it doesn’t hurt to be right, but it is critical that you be effective.

Of course, this entire essay is predicated on the fact that you are working at a somewhat functional organization. There are many dysfunctional organizations out there where the only thing that matters is saying yes to leadership, being right be damned. If you work there, you will need therapy more than my advice.