Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time

by Titus Winters

This brings us to another Zen management trick: asking questions. When a team member asks you for advice, it’s usually pretty exciting because you’re finally getting the chance to fix something. That’s exactly what you did for years before moving into a leadership position, so you usually go leaping into solution mode, but that is the last place you should be. The person asking for advice typically doesn’t want you to solve their problem, but rather to help them solve it, and the easiest way to do this is to ask this person questions. This isn’t to say that you should replace yourself with a Magic 8 Ball, which would be maddening and unhelpful. Instead, you can apply some humility, respect, and trust and try to help the person solve the problem on their own by trying to refine and explore the problem. This will usually lead the employee to the answer,6 and it will be that person’s answer, which leads back to the ownership and responsibility we went over earlier in this chapter. Whether or not you have the answer, using this technique will almost always leave the employee with the impression that you did. Tricky, eh? Socrates would be proud of you.