Leading by praise: How to use a carrot when you really want a stick.

Many naive leaders believe they have two ways to enact change in their followers.  The first way is "the carrot" aka praising good behavior. The second way is "the stick"  aka criticizing bad behavior.  In my experience, the stick is extremely ineffective. I'd say the only time the stick has any positive impact is when the follower doesn't realize she's doing something wrong, or how serious that wrong thing is.  

The goal of this post is how to use a carrot when you want a stick.  First lets recall how to use a carrot effectively in general: Keep it timely, short, specific and often (the one minute manager is my hero).  Any time you see a new good behavior praise it.  When you praise,  be as specific as possible so the follower knows both the behavior you are praising and the valuable impact of that behavior.  It's easy to praise when things go well, but how do we praise when things are going poorly?

When things are going poorly, there's only one thing you can do - put your followers in a position where they perform good behaviors.  Scope their work so they have no choice but to perform good behaviors.  From that good behavior, apply praise.  Even if that behavior is accidental, still give praise.   Slowly, sometimes painfully slowly, you'll get more opportunities to give praise, and you'll get more good behaviors.  Keep giving praise, eventually the fruit of your labor will pay off.

Praising weak performers can be a time consuming delicate process, but it's like lighting a fire: at first you have to work really hard to spark the tinder, then pay close attention while the kindling catches to make sure you don't lose your delicate flame, finally you'll have a fire raging, and you can lean back and relax knowing not only have you lit a fire, but that fire can be used to light other fires.

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Google killed the video store

As a younger man I remember arguing with a co-worker about the death of local storage. 



Me: Who wants to store data themselves?  I can store all data in the cloud, where it will be preserved forever!

Wiser co-worker: What incentive does this cloud have to keep your data? I'll keep my data on my local hard drive thank you very much!

 

8 years later my co-worker was  correct. I got the following letter from Google today:



Later this month, hosted video content on Google Video will no longer be available for playback. <snip> We’ve added a Download button to the video status page, so you can download any video content you want to save. If you don’t want to download your content, you don’t need to do anything. (The Download feature will be disabled after May 13, 2011)

Ouch for being wrong,  and double ouch for having to download all my videos to my hard drive.

Notes:

• Astute readers will note, I actually got a decent deal since I got 8 years of free storage and $/GB has plummeted in that time.


• This isn’t the first time my “bet on a cloud service” has failed. I lost all my face tags when polar rose was bought by apple and shutdown.


• I’m a slow learner, and still use the cloud for the primary copy of all my media.

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Software Engineering “The Soft Skills”

To date, I've focused my blog on the "computer" parts of software engineering. However, as I've grown as a software engineer, one of my largest aha moments is the realization that software engineering is all about people. As such, I'll start posting articles dealing not just with computers, but also with communication, people leadership and management. These "people skills" are as important to a software engineer as the ability to crank out a design specification. For the hardcore among you that think people skills have nothing to do with software, consider this.

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Impedance MisMatch: IEnumerable<T> to DataTable

I had to work with a class that consumed a System.DataTable today. DataTable is an old class that pre-dates generics in the CLR. DataTable carries typed data as an array of System.Object - double plus yuck! As you can imagine the code I use these days has compiler verified type safety by using IEnumerable everywhere. So how did I convert from my beloved IEnumerable to the yucky DataTable? With reflection of course! This simple method solves our problems:

public static DataTable ToDataTable(IEnumerable rows)
{
    var tableToReturn = new DataTable();

    // get properties of T
    var properties = typeof (T).GetProperties().Where(p => p.MemberType == MemberTypes.Property);

    // Convert T's properties to columns in the DataTable
    foreach (var p in properties)
    {
        tableToReturn.Columns.Add(p.Name, p.PropertyType);
    }

    //populate rows
    foreach (var row in rows)
    {
        T row1 = row;
        var propertyValuesAsEnumerable = properties.Select(p => p.GetValue(row1, null));
        tableToReturn.Rows.Add(propertyValuesAsEnumerable.ToArray());
    }
    return tableToReturn;
}

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