Stop Worrying about Weaknesses

Got a interesting email last week. I hope, it would be useful for all...

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Little Johnny comes home one day, looks down at his feet, and gives you his report card. You smile at him as you open it up and look inside. Then your smile disappears when you see the F in math. You also see an A (English) and two Bs (history and science). You look down at little Johnny and ask, "What happened in math, Johnny? Why did you get this F?"

We want our kids to be successful at everything they do. And if they're not good at something, we ask why they failed. We tell them to work harder at it. Understand what went wrong, focus, and fix it.

But that's a mistake. The wrong focus. If you dwell on Johnny's failure, on his weakness, you'll be setting him up for a life of struggle and low self-esteem while reducing his chances of reaching his full potential.

Also, as a side note, you won't fix his weakness. You'll just reinforce it.

The problem with a report card is that it measures all students against the same criteria, which ignores that each student is different with unique talents, distinct likes and dislikes, and particular aspirations. And when we see the F on little Johnny's report card, it's easy for us to get distracted from our primary job: to help him deeply enjoy his life and fulfill his potential by developing and deriving pleasure from his unique talents.

Fast forward 20 years. Little Johnny is now big John. As he sits down for a performance review with his manager, she spends a few quiet minutes looking over his review and then raises her eyes to meet his.

"You've worked hard this year John. Your client orientation is superb. You've met your sales goals and you're a solid team player. But you have an area that needs development, specifically, your detail orientation. The spreadsheets we get from you are a mess. Let's talk about how you can get better in that."
An A, two Bs and an F. And his manager handles it the same way his parent did. By focusing the conversation, and John's effort, on his least favorite and weakest area.

We have a report card problem in our companies and it's costing us a tremendous amount of time, money, potential, and happiness. It's costing us talent.
Traditional management systems encourage mediocrity in everything and excellence in nothing. Most performance review systems set an ideal picture of how we want everyone to act (standards, competencies, etc.) and then assesses how closely people match that ideal, nudging them to improve their weaknesses so they "meet or exceed expectations" in every area.

But how will John add the most value to his organization? He's amazing with people, not spreadsheets. He'll work hardest, derive the most pleasure, and contribute his maximum potential with the greatest result if he is able to focus as much time as possible in his area of strength. Which means taking his focus off developing the things in which he's weak. They're just a distraction.

Here's what his manager should say: "You've worked hard this year John. Your client orientation is superb. You've met your sales goals and you're a solid team player. But working on those spreadsheets isn't a good use of your time and it's not your strength. I'm going to ask David to do those for you from now on. He loves spreadsheets and is great at them. I want to spend the rest of our time talking about how you can get even better at working with your clients. That's where you shine — where you add the most value to the company — and you seem to really enjoy it."

An organization should be a platform for unique talent. A performance review system should be flexible enough to reflect and reward the successful contributions of diverse employees. Let's encourage people to be weak in areas in which they are average — because no one can possibly be great at everything — and place all our effort on developing their strengths further.

If it's impossible to take away the part of their job in which they're weak, then help them improve just enough so that it doesn't get in the way of their strength. If you can't take the spreadsheets away from John, help him get a C and move on. That would be preferable to spending the time and effort it would take to get an A or even a B.

Next time little Johnny hands you his report card with an F in math and an A in English, keep smiling and resist the temptation to ask about the F. Instead, ask about the A first. "What happened in English?" you should say to Johnny, "Why did you get this A?" Then let him tell you about how and why he succeeds. What is it about the work that excites him? What about the teacher? How did he study?

Then, if you want him to get a little better in math, you can help him recreate the conditions that led to his success in English.

And when you're done with the report card conversation, it might still be a good idea to get him a math tutor. Because school is about exposure to everything while business is about success in something.

And then, if you want to teach him to harness his particular path to success, make sure to get him an English tutor too.

MicroFocus Acquisitions

Last month Borland was acquired by MicroFocus. Microfocus has acquired Compuware too. Borland and Compuware have similar kind of testing products. By these aquisitions, MicroFocus is the second largest market leading vendor in Testing tools.

Borland Testing tools:

1. SilkTest - Functional Testing
2. SilkPerformer -Performance Testing
3. SilkCentral Test Manager - Test management

Compuware Testing tools:

1. TestPartner - Functional Testing
2. QALoad -Performance Testing
3. QADirector - Test management

Apart from above products, Borland and compuware had other products. See the MicroFocus - Testing ASQ Products for more information.

Test Management and Motivation

Test Management is talked by few people and rarely. Also we are thinking test planning and test execution as test management. Nowadays Motivation is also one of the serious concerns in test management. It is not only by better package and better environment too. I read a Test Team Management document and it has given different direction. Sara Rees explained well in Test Team Management

Few words from Sara Rees:
Whilst the professional pessimist is a trait to be nurtured in our test analysts, it does have its down side. Testers can easily slide into total pessimism about the project as a whole.

From a project perspective, this approach can lead to valuable data generated by
testing becoming blanketed under a wave of negativity, and dismissed accordingly.

From a test team perspective, the difficulty becomes one of motivation. How do you
keep people committed and energetic about the task in hand when they already
believe it will fail?

Quote1:

One of the keys to this is to evidence progress. During team meetings ask
each member for their rating (on a scale of 1-10) on the quality of the
application. In the early days, the rating may be rather low, but you will be able
to demonstrate an improvement over time. If rampant negativity breaks out,
remind them of how things have changed.

Quote2:

The next major influencing factor is you! Your team must see that despite
deadlines, you continue to champion the quality issues.

I also like to put Jeff Nyman comments here. Jeff is a moderator in SQAforums and is a great testing management guru. You can read the Original post.

Question: How would you motivate the team members in scenarios where there is no much work to be assigned to them (basically during a lean period)?

Jeff Nyman:
what I've done in the past with my teams is encourage them -- during projects -- to keep track of things they would like to during the "lean times." Usually during projects ("the time of pain") you'll hear things like "Ah, if only I had time to restructure this test data!" Or: "If I had a tool that did this for me, my life would be a lot easier." During projects you feel the pain but you often can't do much to alleviate it. So I motivate people by saying "Keep track of those things. Write them down. When this project ends, lets look at working on that."

Then when those lean times are upon us I set up internal projects (internal to the test team, that is) and anyone who has made a good case for their project is given the go-ahead to work on that. I've had success with this approach because it gets people to focus on things that can practically help the team and/or that have caused them demonstrable stress in the past. Further, they are often motivated because, after all, they are the ones that brought up how they would like a solution.

And, of course, this lets them add to their skill-set. Note that this can include just learning things in general, even if there's no clear application for it yet. I had one tester, for example, express interest in open source automation even though, in our environment at the time, there was no need for it. I had him start investigating Ruby and the WATiR test framework. (As it turns out, we didn't use WATiR, but the tester did use Ruby scripts to monitor server logs and pull out information.) I had another person who was interested in learning if we could apply "planguage"-based requirements so I showed them the resource site of Tim Gilb and had them do some research. (It turns out we couldn't use "planguage" but the tester learned a lot about how to think about requirements.)

So what I try to do is encourage the team to keep track of things they would like to learn or like to do. That provides the necessary internal motivation rather than trying to impose motivation externally. Sometimes what people want to do is just for personal improvement and that's fine. Other times they don't so much need to learn something as apply what they already know. For example, maybe one tester wants to restructure our test data using a new schema. Maybe another wants to refactor our SilkTest automated test library. Maybe yet another wants to set up a forum-board knowledge base. Maybe another wants to set up a library of useful database queries.