DEV Community: Steve Worsley

Highlight your strengths with a Johari window

Steve Worsley — Mon, 12 Aug 2019 06:47:04 +0000

Earlier in the year I came across Anna Shipman's blog in which she wrote about an exercise called a Johari window. It's a way of highlighting strengths you might not recognise in yourself through feedback from your colleagues. Anna's article is well worth a read to get more context and you should definitly follow her on Twitter 👌🏻.

Feeling inspired I decided to have a go myself. This would be the first time I've proactively asked for feedback from my colleagues so I was feeling apprehensive. I'm used to receiving feedback during 1:1s and performance reviews so it felt a bit odd to be doing this off my own back. Would I be putting my colleagues out?

To start a Johari window you pick 5 or 6 adjectives which best describe you then send the full list to a few colleagues or team mates for them to pick too. The results are then split into 4 lists of strengths:

Known to you and your colleagues
Known to you but not colleagues
Not known to you but known to your colleagues
Not known to you or your collegues

I picked the following adjectives: Dependable, Helpful, Kind, Patient, Quiet and Silly

Dependable, Helpful, Kind and Patient compliment each other and are part of the supportive side to my personality.

I'm not sure if I would describe myself as quiet now but certainly have done so in the past (before I learnt the word introverted) 😂. But I do like to give my work my full attention, have time to reflect on conversations and if there's more than one other person in a discussion I'm generally happy to let them all waffle on. I don't push my opinions on others, maybe through fear of confrontration or because I don't particularly hold strong opinions. So what I'm trying to say is that I may come across as quiet to other people and that's probably why I picked it.

Silly seems like a bit of a strange strength to have in a professional capacity but I try to take some inspiration from Judi Dench when she said "I think you should take your job seriously, but not yourself - that is the best combination." This strength helps me (hopefully) be a good father, show some vunerability and silliness my type of comedy.

What did other people pick?

I used survey monkey to send out my list of adjectives, as it allowed for grid like structure instead of a long list. I gave my colleagues a couple of weeks to provide the feedback and sent out one reminder. I sent it to 10 people and recieved 8 responses.

Known to self and others

Helpful (6)
Patient (4)
Dependable (4)
Kind (2)
Quiet (1)

Not know to others

Silly

Not know to me

Friendly (6)
Cheerful (4)
Calm (3)
Caring (2)
Nervous (2)
Responsive (2)
Trustworthy (2)
Adaptable (1)
Confident (1)
Giving (1)
Happy (1)
Intelligent (1)
Introverted (1)
Quiet (1)
Reflective (1)
Witty (1)

Interpreting the results

The results were in and... weren't too suprising. It's nice that people find me friendly although I don't feel particularly cheerful. Only one person picked quiet so maybe it's time to let go of that assumption about myself. The mighty Heather Williams suggested running through the results with a coach to keep my assumptions in check e.g. "I'm down as nervous! That must be from when I pair with people and sometimes I feel like I'm all over the place."

At Auto Trader we're lucky to have access to coaches, so I had a conversation with mine around the Johari Window which led onto a deeper Strength Finder process.

It's interesting to look back at these results 6 months later. At the time I didn't really see the benefit of supportive strengths. They seemed 'nice' but weren't really going to help 'get things done' or get me to Senior.
I was looking for a way to have more 'sass and swagger' as I jokingly put it. To be a bit more dynamic.

After going through the Strength Finder process and some coaching I've really taken onboard the benefit of supportive strengths. I've seen how valuable being supportive can be to a people and at the end of the day you're enabling other people, as well as yourself, to deliver for the company.

Would I recommend a Johari Window? Yes, but I do have some reserverations:

Keep in mind that people are limited to only 6 responses so just because someone may have not picked a strength doesn't mean you don't display it.
It's hard not to make assumptions about a score as soon as you total it up.
I found it hard not to pick adjectives I thought other people would see in me rather than picking what I saw in myself.

If you ever feel like asking for feedback I'd say go for it. And if you use a Johari Window just remember that the adjectives are open to interpretation as to how they surface themselves as strengths - it's the conversations around your interpretations and who you have these with which will have the real impact.

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Originally posted on omg.steveworsley.com - Say “Hi!” on Twitter

Thoughts for the Week - Issue 1

Steve Worsley — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 06:50:02 +0000

As a way to decompress 💆‍♂️ from work I write a few notes on the way home. I’ll add some details and related links then they get posted to Twitter @iamsteveworsley and collected here for discussion. ⚡️

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Updating a design system, consuming pattern/component libraries and consuming micro-frontends sure is tricky. More places it can fall over but hopefully with the code split the impact of the issues will be smaller.

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Anyone else find it hard to provide an immediate and useful update on your work? Or say what you've been doing over the past week if asked out of the blue? Read more

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Lift and Shit: performing a Lift and Shift but leaving the re-platformed code in a worse state than it was originally created. Occurs when a lift is rushed resulting in sudden pain and fumbling of the shift. Disappointment is akin to receiving a damaged parcel through the post which you can’t return because the seller has shut-up shop and retired to a farm to start a greenfield project to breed rare Yaks for their wool.

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A challenge I’ve found with design systems and pattern libraries is finding the time to get competent with the varieties of tooling - beyond just using them as and when needed. Particularly Fractal and Storybook.

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Interesting projects, a desire to help people and fear of missing out make it hard to say no. I had so much on during the run up to Senior it became extremely stressful. So part of my PDP refresh will be around focus, working on one or two discretionary effort style things and saying “no thanks” more often. Read more on speed and velocity

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I’ve not come across AHA before (Avoid Hasty Abstractions) 😆 but I’ve certainly come across some bat-shit abstractions and probably a few I wrote my self. 🙈 The Befuddlement Ratio - Every click through you perform in your IDE your intelligence decreases in percent the number of characters used in the abstracted function name.

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See you next time! 🤩

Hey you! What are you working on?

Steve Worsley — Fri, 26 Jul 2019 11:32:53 +0000

"Steve! What are you working on?"

"Sausages! Lemon drizzle cake! It's currently 30°C with a light breeze on the western peninsular so slap on that sunscreen pop pickers!"

Anyone else find it hard to provide an immediate and useful update on your work? Or say what you've been doing over the past week if asked out of the blue?

For me I like the room to take on board a question and provide a thoughtful response so a question like this out of the blue can throw me. Then I trip myself up because I think I'll sound like I'm lying or have been up to something I can't explain - which is completely irrational. It's then tricky to provide the right amount of detail for the context on the spot.

Trouble is I can't recall seeing someone doing this well. I've noticed that team leads have the same problem but they're almost expected to have too much on their plate. They're also likely to be ones asking the question.

It may also be a sign of too much context switching. Or just getting old - sometimes I can't remember what I've done over the weekend. Or an irrational fear that I'm working on the wrong thing. Part of it is working with people with different communication styles.

Here are a few strategies on providing useful updates I've thought about while writing this article:

Signalling intent more often so people don't have to ask for an update.
Keeping a progress log - I find it a useful reminder of all the different things I've been doing though I forget to update it.
Understanding the intent of the person asking the question.
Push back on providing an update straight away and offer to send an email with detailed response.

I'd be interested in hearing yours!

Catch me on ✨ Twitter ✨: @iamsteveworsley

Originally published on: https://listed.to/@iamsteveworsley

Thoughts on Patterns Day conference

Steve Worsley — Sat, 06 Jul 2019 19:18:11 +0000

Today I was lucky enough to travel down to Brighton and attend #PatternsDay with a few developers and designers from @AutoTraderLife. It’s a great conference worth attending if you get the chance. Here are a few thoughts/themes from the day:

Be reassured no matter how professional and together the design system showcases you see from large companies are they are struggling too. Whether your one person or a team you will still be reacting to changes, fighting fires and trying to convince people over and over.
It’s okay to be reactive. Add things when you need them. Personally I need to be a little less “This should have been documented.” And more “It’s okay this hasn’t been documented, but now we need it, I’ll add it.”
Every line of content you add to the documentation is another thing for a designer or developer to take on board and think about.
Common components and patterns you might pick up from other design systems need to be tested in the context of your website/app/product. Removing a component may increase conversions in one app and have a negative impact another. This has been tested.
It’s worth keeping in mind the potential impact on efficiency of components before you add them to the design system.
It’s time to move on from using consistency as a crutch to justify a design system. It may not have much of an impact on users as we first thought.
You will have the same conversations over and over as you excite colleagues to use a design system and they naturally lose interest as other priorities kick in. Get good at those conversations.
GDS provide honest reasoning and research into why a component is used or built that way. It reminded me of Architecture Decision Records which is a way of documenting decisions about a codebase and are stored within the codebase itself. Helps with questions like “Why did we pick React for this solution?” especially if person who’s made the decision has left the company.
I’d be interested in finding out which companies have gone down the route for separate versions for individual components. I think Financial Times started theirs like that. Means you could release a new version of the component without blocking updates to other components. But then adds complexity with multiple packages.

The conference itself is organised well, has the comfiest seats I’ve sat on at a venue, and free barista coffee. You won’t get lunch but there are plenty of great places to eat. You may find yourself queuing for the toilets though.

Brighton is a lovely city well worth a visit especially when it’s sunny. 😎

First published on https://listed.to/@steveworsley/6591/patterns-day