Owning your suck moments

Photo credits: http://gratisography.com/

What does it feel to be a beginner again at something you know very well?

Recently, I have started to learn how to drive a manual car. Although I have been a competent driver in an automatic car for many years, I am a complete beginner in a manual car.

I hop into my learning car and hesitantly started the engine to life with my sweaty palms. I try to find my friction point using the clutch, the car begins to struggle, and oops I stalled it!

Yep! I’m a beginner again … and this is my suck moment.

To be a beginner again feels exhilarating, scary, fun, and totally turns your world upside down. To be honest, I have mix feelings about it. I love it and hate it at the same time!

To describe my feelings about it, just imagine being a pro at something with a skill level of 50 and coming down to a level 5 all at one moment. The inevitable is bound to happen, part of you is going to hurt badly — your ego.

Mine certainly is bruised and tenderised.

If I am to summarise this whole learning experience, I will use one word to describe it — “Humbling.”

Learning something new can be a humbling journey.

A piece of humble pie, anyone?

In the startup world, creating a product or building an idea from scratch means that entrepreneurs have to face and own their suck moments each day as they work to prove their hypothesis. Will this feature work? Will this bring in more customers? Will it boost my sale? Will I fall flat on my face when customers do not respond as expected?

There are many words of what a suck moment can be described in the vocabulary. In Japanese, it’s called Kaizen. A business philosophy of continuous improvement. In it’s simplest terms and in my humble opinion it can be translated to do this:

Suck — Learn — Do — Repeat

Own your suck moment, learn from what you are experiencing, apply your learnings, and repeat.

In the corporate world, big blue-chipped companies are getting disrupted in their playing field. They’re looking into innovation to counter these threats. Change is needed, and change is indeed coming.

There is only one way to get equipped with the changing corporate landscape; you will have to get ready to live your suck moments.

Are you ready for it?

Recently, I have been working with a Scrum team with team members of various experience and levels of maturity in IT.

They have been going through a rough patch and living through lots of suck moments.

As their Agile coach, I wanted to make sure they can take something away from these hard moments.

Here’s a snapshot of their journey to change and recounts of their suck moments

1. Acceptance

This new team suffers from making way too many assumptions against each other. Assumptions in their team member’s knowledge, skills, commitment, method of working, and communication just to name a few.

For this Scrum team, assumptions have started to create chaos within the circle.

As a result, some team member’s output were considered not to be very good quality. And the blame game has also started.

The team can only move on from this situation by accepting the facts that are on the table, working together on an acceptable mode and output for the group, and owning up to their suck moments.

Owning up to their suck moments have to lead the team in working on the following areas:

1. Gaps in the knowledge of team members
2. Bringing accountability within the team. Who initiates what? What will happen when something is not done right?
3. Calling out mode of communication . Do they prefer face-to-face conversation? Receiving feedback in person? Phone calls, emails, meetings?.
4. Calling out the responsibilities of each role within the team. Because this is a new team with various experience level, re-iterating the responsibility of each role, which reinforces each of the team member’s accountability.

2. Learn with scaffolding

This team needed a reset.

As painful as it is, the only way to address the gaps in the knowledge of team members is to work together on building their understanding of the subject.

When you’re reinforcing a structure of a building, scaffolding is built around it to work on it bit by bit, until it could stand on its own. Strong, and build to last.

The learning process of us humans is the same; you will need scaffolding around you until you and your team can stand on your own.

For this team as their coach, I act as the scaffolding. Working on skilling them up, a life-line, or call-a-friend (in times of emergencies).

3. Suck — Learn — Do — Repeat

You can google and read many articles on how to drive a manual car. But there is only one way to drive a car, and that is to do it — just drive.

Execution is where it all comes together. Apply what you have learned, knowing that you will suck at it, learn what’s working and what’s not, do it, and repeat.

The process of learning something new is a pain in the as* but slowly the parts of the scaffolding will come off.

4. Call for tough love

It’s bound to happen, as parts of the scaffolding start to come off, the team begins to get confident working on their own.

Now is the time to reinforce all the learnings of the team.

Tough love is acting only in consultative terms and not fixing it for them. Tough times are ahead, but the team is now equipped to resolve them on their own.

I call this tough love because, in many situations, you will have to watch the team/person live a few more suck moments until they figure it out that they can be on their own.

Tough love builds trust within each of the team members and their abilities. Allowing for the complete removal of the scaffolds that were built around the group earlier. Enabling trust, strength, and built to last.

Owning their suck moments have taken this scrum team well on their way to accepting change, becoming a stronger scrum team, and becoming individuals who approach something new with curiosity and smile.

Perhaps, as part of your 2017 resolution, you have decided to pick up a new skill, instrument, or learn something new outside your field. Well, I wish you all the best!

Remember that it’s going to suck big time but also know that it is only through these suck moments that you can truly shine. So own it!

Hey! Thanks for reading! I’m Juliet Lara, I write about life, learning, tech, startups, and communication.

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You can get in touch with via twitter @julietlspeaks