Heard of Design Patterns? How About Behavior Patterns.

Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.

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Today, I felt like digressing a bit. I hope you’ll follow along.

As a bar raiser and senior leader at Amazon, I spent a lot of time interviewing managers. I mean, a heck of a lot of time. And I’ll have you know, managers are pretty boring to interview.

Engineers will make mistakes. And mistakes are the dessert of interviewing. When I ask an engineer about their best co-worker, and they say, “Well, all my co-workers are idiots.” — it makes me so happy. Because I’ll have a story to tell for the rest of my life.

Managers don’t do that. They give you boring acceptable answers, because they have people skills. Bah.

Anyway, that’s not the point I was going to make at all. I just got distracted.

One of my favorite questions for managers was, “How do you manage top performers differently than bottom performers?"

Why did I feel this was a good question? Because it addressed a couple of important manager things.

One — Ensuring they actually identify top and bottom performers.

Certain managers at certain companies deny the existence of performance.

“Everyone has their strengths.”

“Sometimes people do poorly on a task, but it doesn’t mean they’re a bad performer.”

Ok Mother Theresa, but I’m not going to hire you now.

Two — Making certain managers understand you need to treat some employees differently.

In the name of fairness, some managers are stuck on the idea that their entire team should be managed in the exact same way.

“To be fair to everyone, I treat all my employees the same.”

“Everyone gets the same experience on my team, which ensures that I’m not biased towards anyone.”

I don’t want our star performer treated the same as that slacker who is clearly coasting until their next vesting date. We should be biased towards those with growth potential. But, I’m getting distracted!

This article isn’t about management. I just got side tracked. I’ll get back to the topic at hand.

One reason that question is interesting is that it’s about categorizing people. Yes, everyone is an individual. You’re all unique flowers.

But in this case above, if you manage everyone the same way, you’re condemned to mediocrity. Instead, you help yourself and others if you recognize that everyone is different. The interesting bit is that employees are frequently different in recognizable ways. These patterns of behavior aren’t necessarily unique to an individual. You’ll see them time and time again.

Recognizing these patterns as an employee or manager means that you might be able to know how to make things better.

People patterns? Whatever do you mean Dave?

Humans excel at recognizing and replicating patterns. Yes, every individual is different, but we have so much in common.

If you have an introvert software engineering friend, I'd bet $5 that they've read Ender's Game.

If you’re in your mid 40’s, you can probably toss out Princess Bride quotes with ease. “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya.” As a good dad, my 10-year-old can also quote from the movie.

At work, if you can recognize patterns in other people’s behaviors, you can predict how to work with them, coach them, and manage them better.

If you couldn’t recognize patterns in your co-workers, you’d need to solve every problem like you were seeing it for the first time. That is slower, and takes extra mental effort. It makes you react slower. You’re more likely to make mistakes.

Have you heard of design patterns for engineering? There are dozens of books and online sites listing common requirements, and how those requirements are solved with a common technical solution. In this way, engineers don’t need to rebuild solutions from scratch. They can simply apply what has worked in the past.

If you recognize these people patterns, you can understand what has worked for others in the past, and what hasn’t. Here are a few patterns I’ve repeatedly seen over the years. I’m sure you know more...