Empathy – I sorely lacked that early in my career. I was chatting about this with Tom LaRock because I linked to his great post about empathy in a post about stuff I learned working in the ambulance a few posts back. I’ve actually had about 6 conversations in the past few weeks about empathy. One was with a client we are doing a lot of business with at Linchpin People – partially because they saw how we approach problems and saw that we don’t rush to judgments and use empathy in our dealings with customers. All of these conversations – with customers, with Tom, with colleagues at Linchpin have me thinking that I should write this post you are now reading… What I Wish I Knew Sooner as a DBA Outside of Work is Really Important This one is first for a reason. Time – it keeps going. It doesn’t pause. It doesn’t slow down a bit while you have a busy period at the office. That means the things that matter the most in life keep happening. Whether you are there. Or whether you are not there. Right now. Right this moment – especially if you are new to IT, or in your beginning years – you have a decision to make. It’s possibly one of the most critical decisions you will ever make.. Ready? What’s more important? Your work life? Or your outside of work life? Now I’m speaking mostly as a husband and parent here, but the parallels are important. And if you aren’t yet in a relationship – that doesn’t necessarily mean you never will be. So the advice still sticks. You need to balance things. I’m not saying work isn’t important – it’s very important – it’s a blessing to be able to do work and provide. It’s important to show up, to put in your all and work your tail off and put in an honest days work. BUT… It can get out of control very quickly. Very quickly. There are years – and I’ve talked about this before in blog posts here I know it because the same emotion and words feel like they are coming out – that I would do anything to change. I have a lot of really great memories of my 1st and 3rd biological children at young ages. The first because I was a full time firefighter for her first handful of months of life. I left IT to try it out full time, and realized I missed IT – and needed the money if my wife were to stay home like she wanted where we were in life – so I went back to IT. While a firefighter I left work at work for the most part and was home more, and less stressed. I was able to enjoy life at home more. When I went back into IT? The “issues” and late night troubleshooting and all crept up. And it was all important stuff for the company. And the companies I worked for allowed me to solve the issues and work hard to do it – but I never thought of saying “no.. I can’t” – I just did what I thought was right for the company. And the days, weeks, months and years went by so fast for a time. So fast. My middle biological child? I look at his pictures of his first 3-5 months and it’s a blur. I remember many things and spent time with them, I wasn’t totally absent at all. But I was absent enough.. Absent enough to not really be able to close my eyes and see his 3 month old face like I can my first or my third… Or even his 1 year old face. I missed many things between late nights, commutes, and late nights at home. I’m not going to get that time back. I still am at risk of that – and have periods where I mess it up – but working at the home office, setting my own schedule, etc has allowed me much more freedom. I’ve been independent since my youngest biological child was about 2, maybe 18 months. And that has made a difference. I was at the end of my full time world then and saw some of these mistakes – so I remember him as a baby better than our middle boy. But I missed real time. Because I put the emphasis on work. Bonus Tip - For the most part – your managers aren’t going to step in and say “stop that – you are working too much” (I argue a great manager will and should). The company isn’t going to whine. If you fall into the trap of overworking needlessly – it will bite you hard, and 10 years will go by before you realize you were bitten by it. And even after those ten years your recovery will be slow. Emergencies happen for us DBAs. We get calls in the middle of the night. You need to separate the real emergencies that are “Okay I really have to work this right now or the world will implode and I’ll be shirking my duties” and the ones that really could be okay with a response like “It isn’t a quick fix, production isn’t down during business hours, the SLA allows me to sleep on it. I’m going to go home and be mom, dad, wife, husband, friend, caretaker and deal with this on the company’s time.. Being able to separate these two situations is one of the most critical skills you’ll develop in this career. Trust me. Empathy Get some.. It’s that simple and it can’t be stressed enough. I’m speaking to DBAs mostly here because that was my titled role for most of my full time life. As a DBA – you will bump into all sorts of places where empathy is needed. You will be angry at developers, users, managers, project managers, other DBAs, vendors (Oh.. vendors…) and sometimes even Microsoft. Sometimes it is well placed.. Sometimes it isn’t. But if you don’t approach situations with empathy and ask, like Tom’s post suggests, “ what’s their MacGruffin? “, you are going to do some of the things I’ve done – and am not proud of – in my early and mid points of my career… You will be quick to blame others without understanding the situation. You will assume bad intent.. You will assume folks are beneath your vast skill as a DBA or don’t care. You’ll assume the worst, confirm that assumption and then act it out in your dealings. Instead of gaining allies – this approach gains enemies in time. Remember that we all start somewhere. Remember that there is a base knowledge that everyone brings and a perspective everyone brings. It’s different for everyone. History and situations influence that. Until you know what that is with someone, until you understand where they are coming from – put away assumptions.. Best Cure Here? Get to know the people you work with. Listen. Understand and sit with them and figure things out. Bonus Tip – E-Mail is a dangerous tool when you lack empathy – because it is easy to rip someone apart in e-mail, it’s easy to let your assumptions boil. Put it down and go talk in person or over the phone with them. It’s harder to lack empathy when you are talking to the person… Hero != Blank Check Don’t focus on just being the DBA hero… This one burned me from time to time and it influences some of the other ones I mention too. I had this mentality that I had to be the problem solver. I called it “white knight” syndrome. I wanted to charge into the situation with my perfect posture on my noble steed, slay the dragons and then let everyone know I slayed the dragons. I guess I’m a people-pleaser and my “love language” is praise and affirmation. I got it too. I worked insane hours. I put my best effort in (when there was a crisis..) and I solved problems and was the go-to guy wherever I went. It was great… Except… That it wast great at all.. In my focus on being the hero – I became really really useful when a big problem arose – and burned out, bitter and lazy the rest of the time. You see I’d drop some other tasks, I’d mess up some routine things – because I spent my time saving the day. The worst part?? I rationalized this behavior. My attitude was “well do you want dragons slayed or not? If you want dragons slayed, then you should just be happy with me…” I never actually said that, and I never realized I was doing it until it was too late. And I’d end up burned out, bitter and, frankly, on some “hit-lists” and I’d move on. Now I wasn’t all bad – I’m not trying to sabotage my resume here – I really did do a lot of useful stuff, I taught, I grew, I helped, I made differences, and I really did move on for more skills.. But sure there was a part of me that left because I knew I’d outstayed my welcome and got myself in a hole… Bonus Tip – Do the small stuff really well. Make everything a dragon to slay. Don’t do things for the praise of others – do them to do a great job and work hard. Don’t expect something because you kill a dragon – just do it because it’s part of the job… This attitude is a hard one to shake. Getting Things Done This one is quick. Get a system for getting things done. If you were that kid in school who never followed up on assignments, if you never got your term paper started until the last minute.. FIX.THAT.PROBLEM.NOW!! The biggest challenge I have carried with me for these 35 years I’ve been in this body? Procrastination. It’s cost me money. It’s cost me time. It’s cost me happy customers. With this one? Consistency is key. You can be the dragon slayer I describe above. You can be a hero. You can be the smartest person on the team – but if you slack off and don’t get things done? If you say “ yes ” and then never deliver - If you schedule and then never show up.. If you do that constantly – you’ll be seen for that. You won’t be seen for the marvelous piece of code you delivered, the day that you saved or the fact that you single handedly took the most frequently executed proc from 4.5 seconds to 30ms and then from 30ms to 2ms in a serious all night tuning fest.. You’ll be seen as that unreliable DBA whose yes means maybe and dates always slip… Like I said – I’m still working on this one. Get a system. Get one now. Stick to it and keep yourself accountable here. If you are already great at this skill?! I’m impressed and bow down before you – you’ll go far. Especially in this world of many distractions. Tag.. YOU are it. (if you want to play along.. I know sometimes these tagging things get out of hand and annoying…) I’m also going to tag people in this post. I know that doesn’t happen much, and the SQL Community has T-SQL Tuesdays to do that sort of thing. But I want to hear this advice from a lot of people. If I don’t tag you – please consider yourself tagged. You don’t have to link back to my post here – I’m not looking for linkbait, if I cared about that I’d be blogging a whole lot more than I have been – but if you want to you can – mostly so there is a pingback at the bottom so folks can find your post. If you do share something and want to e-mail me or pingback to me, I’ll probably write a follow up post next week and include all the links I find. So SQLFamily – consider yourself tagged. But I’d also like to specifically tag a few people who are really busy and may not respond but I’d love to hear their take, and I hope they tag others if they like. I don’t want this to be annoying or about the tagging – but I’d love to have a list of posts for folks starting out in the field – and learning from our mistakes is a good start. Steve Jones Brian Kelley Andy Leonard (it’s not just about DBAs – Developers, Managers, etc) Erin Stellato Kathi Kallenberger Tom LaRock Brent Ozar Hopefully that is enough tagged that we should get a response from at least one of them. So guys – and anyone else in the SQLFamily who was implicitly tagged – all I want to see are 4 or so things you wish you could go back and tell yourself when you were starting out. Mostly about Soft Skills but really it can be technical skills or about learning or growing or community, etc.. You don’t have to just share your mistakes like I did. I could come up with 5 more things that I am happy I did early on – but this post was long enough already. I may write that post from a different angle next week. The post 4 Attitudes I Wish I Had Earlier as a DBA appeared first on Straight Path Solutions, a SQL Server Consultancy .
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