AI, Social Media, and Data Center Water Consumption

The Core Question

Public discourse treats AI as the primary driver of a growing data center water crisis. But how does AI’s per-user water consumption actually compare to that of social media and video streaming? And does the evidence support treating AI as the sole problem?

This document examines the available research, verifies the underlying numbers, and presents what survives rigorous fact-checking.

How much water does TikTok use per minute?

The most widely cited measurement comes from Greenspector, a French firm specializing in digital environmental auditing. Their October 2021 study measured the environmental footprint of scrolling the news feed on the 10 most popular social media apps, each tested for one minute on a Samsung Galaxy S7 (Android 8).

TikTok’s water resource footprint was 0.27 liters per minute which was the highest of all apps tested. For comparison: YouTube measured 0.08 L/min, Facebook 0.12 L/min, and Twitter 0.10 L/min.

This figure is a lifecycle assessment metric, not a direct measurement of cooling tower evaporation. It captures modeled water impacts across three layers (the end-user device, the network infrastructure, and data center operations) projected from measured energy consumption and data exchange volumes. Greenspector uses the OneByte methodology (developed by The Shift Project) to estimate infrastructure impacts from data volumes, and notes that this is “a very macroscopic approach” that “is subject to uncertainty.”

TikTok’s high figure is driven primarily by the sheer volume of video data it transfers. The 2021 study found TikTok was among the top three apps for data exchanged per minute and consumed 1.8× more device energy than YouTube.

How much water does a ChatGPT query use?

This question has multiple credible answers depending on what is being measured.

The foundational academic estimate comes from Li, Yang, Islam, and Ren at UC Riverside and UT Arlington. Their 2023 paper (updated through March 2025, UC Riverside summary here) modeled the water footprint of GPT-3 (175 billion parameters) running in Microsoft’s U.S. data centers. They found that GPT-3 consumes roughly 500 mL of water per 10–50 medium-length responses, depending on data center location and time of year. This translates to approximately 10–50 mL per response. The estimate includes both scope-1 water (on-site cooling evaporation) and scope-2 water (consumed at power plants generating the electricity).

OpenAI’s own figure (June 2025): CEO Sam Altman stated the average ChatGPT query uses approximately 0.3 mL of water (or about 1/15 of a teaspoon). This covers scope-1 operational cooling only.

Current independent estimates for GPT-4o (the model most ChatGPT users interact with today): Using publicly available energy data (approximately 1.75 Wh per query) and water intensity factors of 1.3–2.0 mL/Wh, researchers estimate approximately 2.3–3.5 mL per response.

The large gap between the original 2023 figures and current estimates reflects two factors: GPT-4o is roughly 10× more compute-efficient per token than GPT-3, and newer data center cooling systems are substantially more water-efficient than the facilities modeled in 2023. (For a detailed breakdown of why the original 500 mL figure overstates current usage, see this technical analysis.)

Can these two numbers be compared fairly?

Nope, but we can normalize for that. The TikTok figure (Greenspector) is a lifecycle metric covering device energy, network transmission, and data center operations. The AI figure (Li et al.) measures operational water at the data center level (scope-1 and scope-2), excluding device and network impacts.

Let’s account for that difference and add device/network water costs to the AI figures.

A single ChatGPT exchange including the prompt and its response involves roughly 5–20 KB of text data transfer. One minute of TikTok involves approximately 8–15 MB of video data. That is a 500–1,500× difference in data volume.

Network layer: Using IEA-corrected estimates of ~0.06–0.2 kWh per GB of network transfer, a ChatGPT exchange at ~15 KB yields approximately 0.002–0.003 mL per exchange.

Device layer: Rendering a text response requires minimal CPU/GPU work compared to continuous video decode. Conservative estimates produce roughly 0.01–0.05 mL per interaction.

Total lifecycle addition per AI prompt: approximately 0.02–0.05 mL. Against a baseline of 2.3–3.5 mL per response for data center operations (GPT-4o), this adds approximately 1–2%. The lifecycle-adjusted AI figure becomes roughly 2.3–3.6 mL per response. Text is tiny. The entire reason TikTok’s lifecycle number is so high is that it pushes enormous amounts of video data through every layer of the stack simultaneously.

What does an apples-to-apples per-minute comparison look like?

With both figures now on comparable lifecycle scope:

After normalizing the ChatGPT data to include network/device activity, we see that TikTok uses ~50-77x more water per user per minute. Even applying aggressive uncertainty (assuming Greenspector’s methodology overstates TikTok by 5×, and assuming AI’s actual consumption is at the worst case), TikTok usage would still consume roughly 10–15× more water per minute than a ChatGPT session.

What about AI model training costs?

Training a large language model is water-intensive as a one-time event. Li et al. estimated GPT-3 training consumed approximately 700,000 liters of scope-1 on-site water, or 5.4 million liters total including scope-2 electricity generation water.

But for widely used models, this cost amortizes to near-zero per query. ChatGPT processes over 2.5 billion prompts per day. Over a ~1.5-year flagship lifespan, a popular model handles roughly 500 billion to 1.4 trillion total queries. Even using the total 5.4 million liter training figure: 5,400,000 L ÷ 500,000,000,000 queries = 0.000011 mL per query which is roughly one-millionth of a single drop of water per prompt.

How much water does a day of use actually consume?

A person would need to use ChatGPT nonstop for 24 hours to consume roughly the same amount of water that an average U.S. TikTok user consumes in 25–35 minutes of scrolling. (U.S. average daily TikTok usage per Backlinko/eMarketer: 52–58 min; global average ~95 min.)

If TikTok uses far more water per user, why does AI get the blame?

Geographic concentration. Video streaming workloads are distributed across CDN nodes in many cities. AI training clusters require thousands of GPUs physically adjacent. A single hyperscale AI facility can consume 5–8 million gallons per day — comparable to a town of 30,000–50,000 people.

Power density per rack. AI training racks consume 30–100 kW per rack. Traditional CDN/streaming racks consume 5–10 kW. This 6–10× difference in heat generation per square foot drives proportionally higher cooling demand in a concentrated area.

Rate of growth. Microsoft’s water consumption increased 34% from 2021 to 2022 (to 6.4M cubic meters), then to 7.8M in 2023. Google’s rose 20% in 2022 (to 19.5M cubic meters). Both attributed the increases primarily to AI infrastructure buildout. Legacy streaming infrastructure grew gradually over a decade.

These are legitimate infrastructure concerns. They are not evidence that AI uses more water per user than social media. They are evidence that AI’s water demand is arriving in the wrong places at the wrong time.

Are newer AI data centers more water-efficient than legacy facilities?

Yes, substantially. New AI-first facilities target a Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) of 0.2–0.4 liters per kWh, while older general-purpose data centers often operate at WUE of 1.0 or higher. Microsoft’s newest designs use direct-to-chip liquid cooling that saves over 125 million liters of water per facility per year, and some new builds target zero water for cooling entirely.

The irony: the facilities most likely to house TikTok and streaming workloads (older wholesale colocation space) tend to use the least water-efficient cooling technology. The new AI megasites being built from scratch tend to use the most efficient cooling technology available.

What about total volume? Doesn’t AI still use more water in aggregate?

This is where public data becomes insufficient for definitive claims in either direction. ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) does not publish facility-level water consumption data or sustainability reports comparable to those from Google, Microsoft, or Meta. Without that data, credible estimates of TikTok’s total water footprint are not possible.

What we can observe: TikTok serves over 1 billion monthly active users. At 0.27 L/min of lifecycle water per user-minute, even modest average daily usage translates to an enormous aggregate footprint — one that is distributed across co-located facilities and therefore largely invisible in local water accounting.

The total water consumption of all social media and streaming video likely exceeds that of all AI applications today. Unfortunately, this can only be an educated guess since many of the old school social media companies are keeping their environmental impact private.

Who is actually measuring and mitigating their water impact?

This is where the narrative inverts completely. The companies receiving the most public criticism for water consumption are the only ones publicly measuring, reporting, and actively reducing it. The largest video-centric social media platform has disclosed almost nothing.

Microsoft committed in 2020 to become water-positive by 2030. As of early 2025, the company has invested more than $34 million in 90 water replenishment projects across 40+ locations worldwide, estimated to deliver over 100 million cubic meters of water benefit over project lifetimes. In Quincy, Washington, Microsoft funded a purpose-built water reuse utility (confirmed by the U.S. EPA) that recycles data center cooling water in a closed loop, reducing potable groundwater use by 97% and saving approximately 390 million gallons per year. Microsoft’s water intensity has decreased over 80% from first-generation to current data center designs. All new AI-optimized data centers are designed to consume zero water for cooling.

Google committed in 2021 to replenish 120% of its freshwater consumption by 2030. As of the end of 2024, the company supported 112 water stewardship projects across 68 watersheds worldwide (up from 38 in 2022). These projects collectively replenished approximately 4.5 billion gallons of water in 2024, accounting for roughly 64% of Google’s total freshwater consumption.

Neither company has fully offset its water consumption yet. Both have measurable gaps. But both publish detailed, facility-level water data in annual sustainability reports, subject to third-party verification.

ByteDance (TikTok) presents a stark contrast. The company committed to operational carbon neutrality and 100% renewable energy by 2030, announced in 2023. However, ByteDance has published no water-specific replenishment programs, no facility-level water consumption data, and no public sustainability report comparable to those from Microsoft, Google, or Meta. Greenpeace East Asia ranked ByteDance among the lowest-scoring cloud providers in its 2022 assessment, noting the company had “not even disclosed the greenhouse gas emissions from its own operations.” ByteDance has purchased carbon credits but has announced no water-specific mitigation.

The accountability gap is significant: the technology sector being blamed in headlines for the “water crisis” is the same sector investing tens of millions of dollars in watershed restoration, building zero-water cooling infrastructure, and publishing auditable consumption data. The technology sector consuming the most water per user-minute (video-centric social media) has disclosed almost nothing about its water footprint and is investing nothing publicly visible in water replenishment.

Conclusions

First: On a per-user, per-minute basis, current AI chatbot usage (GPT-4o class models) consumes roughly 50–77× less water than TikTok scrolling when both are measured on comparable lifecycle scope. Even under aggressive uncertainty assumptions, the gap remains at least 10–15×. This gap has widened as AI models have become more compute-efficient.

Second: The “AI water crisis” framing is incomplete. Social media and video streaming represent a massive, largely unexamined share of total data center water consumption. AI is better understood as the newest and most geographically concentrated source of demand on a system already stressed by a decade of video-heavy digital services. Framing the problem as “AI vs. the environment” ignores the larger contributor.

Third: The legitimate concern about AI and water is not about per-user efficiency; it is about infrastructure deployment patterns including geographic concentration, extreme power density, and speed of deployment faster than local water infrastructure can adapt. These are absolutely real concerns. They are also solvable engineering and policy problems and a lot of work is being done in this area.

Fourth: The companies being criticized for their water footprint are the only ones publicly measuring and mitigating it. Microsoft and Google have collectively invested tens of millions of dollars in over 200 water stewardship and replenishment projects worldwide, publish facility-level consumption data, and are designing zero-water cooling into new facilities. ByteDance (TikTok’s parent) — whose platform consumes 50–77× more water per user-minute — has published no water consumption data, no water replenishment programs, and received one of the lowest environmental transparency scores from Greenpeace among major cloud providers. The public discourse has the accountability exactly backwards.

The most productive framing is not “AI vs. TikTok” but: How do we manage the total water demand of all digital infrastructure — legacy and new — while ensuring that data center siting accounts for local water availability? Blaming the newest, most efficient entrant while ignoring the established, less efficient incumbents is neither accurate nor useful for solving the underlying problem.

But Jewish people came from Antioch and Iconium; and after they won the crowd over and stoned Paul, they were dragging him out of the city, supposing him to be dead. But while the disciples surrounded him, he got up and went back into the city. On the next day he left with Barnabas for Derbe. After proclaiming the Good News to that city and making many disciples, they returned to Lystra and to Iconium and to Antioch. They were strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to persevere in faith, and saying, “It is through many persecutions that we must enter the kingdom of God.”

Acts 14:19-22 (TLV)

Wait, what?? How is a promise of persecution encouraging? This merited a deeper dive.

Paul wasn’t alone

Going back to John 15, Jesus, himself, encourages us in similar fashion.

“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you.

John 15:18-19

I recognize that from that snippet alone, it isn’t clear whether Jesus was encouraging his disciples or just telling them the facts as they were.  To see the encouragement clearly, it is helpful to take it in the full context.

“I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit. You are already clean because of the word which I have spoken to you. Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in Me. I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from Me you can do nothing. If anyone does not abide in Me, he is thrown away as a branch and dries up; and they gather them, and cast them into the fire and they are burned. If you abide in Me, and My words abide in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. Just as the Father has loved Me, I have also loved you; abide in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will abide in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and abide in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full.
“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. You are My friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you slaves, for the slave does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I have heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me but I chose you, and appointed you that you would go and bear fruit, and that your fruit would remain, so that whatever you ask of the Father in My name He may give to you. This I command you, that you love one another.
“If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you. Remember the word that I said to you, ‘A slave is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted Me, they will also persecute you; if they kept My word, they will keep yours also. But all these things they will do to you for My name’s sake, because they do not know the One who sent Me. If I had not come and spoken to them, they would not have sin, but now they have no excuse for their sin. He who hates Me hates My Father also. If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sin; but now they have both seen and hated Me and My Father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their Law, ‘THEY HATED ME WITHOUT A CAUSE.’
“When the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, that is the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, He will testify about Me, and you will testify also, because you have been with Me from the beginning.
“These things I have spoken to you so that you may be kept from stumbling.

John 15:1 – 16:1 [Emphasis mine]

With whom are you aligned?

So here, we have what we would think of as bad news laid out amidst all that good.  I think the key to understanding all of this is in that last statement — I have spoken these things to you so that you may be kept from stumbling.

I think most of us deep down want to be liked.  It’s natural.  When we’re not, we try to figure out what we’re doing wrong and what we need to change so that we can be liked.  How kind it was of Jesus (and subsequently Paul) to alert us to the fact that there will be times when people not liking us means that we’re doing something right and rather than changing, we must stay the course.  It was also kind to let us know that it may not have anything to do with us at all other than a single choice we have made.  With whom do we choose to align?

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the boastful pride of life, is not from the Father, but is from the world. The world is passing away, and also its lusts; but the one who does the will of God lives forever.

1 John 2:15-17

Why is that encouraging?

The word most frequently translated as ‘encouragement’ is παρακαλέω (parakaleo) and it does not mean “make somebody feel good”.  It is a compound word para (beside) + kaleo (call) and means to call near or to call one beside. It is the ultimate, “I’m in this with you and you’re in it with me.”  For the Lord to call us to his side, we must be enemies of the world because He is.  Aligning ourselves with Him brings persecution because he brought persecution.  We will be hated.

As foreign as it feels to regard people hating and persecuting us as encouraging, that’s what the bible tells us so we must believe it. I think it is encouraging because it places our current circumstances in the context of the eternal. It enables us to take the long view when someone treats us poorly, here, today. Best, it places us in the company of Jesus.

17 Then we who are alive, who are left behind, will be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air—and so we shall always be with the Lord. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.

1 Thessalonians 4:17-18 (TLV)

Unless otherwise noted, scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org

If ‘TLV’ appears in the citation, then scripture is taken from the Holy Scriptures, Tree of Life Version*.
Copyright © 2014,2016 by the Tree of Life Bible Society.  Used by permission of the Tree of Life Bible Society.

3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction so that we will be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. 5 For just as the sufferings of Christ are ours in abundance, so also our comfort is abundant through Christ. 6 But if we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; or if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which is effective in the patient enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer; 7 and our hope for you is firmly grounded, knowing that as you are sharers of our sufferings, so also you are sharers of our comfort.

2 Corinthians 1:3-7

Our hope is in God

That God comforts us in the midst of our afflictions was clear to me but I don’t think I understood then how he comforts us. Today I do. Through faith and by the power of the Holy Spirit, we can endure through our trials and in doing so, His character is revealed to us. As His character is revealed, we know Him better so we trust Him more. We are comforted by the hope inherent in a complete dependence upon Him. We become able to have a heavenly perspective and take a long term view that extends beyond our our current circumstances. We see this played out in the next set of verses.

For we do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, of our affliction which occurred in Asia, that we were burdened excessively, beyond our strength, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, we had the sentence of death within ourselves so that we would not trust in ourselves, but in God who raises the dead, who rescued us from so great a danger of death, and will rescue us, He on whom we have set our hope. And He will yet deliver us, if you also join in helping us through your prayers, so that thanks may be given by many persons in our behalf for the favor granted to us through the prayers of many. For our proud confidence is this: the testimony of our conscience, that in holiness and godly sincerity, not in fleshly wisdom but in the grace of God, we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially toward you.

2 Corinthians 1:8-12

Paul’s affliction left him burdened excessively, beyond his strength so that he despaired even of life. That forced him to depend not on his own abilities but on God’s character which led to hope, not just about the present circumstance but about the future as well.

Comfort is for others

It is important not to miss that the abundance of comfort which God has sent into our hearts is not intended to be hoarded for ourselves. In comforting us in our afflictions, he equips us and expects us to pay it forward. Our trials are training that enable us to come alongside those who are experiencing the same things we did and to comfort them in the same way that God comforted us.

Think about one of the bigger struggles you’ve had in your life. Really come up with one. Right now. Were you comforted by people who denied or minimized the struggle? Were you comforted by people who hadn’t walked it but who pointed you to uplifting bible verses or suggested you try turmeric? Hopefully, you had somebody come alongside you who knew what you were experiencing, who could tell you that it was real, who could meet you in the pain, hold your hand, and point you to Him who could save you. It is expected that you now pay that forward.

Paul did just that when he shared with the church at Corinth that he came to a point of despair and realized that he’d been relying on himself. He openly exposed this sin to them because he cared so much less about his reputation than about God’s plans for them through him. This is the same reason he told Timothy that he was foremost among sinners. Note the lesson — for us to put our training into action, for us to comfort others requires not only compassion but humility and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Comforting others means being exposed

The word translated as ‘comfort’ which is used nine times in 2 Corinthians 1:3-7, is παράκλησις (parakalesis) which means ‘to call alongside’ and it is sometimes translated as ‘encourage’. It says, “I’m in this with you and you’re in this with me.” It is so comforting to have the encouragement of somebody who has walked the path before us and who has come out the other side intact and confident in the Lord. But how can we possibly find one another if we present an image that conceals the paths on which we have walked? We are called to live in the light.

Among my immediate family, we have been trained to comfort the orphans, the abused, the lonely, the ignored, the desperate, mutilators of self, anorexics, addicts, lovers of violence, those caught in habitual sin of all types, the oppressed, victims of assault and of incest* and of rape, those who cannot imagine living tomorrow, children of divorce, the unjustly persecuted, and the chronically ill. That might cover half of it. Looking at this passage on comfort from my family’s perspective today:

Our hope for [people who are described above] is firmly grounded, knowing that as [they] are sharers of our sufferings, so also [they] are sharers of our comfort.

2 Corinthians 1:7 [with my adaptation]

As we go forward and bring this comfort and encouragement to others, we ourselves are encouraged that it is God Almighty who strengthens us.

16 Now may our Lord Jesus Christ Himself and God our Father, who has loved us and given us eternal comfort and good hope by grace, 17 comfort and strengthen your hearts in every good work and word.

2 Thessalonians 2:16-17

* It should be noted that four of our children are adopted.

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org

My mind goes to when Jesus had to field a question about a man who’d been blind from birth — whether it was because of his sin or his parents’ sin.

Jesus answered, “It was neither that this man sinned, nor his parents; but it was so that the works of God might be displayed in him.”

John 9:3

In spite of what our vanity often tells us, sometimes the circumstances we’re in aren’t about us at all. Have you considered my servant, Job?

Returning to the belief that that we need to be smiling in our trials, let’s dig deeper. Removing the parenthetical middle from James 1:2-12, we see how we can consider it all joy.

Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect work, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing. But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all without hesitation and without reproach; and it will be given to him. But let him ask in faith, without any doubting—for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. For that person must not suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord— he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways.
But let the brother in humble circumstances boast in his high position— and the rich person in his humble position, because like the flower of the grass he will pass away. For the sun arises with a scorching heat and withers the grass, and its flower falls off and the beauty of its appearance is destroyed. So also the rich man in the midst of his pursuits will wither away.
Happy is the one who endures testing, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life, which the Lord promised to those who love Him.

James 1:2-12

The joy ties not to the circumstances but to the endurance and its subsequent result. Further, when James tells us to ‘consider it all joy’, the word for ‘consider’ is ἡγέομαι:

2. hegeomai (ἡγέομαι, 2233), primarily, “to lead the way”; hence, “to lead before the mind, account,”

(Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary)

We’re told, therefore, to lead our minds to all joy knowing that in standing the test, we will receive the crown of life. That is much different than enjoying your immediate circumstances and being happy about hurting. It requires long term thinking.

To understand this point, it helps to look at Jesus’ life here on Earth. He came only to do the Father’s will so we don’t have to worry about whether his circumstances were to teach him a lesson or because of his own failings. He was perfect. Nevertheless, his circumstances from moment to moment were not always great. Here are a few examples of when he experienced various trials (emphasis mine):

• “Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is a lunatic and is very ill; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. I brought him to Your disciples, and they could not cure him.” And Jesus answered and said, “You unbelieving and perverted generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I put up with you? Bring him here to Me.” And Jesus rebuked him, and the demon came out of him, and the boy was cured at once. (Matthew 17:15-18)
• And He *took with Him Peter and James and John, and began to be very distressed and troubled. And He *said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved to the point of death; remain here and keep watch.” (Mark 14:33-34)
• Jesus wept (John 11:35)
• And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground. (Luke 22:44)
• And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as You will.” And He *came to the disciples and *found them sleeping, and *said to Peter, “So, you men could not keep watch with Me for one hour? (Matthew 26:39-40)
• In the days of His humanity, He offered up both prayers and pleas with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His devout behavior. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. And having been perfected, He became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey Him. (Hebrews 5:7-9)
• About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, “ELI, ELI, LAMA SABACHTHANI?” that is, “MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAVE YOU FORSAKEN ME?” (Matthew 27:46)

Where was His joy? It’s not a fair question, is it? And yet we get the answer to it in Hebrews 12:

Hebrews 12:1-3 Therefore, since we also have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let’s rid ourselves of every obstacle and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let’s run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking only at Jesus, the originator and perfecter of the faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

Hebrews 12:1-3

Jesus had long term thinking — His joy came from the prize that he could see on the horizon and He endured. By doing so, he paved the way for us to follow. Peter didn’t miss this point:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His great mercy has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to obtain an inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and will not fade away, reserved in heaven for you, who are protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, even though now for a little while, if necessary, you have been distressed by various trials, so that the proof of your faith, being more precious than gold which perishes though tested by fire, may be found to result in praise, glory, and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ; and though you have not seen Him, you love Him, and though you do not see Him now, but believe in Him, you greatly rejoice with joy inexpressible and full of glory, obtaining as the outcome of your faith, the salvation of your souls

1 Peter 1:3-9

Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org

At Cisco, EVERYTHING involved a meeting. The most common type of meeting involved getting a LOT of people together with a two-word agenda, complaining about Webex for the first ten minutes until we were through the technical hurdles, talking almost randomly around what people thought were the key issues for 55 minutes before people realized they were five minutes late for their next meeting, and then rapidly breaking up with no action items or decisions. It was madness.

So you know that I’m not anti-meeting, I want to be really clear. As a company grows, communication is a huge challenge and effective meetings are an absolute necessity. What I struggled with was not the number of meetings. I struggled with the quality of the meetings. Frankly, they were just a colossal waste of time. Preferring to light a candle instead of cursing the darkness, I put a presentation together with Joe Hildebrand on how to have a meeting and walked all Engineering leadership through it. Following are the guts of that presentation.

Goals

Meetings are important but we should make sure they’re useful to everybody. Make sure to have the:

• Correct People. Everybody must have a purpose. Inviting people so their feelings don’t get hurt is not a purpose.
• Correct Agenda. This allows everybody to come prepared.
• Correct Outcome. Capture the actions and decisions. If it isn’t written down, it doesn’t count.

Before the meeting

• Try to avoid the meeting in the first place. Is this something that can be solved with an email, text, or phone call? Do that instead.
• Create the agenda. The agenda should be specific and include a small number of topics. It should define what success of the meeting looks like. Be explicit about the role of each person attending. Are they there for input or to make a decision? Do you want their general opinion or a specific perspective based on their expertise in a given area? In some cases, it may be easier or better to just IM/text each attendee to let them know why you’re inviting them. The bottom line is that nobody should walk into a meeting wondering why they’ve been invited.
• Invite the right people. For any working meeting in which discussion or decision-making is required, only invite those critical to the conversation. The more people you have in the room, the less likely you’ll be to accomplish anything. Make sure all required participants can attend.
• Reply quickly. If you’re invited to a meeting, accept or decline quickly so that the organizer knows your availability. (And let’s be real — “tentative” really means “no” so just say it.). If your role is unclear, seek clarification. If none is forthcoming, decline the meeting.

During the meeting

• Start on time. (Pot, meet kettle.)
• Stick to the agenda.
• Appoint a scribe. The meeting organizer is the scribe if one is not appointed. When appointing one, please be sensitive to the proven gender-bias in doing so. Make sure men get equal time scribing.
• Capture action items
• Capture decisions

After the meeting

• Send notes. The scribe should send notes out on the same day, preferably immediately after the meeting. Any disagreements / corrections to those notes must be brought up within 24 hours.
• Action items translate into real work. They become requirements, tracked tasks, filed defects, etc. Make sure to use the tools that you use for all your organization’s other activities rather than fall prey to the notion that you’ll just remember to do these things.
• Re-evaluate recurring meetings. After each recurring meeting, ask yourself if it is still required. Also ask if the attendees are still correct. Often, recurring meetings outlive their usefulness and continue to exist just because they always have.

I’d love to say that the quality of meetings really improved after putting all of this out there. In reality, some meetings did get better but others didn’t. By gaining agreement on these basics, though, I gave permission to everybody to decline the ones that lacked basic hygiene. In so doing, many of us regained control of our calendars and attended only the effective meetings. That meant we could have more time to make our customers happy and generate revenue.

What did I miss? Feel free to comment below on what you believe to critical meeting hygiene.

I recently came across the email that I sent out to the team to calm their nerves the night before the acquisition closed. Quoted in part below, it carries a point from which many leaders could benefit. We are all toughened into what we deal with day in and day out. Given the number of different jobs being done within any company, that means we are all toughened into many different things. What seems like a big deal to me might not matter to you. When somebody panics and that is confusing or seems silly to you, it might just be because you’ve become desensitized. The solution is simple — start with some empathy and follow it up with a whole lot of conversation.

From: Craig
To: Engineering-all

Last night I spent a few hours pouring over the results of the integration engagement survey and it painted quite a picture.  Quantitatively, engagement is up almost across the board and for the first time in my professional career, I find myself leading the most engaged department in the company.  (Engineers by nature see all the areas for improvement and tend to score lower on such  measures.).  What this tells me is that you all see the amazing opportunity in front of us.  We really do get to press fast-forward on our vision of becoming the world’s most trusted customer communications platform.  Overnight we pick up all the communication channels our customers care about…. There are truly exciting times ahead!

At the same time, I read all 244 Engineering comments on that survey and got a fuller view.  While we are all mostly excited, it is impossible to ignore the anxiety around change and uncertainty.  Despite communicating that there are no changes on the horizon, over a hundred comments related to stress around not knowing what changes are coming and whether those changes would be Good or Bad.  This really struck me and exposed one of my blind spots.

As a senior leader, the vast majority of my time is spent working on things that never ever come to fruition.   As one such example, you all know about the major acquisition that took place last year but almost none of you know about the multiple that came close.  I (and many of my leaders) are toughened into change and uncertainty because we live with it every day.  Our jobs are to explore the possibilities knowing that we must choose the best path among them.  We don’t share all the possible outcomes as they are in flight because it would only cause stress and churn.  It is a lot like living on a roller coaster that crashes more often than it returns safely to pick up new passengers.  As leaders, we get on this ride every day because we owe it to you.  You deserve a clear path that we know will land safely and that will feel meaningful.  Our shareholders deserve their returns.  Our customers deserve our very best.  Tomorrow is no different for us.

The majority of you in Engineering, however, build things that are real.  Tests pass today that didn’t yesterday.  Stories get done.  Trainings happen.  (Career Development Plans) get filled out.  These things that you do send trillionS of emails, help our customers reach their customers in meaningful ways, and drive revenue for SendGrid.  The things that you do every day get us closer to our vision.  There is less uncertainty in that.  Tomorrow is different — you see yourself getting on a roller coaster.  We promise it’ll return you safely and that we’ve been on it before and that it’ll be a lot of fun.  That reassurance doesn’t take the butterflies away.  That is completely normal.

The best reassurance, IMO, will be through transparent communication.  In the coming weeks, I’ll make sure to host multiple listening posts where folks can come to ask questions and share concerns.  Where I don’t have answers, I’ll be frank and where I do, I’ll happily share them.  We’ll get through all this change together.

<Redacted — addressing specifically voiced concerns./>

I am incredibly excited about the opportunity we have and I know that y’all are the right team for all the joys and the challenges that sit in front of us.  There is nobody I’d rather have with me on this journey.   I’ll try my darnest to communicate as things become more clear.  Please do not be shy about hitting your leadership (myself included) up with any questions/concerns you might have.  If we remember to assume positive intent and commit to continuing to talk, there is no difficulty we cannot get through together.

—C

Over the next month, I hosted half a dozen listening-post sessions. A lot of people showed up for the first couple sessions and they felt safe to voice their concerns, rational or not. In return, their questions and concerns were addressed with full candor. The last few sessions were much less well attended. It turns out that once people had been heard and reassured, they agreed that it must not be scary to be acquired. And they had work to get back to.

You may be wondering why I’d take a three-week trip in the midst of everything that was going on.  My wife, Krystal, has lived with SLE for 43 years and was being hit with debilitating seizures, sometimes multiple times an hour.  These likely stemmed from a Lupus flare that started back in 2017.  Her health had steadily deteriorated for quite a while and there were legitimate reasons to believe that she would not make it.  We’d exhausted what the local doctors could diagnose and had been accepted by the Mayo Clinic up in Minnesota and so we packed up the car and off we went.  With so much time to think and talk with Krystal while we drove across the country and while we waited for doctor after doctor, all of my problems with my organization were put into perspective.  It is amazing how almost losing the person I love most in this world helped me see what actually matters.

What matters is not architecture or process or adherence to standards or any other seemingly important thing.  What matters is people and our relationships with them.  What matters is the environment that we create in which those people can either flourish or wither.  What matters is that we do everything we can to help others be all that they can.  On the drive back to Denver from Rochester, Krystal reminded me why she felt it was important that I keep inspiring my team.  She said that SendGrid was changing the way that business is done.  She said that we hired souls, not skillsets and that the kindness and collaboration we exuded must succeed so that others could see that a different way was possible.

When I addressed my organization, I let them know what I’d been going through.  I let them know that I had concerns about how things were going in the day to day at the office.  Rather than diving into the details and explaining why they needed to do things The Right Way, I shared why it mattered to me in the first place and what fundamental principles underpinned how we developed software.  And from that day, as I addressed each incoming class of new employees, I only talked about the principles — not the processes or tools or functions.  Briefly, these principles are as follows.

Ownership

Playing ‘mother-may-I’ with senior management is demoralizing.  So is giving a step-by-step  set of instructions to people who are being paid for their creative brilliance.  I have tremendous respect for the people in my organization and believe that they are the best people to make the critical decisions in their day-to-day.  If they are the ones waking up in the middle of the night when a system goes down, then they are the right ones to say what level of quality that system needs and how we will ensure that we get it.  Being an owner means it is their job to maximize the value delivered to their customers and that means that sometimes, they have to roll up their sleeves and do jobs that are unnatural to them.  This means that at different points in time they will be required to wear different hats and do things that might not be fun for them.  At times, developers will have to test, QA engineers will have to deploy, and Architects will have to train support. The end goal is a happy customer but the journey ensures an environment in which people are respected, valued, and able to grow.

Empowerment

When we expect our employees to act as owners and hold them accountable to delivering results, we owe it to them to ensure that they have enough support and the autonomy to accomplish their goals.  This much is obvious.  

What I’ve found to be less obvious, is that they too have responsibility for their empowerment.  All too often, I’ve seen employees complain about the absence of something that would help when not only does that something exist, it was discussed at all hands, announced via email, and demonstrated at a brown-bag session.  For our employees, empowerment must also mean a responsibility to fully understand not only how we do things but why that is the way that we do them in the first place.  I can understand if somebody making minimum wage flipping fast food burgers doesn’t understand all the details of how the fryer works.  It is an entirely different matter, however, when somebody making a six figure salary in a technology company building software takes a passive approach to understanding the software development process from ideation to release.  How can one have self-efficacy in such an environment without something so fundamental?  How demoralizing to reduce one’s job to following checklists rather than understanding the underlying goals and seeing the process as a framework designed to help them express their own creativity!

Indeed, understanding not only the what but the why is how individuals can make their biggest impact on the business.  If something seems like unnecessary process and is getting in their way, those impacted must raise the issue.  If it really is a valuable process, raising the issue gives leadership the opportunity to teach and to provide important context that the individual contributor might not have.  Sometimes leaders have it right.  If it isn’t a valuable process, raising the issue just might make everybody’s lives better by helping us see that we can do something better and faster.  Sometimes leaders make mistakes too. Regardless of the situation, raising the issue can be a win for the organization.  The processes and tools are there for you.  If they’re not helping, figure out why and fix it.

Assume Best Intent 

In the Summer of 2018, we had two teams whose opinions of one another had dropped so low that they had begun to resort to name calling.  It started when Team Strung Out (not their real name) was working on a project with a critical date having board-level exposure and hit a technical area that they didn’t understand at all.  Team Judgmental (also not their team name) gave them some code that could be modified to meet their needs.  The problems came when that code wouldn’t work for Strung out and Judgmental stopped helping them after the first week or so.  Within a few weeks, Judgmental was “selfish, wrote bad code, and didn’t care”.  Strung Out was “stupid and couldn’t code their way out of a paper bag”.  

In the all-hands when I came back from Mayo, I helped everybody see what was real.  Strung Out was working crazy hours on a stressful project and were very naturally getting more frustrated than usual. Their work was needed for us to hit our revenue targets in our first year as a publicly traded company and they were taking on the burden of this for the good of all of us.  When the code that was given to them didn’t work and they couldn’t get help, it fed into human emotions that were already running hot.  To hear that they were being viewed as people who couldn’t understand a simple concept was really too much.

Team Judgmental had a completely different experience.  Seeing their fellow engineers so stressed, they tried to help as best they could by giving them some code that they’d written in the hopes that it would help.  They did some initial training but then got sucked into a critical project of their own — meeting the SOX controls the SEC requires for a company of our valuation.  Failing to do so would lead to a “material deficiency” in our audit.  They had to say no to Strung Out for the good of the company.  When they heard that their code was being maligned, it was natural for them to become offended and choose to believe that the problem was the intelligence of the accusers.

The reality is that both teams believed they were doing the best they could for the company as a whole.  They probably were.  They wanted to work better together but the circumstances in that moment just worked against them.  To their credit, when they were able to see the situation from the perspective of the other, they had genuine empathy for each other and patched things up.  They met their dates and the impact of those two projects played a material role in our $3B acquisition six months later.

I shared this story with each new employee to help them see that in situations where everybody is acting in the company’s best interests and where there is absolutely no villain, it is still easy to create them.  To have the type of environment that we all want to work in, we need to resist this urge.  Start with questions and work towards empathy — we really are all in it together.  People are just messy sometimes.

Help Others and Ask For Help

It is a shame that the traditional hero-developer culture in the software industry fails to reward assists.  Every one of us coming in the door has something to teach and areas where we need to learn.  When we help one another get stronger by taking the time to step out of our immediate concerns and help a co-worker get better, it always pays back with interest.  
Since the fiasco described above, my promise to my organization has been that if, in the very rare case members of a team have a deadline so pressing that they cannot take time to help anybody else, I will make it clear to everybody in the organization so that everybody knows why they are saying, “no.”  In all other situations, it is my expectation that a request for help be met with help.  When my son, Trystan, interned with one of my old teams this summer, he gushed about how much time they were putting into him, a lowly intern, to help him understand the nuances of Go-lang.  This is how each member of a team gets stronger.  It has direct impact to productivity, engagement, employee retention, recruiting, product quality, and accelerated timelines.  So weird that it feels like something that should be put off.

One other place that the principle of help shows up is in all of the various product reviews.  I’ve seen senior engineers bristle at the idea that an architect needs to review their design.  “Don’t you trust me?”  Such an engineer has already failed at assuming best intent.  The reality is that it is always a good idea to have more eyes on a design.  That architect most likely isn’t doubting the engineer’s ability.  They have just been around long enough to have been bitten by their own bad designs far more times than the engineer.  Why would the engineer not want to benefit from all that experience when it may literally be what makes it possible for the engineer to sleep at night?  Accept the help.  Say, “thank you.”

Better Together

If we are doing a great job with our hiring, then we build teams with diverse skillsets from diverse backgrounds.  That is not enough.  We must shape the environment in which they work so that every single person feels safe to speak up in every single situation.  More, they must understand that their voice is important to us.  Assuming positive intent, asking for help, and creating a place for people to help others gets us part of the way there.  Cultivating active curiosity gets us further.  If somebody is not speaking up, solicit their view.  

Back to my son’s internship this summer, he was asked in a group meeting for his viewpoint on the estimate given for a particular code refactor and responded with something like, “I’m just the intern.”  But God bless my former team.  They answered, “but you might be looking at it in a different way that we’re not.  We need to hear it.”  It turns out that he was and they time-boxed the refactor to account for his concerns.

That’s an environment in which people can thrive.

What if I told you there is a simple way to build a tool that you can use throughout the first year to identify the hotspots and the people who will help you with them? There is.

The Challenge

When I started at SendGrid, I felt that it was important to meet with everybody in the department to understand what they, personally, struggled with and what they loved about the company. I figured it would help to uncover any hidden issues and would give me a great opportunity to build the relationships that would be needed when change got hard. Given that people are often less forthcoming in group meetings and relationships are harder for me to forge in those settings, I chose to meet with everybody individually. With about 90 people in the department at that point, this meant that even with 30 minute 1-1s, I was talking about 2-3 a day, every day, for a couple months.

Worth it.

The Questions

With only 1/2 hour, I had to be selective about what I asked. I chose to ask three pretty normal questions and one screwball. The normal questions:

• Tell me about yourself — your background, what you like to do for fun, etc. We typically spent 10 minutes on this both as an opportunity to get to know each other and also to identify connection points. SendGrid had some truly wonderful people.
• What do you love about SendGrid? In other words, what should I not mess with? It was heartening to hear how much people loved their co-workers.
• What gives you headaches? What should I be looking into in my first 90 days? Oh, my, did people hate the build system!

The screwball question:

• Let’s fast-forward into the future. You’ve had it! You’re done with SendGrid and walking out the door. <pause> I’m going to give you a gift. You get a lifeboat. You can take any three people from SendGrid with you to your next company. Who would you pick?

What did I learn from the lifeboat?

The lifeboat question, tracked as rows in an ever-growing spreadsheet quickly becomes overwhelming. It is helpful to transform the spreadsheet into a directed graph in order to visualize it. Practically, this is as simple as drawing an arrow (edge) from each person (node) to the three people they picked for their lifeboat.

Drawing a graph with 90 nodes and 270 edges is too difficult for humans so I used (and would recommend) Graphviz to draw it for me. Here is an anonymized version of the actual graph from SendGrid Engineering. I like to think of it as a Respect Graph.

Key
Level: Junior (red), Mid-Level (green), Senior (blue), Lead (black)
Function: Program Management (arrow), Developer (oval), QA (octagon), Technical Operations (pentagon)

Know your stars

Let’s pull out some pieces of this to highlight a few of the observations we can glean.

The Collaborator

Odds are good that 575145200 is a star. The question is what kind of star? Knowing that developers are ovals and octagons are QA, this is a tester who has the respect of all the developers he works with — respect that is not easily given. If your instinct is that this is a person who makes their code better while managing to be highly collaborative, you’re spot on.

For the next type of stars it is helpful to make one general observation. People tend to put people who are on the same team in their lifeboats because they are the ones with whom they are most familiar. In this next image, I’ve circled the teams so you can see how strongly connected those sub-graphs are.

The Connector

See how many teams had members who picked her for their lifeboats? This happened to be the case across both different technologies and geographies. This is a star who can be leveraged to help a person in need know who to go to regardless of where they are in the organization. The Connectors also form an informal communications network. If there are messages you need to have make their way across the organization but you cannot make them via formal announcement, these are the folks you want around.

The Firefighter

See how this senior person was chosen by every mid-level person anywhere near them but not by many outside that team? Either they are an exceptional inwardly focused mentor who you’ll want to have on a management path or they are the lone-wolf fire fighter who works while others stand in awe. (Hint: if they were an exceptional mentor, wouldn’t at least one of their teammates be valuable enough to be in somebody else’s lifeboat?) As your organization scales, this is a person you must help to share what they know with others. It might take arm-twisting but it needs to happen in order to spread that tribal knowledge.

The Rising Star

What’s so special about a person who is in two lifeboats? Remember that red is the color assigned to our most junior engineers. This person was selected by two separate senior engineers, out of all the people in the company they could take. Make sure these high potential juniors have a career path so that they can grow and learn in your organization. If you don’t, they will grow and learn in somebody else’s. (This person was promoted twice in the first three years of my tenure.)

Final remarks

There is so much more that a graph like this can tell the observant leader. Teams that work tightly together would show up via a lot of inter-connectivity. Are there teams that are supposed to work tightly together but don’t inter-connect? What would that mean? Are there senior folks on the same team who are in a large number of lifeboats? They’d be your first candidates to anchor new teams as you scale up. Rather than continue to enumerate all the possibilities, I’ll leave the rest as an exercise to you, the reader. What can you find in it? What should I have incorporated other than level and function?

As a company scales, the number of teams begins to grow. Past a few, they can’t keep track of the day to day decisions being made by other teams and you need a central point who understands the pieces. This is often the engineering manager.

At some level of scale, the manager realizes that they either have to focus on the people and process or on the technology. Past some number of reports, it becomes impossible to track the work, the architecture, and the people and service all of them well. The simplest solution is to have a dedicated architect. They work with the tech leads (or line managers) for the teams and help them line what they’re doing up with a bigger coherent vision.

Past a certain number of teams, there are enough different products and technologies that a single architect can no longer manage all the complexity. They either become the bottleneck by trying to stay engaged in the practical for all the teams or they climb into their ivory tower and hope that the vision they create gets absorbed somehow by all the teams. The end result is the same — disconnect between architecture and implementation and a LOT of teams doing what they want how they want.

With strictly senior teams, this can sometimes be okay (delta the inefficiencies introduced by teams duplicating work when they encounter similar problems). Scaling quickly, however, requires hiring a lot of people earlier in their career and the pace of feature development in a growth company limits the sharing of best practices. Without the benefit of architectural oversight, some of these teams will create fires in production, even in the face of their best intentions. If there are enough teams, at least a few of them have something on fire at any moment. Customers lose trust.

This problem can be solved by layering the architectural responsibilities across three tiers — the Strategic Vision, the Tactical Day-to-Day Trade-offs, and the Bridge Between them. The Strategic Vision is the realm of the Chief Architect. This person sets the lighthouse on the horizon (2-3 years out) so that we know where we are steering the company from a technology perspective. In order to be a lighthouse, the vision should be relatively unchanging from month to month and so, by necessity, remains fairly pure and high level.

The Tactical Day-to-Day Trade-offs are best made by the tech lead within a given scrum team — the very person who is under pressure to ship a specific feature by a specific date. They are the closest to the actual implementation and can understand time vs. value. Their focus should be on making decisions that maximize customer value over time. This (often) means that they will choose between different technical solutions based on how quickly or easily they can be implemented. Typically, these decisions do not account for the long term vision or show understanding of what is being developed across the organization. We can try to educate this layer and hope for the best but the reality is that it is too much to expect all of the folks at this level to always adhere to best practices in the face of the pressure to ship. What is needed is a more senior architect who understands their struggles and their goals and can help them align to the overarching vision.

The Bridge Between the chief architect and the technical leads is built by these very senior (typically director+ level) architects who have intimate knowledge of the lighthouse vision and work daily with some set of the scrum team tech leads. Their job is to own the mapping between the strategic vision and the day to day work of their smaller set of teams. They help the tech leads make very practical decisions to ensure that while we do not strive for architectural perfection, the trade offs we must make are at least directionally correct.

This organizational structure is not a theoretical one. It served me well in three different companies spanning over a decade of time. As with anything, it is subject to the second law of thermodynamics — everything falls apart without work. In future posts, I’ll cover the mechanics by which I’ve seen it work as well as the type of architect who does best in this system.

What it looks like in a picture

I think I was a director before I realized that what felt like constructive energy actually stunted the development of my team and consistently ensured that we made good decisions instead of really great ones. Here are some hard-won lessons from that era.

Slow to speak

Because I’m pretty persuasive by nature, I found that when I spoke first, people tended to agree with me and we came to decisions quickly. This felt like progress. What we lost, however, was getting everybody else’s ideas on the table. What’s worse is that people actually became less vocal over time. It turns out that if one person seems to have all the ideas, everybody else figures that the idea stuff is covered and they can use their creativity on other things.

There’s a lot of writing on the importance of thought diversity (for example, this article) so I won’t try to recreate that in this post. What I will say is that in recognizing my ability to bias a thought process quickly, I have learned to stay quiet until all ideas are out on the table. Prior to this point, my only efforts are to solicit input and to clarify the problem or its constraints. Less of me means more of everybody else.

My job or yours?

As a young director, I found myself in a conversation with the architect of our server product about a design choice he wanted to make. Having been the architect of that exact product, I had a clear viewpoint and expressed it. Repeating that process a few times, he started coming to me before forming an opinion. Happy to help (and feeling important), I’d point out the different choices, the bear traps that would get him, and what the right approach would likely be. It was fun! Then it hit me.

As much as I loved architecture, that was no longer my job; it was his. The more I did in that arena, the less he would be able to develop and the less fun he would have. I asked myself if I trusted him in that role or not and I did. From that point forward, my role shifted from doing architecture to teaching architecture. I helped frame the problems for him to solve, asked the tough questions, and suggested research paths. What I never did again was tell him The Answer. Even when I felt like I knew it.

Big tent meetings are their turn to shine

I’ve spent a lot of time in meetings with people at different levels in the organization. Any more, I tend to speak more quickly in meetings with others at my same elevation. I’ve learned that because I have A Title, what I say in meetings that include the next layer down can have more of a quieting effect that I want (see Slow to Speak). More than that, though, it misses one of the best opportunities to develop my team and allow them to shine.

Instead, in those bigger tent meetings that include both the executive leadership team and their extended leaders, I spend a lot of time instant messaging members of my team. When I know they disagree with something that’s being spoken about, I prod them to speak up. When they have relevant data or context, I encourage them to take part. I help them frame the message they want to deliver. When they’re done, I give immediate feedback.

I’ve seen other executives go a different route in those meetings — landing a point or asking the right question themselves. That has value, to be sure. I’m also sure that seeing how little I land a killer point in these forums has given people opportunity to question my participation level. But putting my energy into coaching the next generation and ensuring their visibility across the organization provides my team with greater opportunity, visibility, and fun. It makes our organization stronger.

Ultimately, all three of these lessons come back to the same point. I am one person who, at best, can have an additive effect to an organization. What I’ve learned is that in reducing the amount of Me the public sees, we get more of the Team. That’s multiplicative.