How is it that so many great ideas from developers never come to fruition? There exists an untold amount of knowledge within most development teams as relates to technology. I don’t think anyone could argue that the guys in the trenches are often the guys that know the best way to solve a problem.

I’ve personally been on many projects where developers have the right solution for a particular scenario. There’s just one problem… they can’t convince the people making the decisions.

The people in power - be that IT Managers, VPs of Development, or others in similar positions - are influenced by factors different from the factors by which developers are influenced. Their source of information comes from industry journals, news articles, seminars, and the like. Lest any of you think otherwise, the information going to the poeple at that level is in no way an accident. Products are specifically targeted to the people making the decisions and those that have buying power and the messages that your manager gets is likely to originate from one of these sources.

Now, I’m not saying that some of these companies don’t have a great product to sell but it’s often going to be very hard for a manager at this level to see the cons of a particular product versus another. That’s where the developer’s knowledge is essential. Working in the guts of the business software you can often provide a great solution to a business problem but in order to do that you have to be just as convincing as the ones selling their products.

The best way to do this is by viewing the problem at hand from your manager’s perspective - not your own. Your manager has certain agendas and desires and it is critical that you understand those fully in order to appeal to them with your suggestions. For example, your manager sees oportunity in buying a particular app server. The salespeople for that app server have been very convincing, he’s heard a lot of hype from the rest of the industry about it’s great characteristics. And now you come along and refute what everyone else in the industry says. From his perspective you are already losing credibility in your deviation of the accepted norm.

If you want to convince your manager of a different route you need to make sure you do the following. The first thing most people will do is proclaim themselves right and defend their point of view. This is backwards. First you want to probe your manager of his needs. Let him talk and don’t refute anything he has to say. You need to genuinely agree with his concerns. As each concern is brought up you will want to gently probe with questions that explore the concern directly because you will likely find the high level concerns are symptoms and not necessarily the problem.

Once the true problems are revealed, probe more to ask him to defend his decision and have him justify his solution. Here is where he - not you - will find the problems with his solution (If there are any). If he can’t defend his decision then it should become clear that he hasn’t found the silver bullet. At this point, you have your window to calmly suggest your alternatives. You will, of course, be prepared will all of the details in how your solution will solve the problem and the other pros and cons. Either way, you need to get your manager to that phase of being receptive to more than his/her own ideas. And that’s how you can get your manager to listen.

Tags: management, teams