Mistakes happen
Today, I’m not thankful that it’s Friday, although I am happy about it. Today I am thankful for the wisdom of Grant Fritchey (blog/twitter). No Grant didn’t help me with any kind of problem, at least not directly. Hell, I have never even met the man in person. No, I’m not some kind of weirdo interwebs creeper either. I do, however, follow Grant’s blog and occasionally see his twitter posts. What can I say, he’s a pretty sharp crayon when it comes to SQL, and as a DBA I like and listen to, sharp crayons. But today I’m not thankful for Grant’s technical wisdom. Today I am thankful for his wisdom related to making the relationships between the DBAs, devs, IT, and business folks better.
As you know, COVID-19 has upended well…everything. This means, that my employer’s priorities have been upended as well. So with fast responses to technical and business problems, the IT department hasn’t had to polish things out and make their experiences seamless. This week, I forgot about that and started letting my ego and my own self-importance get the better of me. I was focused on the problems related to databases and the SQL instances I work with, I forgot about the bigger IT picture. During a SCRUM call, I was a little too honest about my frustration related to connecting to instances in the cloud and how unintuitive access currently is, along with the inability to use our toolsets. It was pointed out to me later, that my frustration was a little too apparent and could have been seen as hostile towards the IT department folks on the call.
Own It
So today, I used some wisdom from both Jocko and Grant, I chose to own it. I decided it was better to apologize for my ego whether it was misconstrued or not and make sure to foster a better relationship between the IT department and the Data Team. So instead of dismissing it as just a misunderstanding in a moment, I opted to take 20 minutes to send an apology accepting all of the blame. I’m not posting this as a humble brag about my moment of empathy either, I am posting this to both remind myself I will be better publicly and to reinforce the lesson. The bottom line, it is better to remain humble and approachable than to fracture getting work done because of some unmet, implied expectation that neither side had agreed to.
I will be better.