Changing I to You

It’s been a while!

I’ve been noticing an interesting trend – after going through a coding bootcamp from May 2022 – Sept 2022 and starting as a Software Engineer at AppFolio (property management SaaS company) I’ve dropped a few rungs on the corporate ladder. Namely, I was a Lead Product Manager or the equivalent at Acorns before I left and am now a Software Engineer 1. I make mistakes, I am learning things for the first time and overall it’s been an incredibly enlightening experience.

All that aside, I’ve begun to look at how people at those higher rungs in the ladder convey their thoughts or feelings (of gratitude, disappointment, regret, etc.) and there’s an important trend I wanted to both call out and show how we can make it better.

I want to give a BIG :thankyou: to this whole team. I know several of you went above and beyond and were helping out on Sunday and into the early hours of Monday (yes I saw :eyes: those timestamps from both PT and ET timezone team members) to ensure this email send was successful. This was a massive email and I know how complex the logic was for it, but I genuinely do not think it couldn’t gone any smoother.Super duper impressive and I am sure that would not have been possible without the ownership exhibited by this team. Huge thank you from me and the rest of the org as well!!!!

And let’s take a look at another one:

Hello everyone, it is fantastic to be here! I am enjoying the onboarding and am impressed with what I’ve been seeing. Great job!

Both of these messages are congratulatory – I felt like this was the best way to make the point: we need to focus on “you”, not the “I” of the statement.

In the first example, the writer is conveying this immense grattitude, but there’s a mismatch between the actions of those being congratulated and the writer’s thought process (trying to hide gender here is difficult lol sorry for the weird sentence structure). Thinking about this another way, the team worked on this problem to send out an email for a variety of reasons – the company, the revenue, the ability to add that to their scorecard and be recognized by their manager for it, a bonus, etc. They did not work on it so the writer of the message would be impressed or give them a thank you. Recognition is nice, but the way the writer wrote this example would have, I think, a more positive and impactful message if written without the writer’s perspective in mind, i.e., change the I to a You. Not find and replace, but think about how the people who worked on that problem were doing the work for the company or for their team or teammates, not me (if I was writing the above message).

In the second example, it’s a similar idea: “I am impressed” is the main message and again, onboarding and building new people into the company isn’t about impressing the person, it’s about the work untold numbers of people put in to make the onboarding process that good.

So what can we do about this?

For one, focus on the receiver of the message. Very basic concept of “speak to your audience” but it’s especially true here. We can change the second example to the following:

Hello everyone, it is fantastic to be here! You all have done an incredible job setting up the onboarding program. Great job!

The first example is much longer and would require a rewrite, but the gist is to focus on the work that person or group has done, not how it impacted you directly but how it impacted their target audience or helped them achieve their goals. It’s a level of empathy I think I have seen missing when people reach the managerial level and above and begin to think of their opinion really mattering when, truly, it doesn’t in so far as congratulatory messages go. The real benefit one gets from solving a problem or going above and beyond or doing what they’re supposed to be doing is about the job, the people they work for and the people they serve, not some manager or team lead who occasionally pops in to hand out high fives.

Being empathetic to the people you are about to share a message with and thinking about their intentions is incredibly important. If you are in that position, keep that in mind and take a second to think about what their work means to them, not to you.