I was so Alice for much of my career. I know this is going to sound totally cliche because this book get's recommended everywhere, but How to Win Friends and Influence People really did help me.
IMHO there's also a limit to how much you can spare everybody's feelings and still be effective at that ^^. I think the OP believed that there isn't a limit. I think he's wrong.
In a corporate environment, there's almost no value in actually being one though. Linus Torvalds would almost never be promoted and would frequently be unceremoniously terminated - as advocated for by Brendan Gregg.
That is, do you like "seeing people actually called on their BS"? Or, do you like people stop doing BS things as a result?
IMO, the latter is much more interesting than the former. Being a 100% Alice guarantees the former, but does not guarantee the latter.
And, quite frankly, if someone in my organization said that someone should be 'retroactively aborted' for a tech choice they made, I'd argue for their termination too.
I don't think you can, actually. You can do it without being gratuitously mean, but one way or the other somebody's feelings are going to get hurt.
>And, quite frankly, if someone in my organization said that someone should be 'retroactively aborted' for a tech choice they made, I'd argue for their termination too.
Is what you make as technically impressive as linux?
The difficulty though is that at some point if you believe something is important you may ultimately have to go through some kind of dialectic to make your case.
How to Win Friends and Influence People says never have an argument. If you follow this advice you will reap the benefits of the book. However what you're building in your team will trend toward a Least Common Denominator. Or else I don't know how to not let that happen in a world where you can't debate. (Any response that tries to say debate/argument/dialectic aren't all the same thing in this context I think is cheating. Or someone enlighten me.)
Learning how to separate those situations is important, but not usually a major issue when approached in that context. If all else fails just have a coin flip and say winner takes all. If someone still can't let it go, they are toxic and it's time to remove them from the team.
PS: I call it the bike shedding rule. You need a system to pick a color for a bike shed with reasonable costs. The actual color is less important than the time wasted on the choice.
I think in many cases an optimal product can only be produced when there is a holistic vision that is kept in view. And in this paradigm, is is much more difficult to say A is vastly better than B.
Here's just one example--> many software systems that I come to have trended into maintenance nightmares. When you trace back all of the steps from inception to the present moment, you realize that it is due to a series of these kind of A/B decisions that boiled the frog. In each case A wasn't vastly better than B. But the sum of all the A decisions... And this is where it gets harder to make a case... where you may have to take a long walk to make the case...
It sounds like a silly distinction, but what if you and I disagree about something. I have two choices. I could:
A.) Get incredibly defensive when you disagree, interrupt you constantly, lose my temper and flat out refuse to listen to your ideas.
B.) Thank you for disagreeing because we're all on the same team and want to avoid mistakes. Then I'd listen to everything you have to say and work hard to find areas where we agree. And, after I understand your argument, I point out all the areas where you are correct (and especially areas where I am wrong).
I'd argue that it's more about learning to disagree respectfully and tamper all the impulses to get defensive and turn it into a series of personal attacks.
*By lasting changes I mean, do you feel like you've changed and valued being more sociable?
I will ask questions about the outcomes of an approach rather than making statements about it so that I make sure we both are working with the same information.
basically it's made my life a lot less stressful, and my discussions with colleagues much more productive