Improving incident response through structured, ownership-driven communication. How subtle language quirks can undermine confidence and cost revenue and customer trust.
I like the pay-attention-to-language approach. In addition, the clear assignment of roles during the incident can help a lot, with the incident leader being the most important one - so you always have one person who can cut through the maybes and shoulds and make clear shots.
Indeed! We've got an official Incident Commander role, but it's usually for bigger outages, rarely for small ones. Smaller outages add up and subtract from your overall uptime easily though.
We're in the midst of overhauling our Incident Process at my employer. Hope to share some insights and analysis in a few months!
Unfortunately, too many orgs/teams equate collaboration with "mushy communication" (focus on likeability vs being respected). No need to choose between the two--aim for both; however, it does require communicating expectations upfront and holding team members to account.
This is why these three bullets resonated for me :-)
- Immediate: Review your team’s last incident response and highlight instances of ambiguous language. No blame, promise?
- Medium-term: Establish team norms that encourage explicit ownership statements.
- Long-term: Incorporate direct communication training into onboarding team members into On-call roles.
Thanks for sharing! Indeed, there's for sure this (weird) likeability-respect tension.
Holding people accountable for sure seems like the 'ugly' part at first. I actually have "How to hold people accountable without feeling weird" on my topic list to write about!
I look forward to reading about your experience in this area! My take? Communicate your expectations (any wiggle room for others to renegotiate your expectations? If not, say so. Otherwise adjust). Then it's just about being consistent (this is where things can get "weird" ;-o).
I like the pay-attention-to-language approach. In addition, the clear assignment of roles during the incident can help a lot, with the incident leader being the most important one - so you always have one person who can cut through the maybes and shoulds and make clear shots.
Indeed! We've got an official Incident Commander role, but it's usually for bigger outages, rarely for small ones. Smaller outages add up and subtract from your overall uptime easily though.
We're in the midst of overhauling our Incident Process at my employer. Hope to share some insights and analysis in a few months!
Unfortunately, too many orgs/teams equate collaboration with "mushy communication" (focus on likeability vs being respected). No need to choose between the two--aim for both; however, it does require communicating expectations upfront and holding team members to account.
This is why these three bullets resonated for me :-)
- Immediate: Review your team’s last incident response and highlight instances of ambiguous language. No blame, promise?
- Medium-term: Establish team norms that encourage explicit ownership statements.
- Long-term: Incorporate direct communication training into onboarding team members into On-call roles.
Thanks for sharing! Indeed, there's for sure this (weird) likeability-respect tension.
Holding people accountable for sure seems like the 'ugly' part at first. I actually have "How to hold people accountable without feeling weird" on my topic list to write about!
I look forward to reading about your experience in this area! My take? Communicate your expectations (any wiggle room for others to renegotiate your expectations? If not, say so. Otherwise adjust). Then it's just about being consistent (this is where things can get "weird" ;-o).