A Rubber Duck Is Outperforming You

Why answering your team's questions trains them to keep asking, and what to do instead.

Someone on your team shows up at your desk. She's stuck. She starts explaining the problem, and about fifteen seconds in, you already know the answer.

So you give it to her. She says thanks and goes back to work.

Ninety seconds. Problem solved. It felt like the job.

Here's what it cost you. She walks back to her desk thinking, "When I'm stuck, my manager always has the answer." That thought is exactly why she'll be back tomorrow.

Meanwhile, a piece of bath toy plastic is doing this better than you are

A lot of dev teams keep a rubber duck sitting on a desk in the workspace. The rule is that an engineer who's stumped has to explain the problem out loud to the duck before interrupting a colleague for help.

More often than not, somewhere in the middle of explaining it, they find the answer. Or at least something worth trying.

The practice got its name in The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. The plain read: explaining your problem to something that cannot possibly help you is frequently enough to solve it.

There's real cognitive science under this. Michelene Chi's work on the self-explanation effect found that people who talk through their reasoning as they work a problem build deeper understanding than people who are handed the worked solution. The explaining is where the understanding gets made.

The duck forces the person to move from a cloud of abstract frustration into structured sentences. That reorganization alone changes the angle they're viewing the problem from. And the duck won't interrupt, won't judge, and won't tell anyone.

I spent 20 years leading teams inside tech companies, and I now spend all of my time coaching managers who are leading new teams. I am not okay with a rubber duck outperforming the managers I coach.

So let's break down what actually happened in those two scenarios.

Same problem, two different paths. On one path, a person hears her own thinking out loud, gets an idea, tries it, and it works. On the other, she gets a good answer from you and it also works.

Both problems are solved. Only one person is more capable than she was an hour ago.

Get the duck. Then outperform it.

Go get one. It doesn't have to be a duck. On my last team at F5, our animal of choice was an otter. It will cut real interruptions out of your week and your people will solve more of their own problems.

But the duck just sits there. It can't ask a follow-up. It can't connect her to the person who solved this last quarter. It can't tell her she's on the right track.

That's your part.

Start by doing what the duck does. When she says she's struggling with something, you say, "Sure thing, walk me through it." Then you listen. No interrupting, no finishing her sentences, and no facial expressions doing the talking for you. She may be putting this problem into structured sentences for the first time. Let her get all the way through it.

Then add the three things the duck can't do.

1. Hand the problem back to her.

This is where the typical manager gives the answer. You're going to ask instead.

"Got it. What's your gut telling you to do from here?"

Just like when talking to the duck, she likely already has an answer. 

If she's genuinely jammed up, go to my favorite question: "What's one small step we could take in the direction we believe we need to go?"

This works especially well when someone is frozen by a decision that feels like a major commitment. People can almost always name the next small step. Taking that step keeps things moving, and the result gives you information you had no way to get otherwise.

2. Open a door she can't see.

You have context and relationships she doesn't have. You know someone in another group who solved this exact thing last quarter. You know who controls the resource she needs.

This happened to me constantly as a team leader. Somebody brought me a problem and my main contribution was connecting them with the person who had the experience, the budget, or the access to move it forward.

3. Tell her you've got her back.

When she lands on a next step, say so. "Yeah, that sounds like a good move. Let's try it."

The duck can't do that. Now she goes back to work knowing you're in it with her.

What this sounds like on a Tuesday

She pulls you aside. "Hey, you got a minute? I'm struggling with something."

"Sure thing, walk me through it."

She explains. You listen all the way through.

"Got it. What's your gut telling you to do from here?"

"I don't know. It seems like such a big commitment. I don't want to get this wrong."

"I hear you. What's one small step we could take in the direction we believe we need to go?"

She thinks for a second. "I suppose we'd need proposals from a couple of vendors we could bring in for this work."

"That sounds like a good next step. Why don't you reach out to Susan in platform ops? She just wrapped a similar project. She can probably tell you who she looked at."

That conversation took four minutes. She walks away having clarified her own thinking, identified a step she can take today, gotten pointed at someone who can help, and confirmed that you're behind the direction.

All the benefit of the duck. None of the dependency of the typical manager response. Plus the two things only you could add.

Watch out for this pitfall

Don't ask these questions when you've already decided the answer. If you ask what her gut is telling her and then override it, you've taught her that the question is theater and the real move is to wait for your verdict. You'll get less initiative than if you'd just answered in the first place.

And not every problem is a coaching moment. Production is down at 2 a.m. and you know the fix, say the fix. When the cost of the slower path is real and immediate, answer. The rest of the time, which is most of the time, hand it back.

You're leading a new team. They're going to have questions. They're going to get stuck. The worst thing you can do is become the rapid-fire answer machine, because that's how you end up with a team that waits for you.

Get the duck. Then outperform it.

Best,

Jeff

P.S. If you've recently taken on a new team and your day keeps getting shredded by people bringing you problems they could solve themselves, let's get on a short call. We'll look at which questions are actually yours to answer and what to hand back. Here's a link to my calendar.