A few years back, I went through a period when I was facing a number of challenges at work. Despite how hard I was trying, I didn’t seem to be making significant progress. I talked to my executive coach about my situation and shared my frustration with him. His advice to me was to “get on the balcony.”
He gave me an analogy: on a team, every contributor is like a dancer on a dance floor. As a leader, I am one of the dancers too, trying to orchestrate the dance at the same time as I’m dancing. The music is fast. Everyone is moving like crazy. It’s difficult to figure out where the problems are, let alone how to solve them. But if you go up to the balcony and look at the dance floor as a whole, you will more easily see patterns emerge and find a better way to address the issues. The idea behind this philosophy is that by taking a step back, you can see the bigger picture.
I have found this concept very impactful in my work. For example, there was a time when we could not find team members to take on some work for our product. We had a lot of team members coming in, doing the job for a few months, and then wanting to transfer to a different type of work. At first, we focused on continuing to find more people to do the work. After a while, I took a step back and asked myself, “If the work is interesting, but no one wants to do it, is there something wrong with the current system?”
After digging deeper into the situation by chatting with the team members who had moved on, we realized that the current engineering performance review system didn’t reward this particular type of work. We decided to go to our leadership team to fix the current system instead of continuing to struggle to find more people. Once the review process was changed, we saw people happily staying longer and contributing to the work, since they now felt like their impact was appreciated. By getting on the balcony to see the bigger picture, we were able to address the root cause rather than continue fixing the symptoms.
This is just one example of this week’s Whisper at work. Getting on the balcony can help you gain clarity, solve problems, and do your work more effectively. However, it’s not always easy to do this, because…
Taking a step back means taking a step back from your team. When you go up to the balcony, your team is missing a strong dancer on the dance floor. This makes the short-term situation even more painful for them, since they don’t have immediate help when they need it. It takes courage to leave your dance position open and accept the short-term pain because it’s the right investment for the future.
Getting on the balcony means accepting that it’s our job to change the situation. That’s a scary thing at first. It’s tempting to blame the system for not setting up the right environment for success. However, it’s even more powerful to give ourselves permission to drive systemic change. In my earlier example, I had doubts that I would be able to change the performance review process. Isn’t that a Human Resource leadership job? However, when working around the old system didn’t yield any results, I had to accept my responsibility to go to the top leaders and advocate for a bigger change. Accepting this responsibility is uncomfortable at first, but once we get to practice it a few times, it can be an invaluable leadership skill.
Getting on the balcony means using your skills to orchestrate the dance floor instead of dancing. You stop being a dancer and start being a choreographer and leader. You rely on your communication and leadership skills to help create alignment between many stakeholders. Some of them are still on the dance floor, while some are upper management. You can no longer be the person to directly do the work. The next person who does the work might not do it as well as you could, but being a good leader means giving them the opportunity to take on the role. This can be a steep learning curve, especially for people who are strong and comfortable executing. For more on learning to delegate, check out last week’s Whisper on Managing Burnout.
Getting on the balcony can provide us new perspectives that allow us to make bigger changes and shift the direction of the team or the product. A few years ago, the Google Search Ads team found that customers who were looking online for local services, such as locksmiths or plumbers, were being taken advantage of. Because these services are typically for emergencies, customers don't have the luxury of time to search for reputable services. They often completely rely on the top search and ads results from Google. This created opportunities for disingenuous companies who were skilled at search optimization and running ads, but not at providing good services. They were able to drive out the good local businesses, who didn’t have enough resources and skills to compete in the online world.
The Search Ads team set out to find ways to help promote reputable local services. They explored many options to teach local service providers how to run more effective ads. They taught them how to improve their advertising, and how to use ratings and reviews as a way to build online credibility. However, this didn’t get a lot of traction, meaning that the ads from the less reputable companies still often won over the ads from local service providers.
Once they took a step back, it became clear that the local businesses were not equipped for learning the internet marketing skills they would need to up their game. This was a problem, because they were competing with professionals who just wanted to exploit the business they could get using search engines.
Getting on the balcony allowed the team to explore solutions that we believed would help fix the long-term challenges in this industry. Google then created a product called Local Service Ads, where they (1) allowed all the local services to sign up and verify their quality with Google; (2) ran ads themselves to match the consumer needs with these vetted local service providers; and (3) only charged these service providers for the customers that they were actually servicing, so they didn’t have to worry about learning how to run ads or spend ads money without getting enough return. On the consumer side, they provided a “Quality Guarantee by Google,” meaning that if the service providers didn’t provide the service they promised, Google would pay the consumer back their money.
It was a win-win-win for all parties. Service providers now only paid for the business they got, without having to learn how to do internet marketing, which was not something they cared deeply about. On the consumer side, they got the service they wanted at a reasonable price with added peace of mind. On Google's side, they were now able to maintain the trust of consumers while also gaining revenue from local service providers in a fair way (rather than gaining revenue from exploitative or illegitimate companies).
If Google had not gotten on the balcony, they never would have developed a strategy that drastically changed the ads industry. Prior to this, I’m not aware of any large companies that offered that type of end-to-end paid conversion ads. Google was able to do this because they dared to solve the root cause of the problem. In a way, they could have been satisfied to only address the symptom of the problem, but they decided to address the problem itself with a systematic change in the way an ads solution could work.
Getting on the balcony also goes beyond project and day-to-day workplace challenges. I have been able to apply this practice to look at my career as a whole. For example, there was a time when I didn't feel happy with my job. The role was impactful but unfulfilling. Despite exploring different ways to fix it, I was not finding joy in my work. Getting on the balcony meant taking a week-long break to really think through what mattered most to me. I reflected on the moments in the past when I had truly enjoyed my job and asked myself what I was really feeling during those times.
Through this process, I discovered that I enjoy coordinating very complex projects, ones where I have to bring all the puzzle pieces together to create a bigger picture. I also realized that I love matching people with work that leverages their unique talents. Although my current job was impactful, it didn’t bring me joy, because it didn’t align with my needs. Because of my specialty, the team wanted me to go deep into individual contributor work instead of giving me the “team captain” role where I found the most energy. I shared my realization honestly with my manager, and we worked together to help find me a better role. Sometimes getting on the balcony means taking a step back, reevaluating the situation, and getting clarity on what matters.
Getting on the balcony has numerous benefits inside and outside the workplace, but that does not make it easy. This is an ongoing process for me. I don’t always succeed. It’s an area that I’m actively working on. But by using this philosophy, I have had some positive experiences so far. Taking a step back has allowed me to identify big problems and find strategic ways to solve them. I hope to continue to gain perspective as I practice this more frequently.