Yesterday, I “managed”.

I’m really more of a worker bee type. Several years ago, I did a 5 year stint in management, mostly without success and with only a lot of emotional scars and a Prozac habit to show for it. I took a new job a couple of years ago, where I was hired on to be a Java developer. But last December I was unceremoniously promoted to team lead on a project I knew nothing about in an organization that was still new to me. It was H-E-double-hockey-sticks for the first six months, with an impossible deadline, and myself a (minor) part of the third project management team brought in on the project after the first two teams failed (badly) to hit their dates.

Five developers report to me, all contract Java developers from India. The project manager I report to is also from India. Everyone who works for me is brilliant (India doesn’t send any dumb people to American, as far as I can tell.) And my project manager is one of the quickest thinkers I have ever met, much less struggled to please. Now, I’m no Einstein (though I did play Einstein in a stage production once), but I’m pretty skilled in JEE and Web application development. But these guys can code rings around me.

Like I say, they’re from India. It took me awhile to understand all of their various accents (one fellow has a heavy accent and also speaks with a stutter). There were some cultural differences too: like, they really freak when you get pissed off and say a curse word in frustration. (Lesson learned!!)

Although they sit in various locations throughout two buildings, we have configured a small cubicle, a "war room" where four of them may sit together to develop software, fix defects, and test. My own office is in another building nearby and several times a day I make a walk through an underground connecting tunnel to check in on their progress.

Our product is a middle-tier that "emulates" a legacy mainframe system and a distributed database that is called through HTTP Web services. Their job is to fool a static front end layer into believing it is still talking to the mainframe. The architecture was a little over my head at first, and my first few months on the job were quite faith-based (there was a part of me that never believed their crazy contraption could ever work... until they proved it to me).

In the past month, we turned a corner on some problems that were driving me nuts (never a long drive for me, even in the best of times) and we have a little breathing room on our recently extended deadline. Yesterday, we were facing some problems in the legacy front end, an application layer that we interface to but don’t code in and don’t have much visibility into. The support guy for that layer, a fellow who was supposed to help us test to determine whether the problem was in the front end or in our code, was being uncooperative and just generally difficult. It wasn't in his code, he said, and he didn't even think we should be wasting his time. He would only perform one test, a test that would rule out that the problem was in his code. We had planned to come in this morning—at the support guy’s convenience: he refused to stay late yesterday—and run his test,  a test that had to be done either after our UAT testers finished their testing or before they started. But late yesterday afternoon, my project manager got the brilliant idea to run the test yesterday evening, since we had the expertise in our team and the server rights to perform the support guy's test ourselves.

So, I planned to stay late with a couple of guys from my team to run the test. I made the walk through the tunnel, climbed the stairs to the War Room, and outlined the plan. The War Room is a tiny cube, and the team are cramped and crowded, with their four computers and four chairs. I was standing against the wall, just kind of killing time and watching them work as we waited until the testers had cleared out of the environment. They asked if I wanted a chair. I said, no, I'm good.

But this just wouldn't do. They were obviously uncomfortable with this arrangement, and one of them walked out and came back with a fifth chair. He explained that in India, it is against protocol for the higher ranking person to be standing while others are sitting. I don't usually think in terms of rank--one of the things that makes me something of a poor manager--and this protocol issue never occurred to me. Simply by standing, I was causing discomfort for them. Another lesson learned. We passed the time discussing Indian and American customs. I learn a lot from these guys besides just Java. To pass the time, I surprised them with some music I had found while on a visit to Malaysia, a Hindu mantra called Om Thiriyambagam Siva. One of the men recognized the chant, and my playing it on my new iPhone did not seem to create discomfort, so we listened to this blissful chant while we waited and talked. One of them explained how "Om" was believed to be the sound produced when the universe began.

Our window opened for making the test and we quickly found out that the support guy’s theory of the problem was wrong (as the guys had already assured me it would be, because they had already proven it wasn't in our software). One last walk through tunnel to make a report to my project manager. Then, I went home, feeling more confidence than ever in my developers and testers, and knowing we didn’t need the support guy to even run his test. But after I arrived home one of the developers, the one who has been berated and “shown up” by the support guy several times, took matters further. He found someone else on the support team, and with her help actually isolated the problem to be a data table that had been corrupted. At that point my developer called me with the news and asked if he could apply a fix (i.e., restore the data in the table). I told him that if he had the blessing of the support folks (like I say, this is their application layer and their code and their data table), that they should go for it. He called back a little later with the news they had fixed the problem!

By the time I went in early this morning to call off the support guy from running his test, I was able to tell him that we had already diagnosed and fixed the problem, a problem that both he and I now knew was his, not ours, to troubleshoot and fix. It was sweet. But I didn't gloat. (I saved that for this post.)

More than once I’ve gone home after such a successful day, only to come in the next morning and have the rug pulled out from under me. But today was different. Today, we solved some other problems, and successfully beat back some challenges from our testers (who are some of the most trying people on the planet! Oh, the abuse we have taken from them!) and from another development team that is dependent on our product, who also tend toward the abusive. I knew what the issues were, and I was able to respond to both the technical and the interpersonal challenges—with the solid help of my guys, and the skilled leadership of a seasoned project manager, but still pretty much on my own—and also to direct the work of five remarkable people from another world.

I don’t feel nearly as incompetent as I did even three months ago. My job is still a bitch right now, and the days I expect to leave the office bitch-slapped and muttering can still be counted in dozens. But when I can string together two days in a row where I walk out feeling like a winner, it’s something to talk about.

Thanks, guys!