Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

• Preface
• Managing the human resource
• The office environment
• The right people
• Growing productive teams
• Fertile soil
• It’s supposed to be fun to work here

Preface

The major problems of systems work are not much technological as sociological.

If a group of people who have to work together don’t trust each other, no nifty software package or gizmo is going to make a difference.

Managing the human resource

Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components.

Failing projects

The cause of failure most frequently cited by our survey participants was “politics”, a.k.a. the project’s sociology.

By noting the true nature of a problem as sociological rather than political, you make it more tractable.

The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.

The high-tech illusion

Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions.

The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is because it’s easier to do.

Make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger

The “make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger” mentality only serves to damp your people’s spirits and focus their attention away from the real problems at hand. To manage thinking workers effectively you need to take measures.

A quota of errors

Making an occasional mistake is natural and healthy. Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive. Encourage people to make some errors. Ask your folks on occasion what dead-ends roads they’ve been down.

Management: The bozo definition

“Management is kicking ass” mentality might work for cheeseburger production, but won’t for any effort which people do work with their heads rather than their hands.

The people store

Many managers convince themselves that no one is irreplaceable. That there is no such thing as a key person. The people manager realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective.

A project in steady state is dead

The only steady state of a project is rigor mortis. The focus of project management ought to be the dynamics of the development effort.

A catalyst is someone who can help a project to jell, is worth two people who just do work.

We haven’t got time to think about this job, only to do it

We have to learn to do work less of the time and think about the work more. The more heroic the effort required, the more important is that the team members learn to interact well and enjoy it.

Vienna waits for you

There is a widespread sense that what real-world management is all about is getting people to work harder and longer, largely at the expense of their personal lives.

Spanish theory management

The Spanish Theory is that only a fixed amount of value existed on earth, and therefore the path to accumulation of wealth was to learn to extract it more efficiently from soil or from people’s back.

The English Theory is that value can be created by ingenuity and technology.

The English had the Industrial Revolution, while the Spanish spun their wheels trying to exploit the land and the Indians in the New World.

The Spanish Theory of Value is alive among managers. Productivity means achieving more in an hour of work, extracting more for an hour of pay. Attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime.

The ain’t no such thing as overtime

There will be more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime. For the long term it will cancel out.

Nobody can work more than forty hours with the level of intensity required for creative intellectual work. Overtime is like sprinting.

Workaholics

Workaholics will put in uncompensated overtime.

The realization that one has sacrificed a more important value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work) is devastating. These profiles will eventually realise this and they will be gone.

You can’t let them do so at the expense of their personal lives. The loss of a good person isn’t worth it.

Productivity: Winning battles and losing wars

Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The cost has to include the replacement of any workers used up by the effort.

Reprise

In the Spanish Theory managers think that is better to have hopelessly impossible schedule to extract more labor from the workers.

People under time pressure don’t work better, they just work faster

In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and their own work experience.

Quality, if the time permits

Man’s character is dominated by a small number of basic instincts. When you feel them, there is always passion involved. The slightest challenge to one of these built-in values can be upsetting.

We tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce. Not the quantity of product, but the quality. Any step you take that may jeopardize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of your staff directly against you.

The flight from excellence

Workers kept under extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will hate what they’re doing. The decision to pressure people into delivering a product that doesn’t measure up to their own quality standards is almost a mistake.

We have to assume that people who pay for our work are of sound enough mind to make sensible trade-off between quality and cost.

Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence.

In the long run, market-based quality costs more.

Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

How is it possible that higher quality coexists with higher productivity?

The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.

Quality is free, but…

Letting the builder set a satisfying quality standard of his own will result in a productivity gain sufficient to offset the cost of improved quality.

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily to it.

Hewlett-Packard has long been an example of quality standards. Quality identification works for increased job satisfaction and some of the lowest turnover figures.

The team can insist that delivery wait until its own standards are achieved.

Parkinson’s law revisited

Work expands to fill the time allocated for it

Some managers have a strong conviction that the only way to get work done at all is to set an impossibly optimistic delivery date.

Parkinson’s law and Newton’s law

Parkinson’s law is not a law in the same sense that Newton’s law is a law. Newton was a scientist. Parkison was a humorist. His “law” caught on because it was funny. His law comes after observing a fictitious government bureaucracy.

Parkinson’s law almost certainly doesn’t apply to your people

You wouldn’t be saying this if you’d ever met our herb

The reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals.

Treating your people as Parkisonian workers doesn’t work. I can only demand and demotivate them.

Some data from the University of New South Wales

Some data proving that Parkison’s law doesn’t apply to most workers: Programers seem to be a bit more productive after they’ve done the estimate themselves. Programmers work harder to meet the analyst’s estimate, bad estimates are always a demotivating factor. The systems analysts tends to be a better estimator than either the programmer or the supervisor. Tight estimates sap the builders’ energy.

The surprising part of the 1985 Jeffrey-Lawrence study is that no estimates outperformed all others. Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (“Just wake me up when you’re done”) had the highest productivity of all.

Schedule pressure needs to be made in much the same way you decide whether or not to punish your child.

Variation on a theme by Parkison

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day

Becoming worse every year, is frightening true in many organizations. It’s the company that exhibits Parkinsonian behaviour rather than its employees.

Laetrile

Laetrile is a liquid from pressed apricot pits. You can buy the stuff in the grocery store for about the price of almond extract. In Mexico, you can buy it for fifty dollars a drop to “cure” your fatal cancer.

People who are desperate enough don’t look very hard at the evidence.

Managers are “desperate enough”, and their desperation makes them easy victims of a kind of technical laetrile that purports to improve productivity.

Something to bear in mind is that problems are not usually susceptible to easy solutions because all easy solutions were though of and applied long ago. Easy nonsolutions are often more attractive than hard solutions.

False hopes engendered by easy technological nonsolutions are like Sirens. An attractive fallacty that leads nowhere.

The seven false hopes of software management:

• There is some new trick you’ve missed that could send productivity soaring.

  The line that there is some magical innovation out there that you’ve missed a pure fear tactic, employed by those with a vested interest in selling it.

• Other managers are getting gains of 100% or 200% more!

• Technology is moving so swiftly that you’re being passed by.

  Productivity within the software industry has improved by 3 to 5 percent a year

• Changing languages will give you huge gains.

  It might give you a 5% gain

• Because of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately.

• Isn’t about time you automate your software development staff?

  The belief that software developers do easily automatable work is a fallacy. Principal work is communication to organize users’s expressions of needs into formal procedure.

• Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure.

  They won’t, they’ll just enjoy it less.

This is management

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

The office environment

Everybody’s workday is plagued with frustration and interruption.

The furniture police

For each of the observed kinds of disturbance, you’d look for an easy, mechanical way to protect your workers. You’d investigate the advantages of closed space and the trade-off of cost against privacy and quiet. Finally you’d take into account people’s social needs and provide some areas where a conversation could take place without disturbing others.

The police mentality

People who promulgate rules about leaving each desk clean at night and prohibiting anything to be hung on the partitions except perhaps a company calendar.

The uniform plastic basement

Basement space is really preferable from the point of view of the Furniture Police. But people work better in natural light. It translates into higher quality of work. People want to shape their space to their own convenience and taste. Typical inconveniences that come from dealing with human workers.

For most organizations with productivity problems, there is no more fruitful area for improvement than the workplace.

“You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5”

“Overtime is a fact of life”

Staying late or arriving early or stating home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment.

A policy default

Management had decided after due reflection that they couldn’t really do much about it. This is a policy of total default.

Productivity nonfactors

From studies run in Coding War Games in many organizations, the following factors had little or no correlation to performance:

• Language, with exceptions on assembly language obviously
• Years of experience, with the exception of people with less than 6 months of experience.
• Number of defects, zero-defect workers paid no performance penalty for doing more precise work. In fact, they took slightly less time.
• Salary, very weak relationship between salary and performance.

You may want to hide this from your boss

What did correlate positively to good performance was this rather unexpected one: It mattered a lot who your pair mate was.

Two people from the same organization tend to perform alike. Best performers are clustering in some organizations while the worst performers are clustering in others.

Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively.

Effects in the workplace

People who perform better tend to gravitate toward organizations that provide a better workplace.

If you participate in or manage a team of people who need to use their brains during the workday, then the workplace environment is your business.

Saving money on space

A penny saved on the work space is a penny earned on the bottom line. Savings have to be compared to the risk of lost effectiveness.

Few facts

IBM studied the work habits of those who would occupy the space. They concluded:

• 100 square feet of dedicated space per worker.
• 30 square feet of work surface per person.
• Noise protection in form of enclosed offices or 6-foot-high partitions.

Workplace quality and product quality

Workers who reported before the exercise that their workplace was acceptably quiet were one-third more likely to deliver zero-defect work.

Zero-defect workers: 66% reported noise level okay

One-or-more-defect workers: 8% reported noise level okay

When a worker complains about noise, he’s telling you that he is likely to be defect-prone.

A discovery of Nobel Prize significance

Worker density is inversely proportional to dedicated space per person.

Noise is directly proportional to density, so halving the allotment of space per person can be expected to double the noise.

Hiding out

When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out.

Gilb’s law

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.

Measurement is better than nothing. An organisation that can’t make some assessment of its own productivity rate just hasn’t tried hard enough.

Measuring with your eyes closed

Measurement schemes tend to become threatening and burdensome.

Management has to perceptive and secure enough to cut itself out of the loop. The data on individuals is not passed up to management. Data collected on the individual’s performance has to be used only to benefit that individual. Is an exercise in self-assessment.

Individuals are inclined to do exactly the same things with the data that the manager would do.

Brain time versus body time

Thirty percent of the time, people are noise sensitive, and the rest of the time, they are noise generators.

Flow

Flow is a condition of deep, nearly mediative involvement.

Unfortunately, you can’t turn on flow like a switch. It takes a slow descent into the subject, requiring ~15 minutes of immersion period.

The state can be broken by an interruption that is focused on you, or by insistent noise. Each time you’re interrupted, you require an additional immersion period. During this immersion, you are not really doing work.

The endless state of no-flow

If the average incoming phone call takes five minutes, and your reimmersion period is fifteen minutes, the total cost of a that call in flow time (work time) los is twenty minutes.

Just as important as the loss of effective time is the accompanying frustration.

People who work for you need to get into flow. Anything that keeps them from it will reduce their effectiveness and the satisfaction they take in their work.

The e-factor

If your people spend 40% of their total work hours uninterrupted, then the environment is allowing people to get into flow when they need to.

E-factor = Uninterrupted hours/body-present hours.

The telephone

One of the principal causes of interruption is the incoming telephone call. Even if some of the calls were important, they may not have been worth interrupting your flow.

Tales from the crypt

Steps that can be taken to minimize the negative impact of interruptive calls. The most important of these is to realise how much we have allowed the telephone to dominate our time allocation.

A modified telephone ethic

People who are charged with getting work done must have some peace and quiet to do it in. That means periods of total freedom from interruptions. When they want to work in flow, they have to have some efficient way of ignoring incoming calls.

The big difference between a phone call and an electronic mail message is that the phone call interrupts and the e-mail does not. Priority at “receiver’s convenience” is acceptable for the great majority of business communications.

The trick isn’t in the technology; it is in the changing of habits.

Incompatible multitasking

Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration.

Bring back the door

In creating a sensible workplace, the most obvious symbol of success is the door. Workers can control noise and interruptibility to suit their changing needs. The most obvious failure system is the paging system.

The show isn’t over till the fat lady signs

If you believe that the environment is working against you, you’ve got to start saying so.

As people begin to realise that they aren’t alone in their feelings, environmental awareness increases.

The issue of Glitz

Depressing surroundings would be counterproductive, but as long as the office wasn’t depressing, then you could happily ignore it. The money spent on high-fashion decor is a waste.

The next time someone proudly shows you around a newly designed office, think hard about whether it’s the functionality of the space that is being touted or its appearance.

Work-conductive office space is not a status symbol. it’s a necessity. Either you pay for it by selling out what it costs, or you pay for it in lost of productivity.

Creative space

You can either treat the symptom or treat the cause. Treating the cause means choosing isolation in the form of noise barriers. Treating the symptom is much cheaper. Pink noise, disruptive noise is drowned out at small expense. You can ignore the problem altogether so that people have to resort to iPods and headphones to protect themselves from the noise. You should expect to incur an invisible penalty: they will be less creative.

In the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music.

Many of the everyday tasks are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere. The creative leap involves right-brain function. If the right brain is busy listening to “1000 Strings” on Muzak, the opportunity for creative leap is lost.

Since creativity is a sometime thing anyway, we often don’t notice when there is less of it.

Vital space

Enclosed offices sooner or later get around to the “sterility” of working alone. But enclosed offices need to be one-person offices.

Breaking the corporate mold

A proposal to allow people to reorganise into shared suites will be seen as a threat. Someone in the upper reaches of the organisation will hate the idea.

By making everything uniform, the “owner” of a territory exercises and demonstrates control.

Management should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet and enough ways to ensure privacy so people can create their own sensible work space. Uniformity has no place in this view.

Taking umbrella steps

Christopher Alexander in 1979 with “The Timeless Way of Building” book set out to codify the elements of good architectural design.

Alexander’s concept of organic order

The master plan is an attempt to impose totalitarian order. A single and therefore uniform vision governs the whole.

Alexander proposes a facility can grow in an evolutionary fashion.

Organic order emerges, every place is unique and the different places also cooperate, with no parts left over.

Patterns

You feel more comfortable if there is a wall behind you. There should be no blank wall closer than eight feet in front of you. You should be sufficiently enclosed to cut noises.

Design sensible work space for people who make their living by thinking.

Tailored work space from a kit

Individual modules give poor-quality space to the person working alone and no space at all to the team. Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space. Each individual needs protected private space.

╔═════════════════════════════════════╗
║  GEORGE      ┌─┐  ┌─┐  CONFERENCE   ║
║  ┌──┐       ┌┴─┴──┴─┴┐ TABLE        ║
║ ┌┤  │       │        │      STEVE   ║
║ └┤  │       └┬─┬──┬─┬┘      ┌──┐    ║
║  └──┘        └─┘  └─┘     ┌─┴──┴─┐  ║
║                           └──────┘  ║
║  READING  ║    ARIA    ╔════════════╝
║  AREA     ║    ┌──┐    ║
║  ┌─┐ ┌─┐  ║  ┌─┴──┴─┐  ║
║  └─┘ └─┘  ║  └──────┘  ║
╚═══════════╩════════════╝

Windows

Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them

The problem of windowless space is a direct result of a square aspect ratio. A sensible limit for building width is thirty feet.

Indoor and outdoor space

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to work in space that had an outdoor component, it’s hard to imagine ever again limiting yourself to working entirely indoors.

Public space

An old pattern for interior space is a smooth “intimacy gradient”.

At the entrance of the workplace should be some area that belongs to the whole group. Further along the intimacy gradient should be space for tightly knit work groups to interact and to socialize. Finally, there is the protected quiet thinking space for one person to work alone.

Group interaction space needs tables and seating, writing surfaces, areas to post and space for members to prepare simple meals and eat together.

A pattern of patterns

Reliance on non-replicable formulas. The space needs to be isomorphic. People at all levels need to leave their mark on the workplace.

Return to reality

You don’t have to solve the space problem for the whole institution. If you can solve it just for your own people, you’re way ahead.

The right people

• Get the right people
• Make them happy so they don’t want to leave.
• Turn them loose.

The Hornblower factor

The Hornblower books can be read as an elaborate management analogy.

Born versus made

Managers are supposed to use their leadership skills to bring out untapped qualities in each subordinate. But managers are unlikely to change their people in any meaningful way. People who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they are not right for the job from the start, they never will be.

Getting the right people in the first place is all-important. Your skill at these tasks will determine to a large extent your eventual success.

The uniform plastic person

You can’t hire based on appearance. Most hiring mistakes result from too much attention to appearances and not enough to capabilities. Evolution has planted in each of us a certain uneasiness toward people who differ by very much from the norm.

You probably don’t feel that you have an uncontrollable tendency to hire attractive or “normal” looking people. The perceived norm encourages you to hire people that look like, sound like and thing like everybody else.

The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity. Strong managers pride is tied only to their staff’s accomplishments.

Standard dress

Uniformity is so important to insecure authoritarian regimes that they even impose dress codes. Accomplishment matters only by people who don’ look different.

Valuable people begin to realize that they aren’t appreciated for their real worth, that their contributions to the work are not as important as their haircuts and neckties. Eventually they leave.

If what’s gone wrong in your company is promulgation of formal standard appearance, it’s too late for a remedy. Get yourself a new job.

Code word: professional

Dress standards might be understandable if you worked in the Customer Relations or in Sales. Managers with shaky self-confidence are uncomfortable with any kind of behavior that is different from average.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. Professional means unsurprising, a perfect drone.

In a healthy environment, professional means knowledgeable and competent.

Corporate entropy

Entropy is the levelness of sameness. The more it increases, the less potential there is to generate energy or do work.

Second thermodynamic law of management Entropy is always increasing in the organization.

The most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though they may deviate from the corporate norm.

Let’s talk about leadership

Leadership as a work-extraction mechanism

Using a gun to lead means you have to “lead” from behind. In the workplace, is replaced with a delegated authority and position of power.

Leadership as a service

It happens outside the official hierarchy of delegated authority. Leadership is not about extracting anything from us; it’s about service. Enables endeavors to go forth. Sometimes directions are set, but their role is as a catalyst, not as a director.

In order to lead without positional authority:

• Step up to the task
• Be fit for the task
• Prepare for the task, ahead of time
• Maximize value to everyone
• Do it all with humor and goodwill

It will help to have charisma.

Leadership and innovation

Innovation is all about leadership, and leadership is all about innovation.

It takes a bit of a rebel to help even the best innovation achieve its promise: rebel leadership.

Nobody knows enough to give permission to the key instigators to do what needs to be done. Leadership as a service almost always operates without official permission.

Hiring a juggler

It would be ludicrous to think of hiring a juggler without first seeing him perform. You need to examine a sample of those products to see the quality of the work the candidate does.

Aptitude tests

Aptitude test may give you people who perform better in the short term, but are less likely to succeed later on. Maybe you should use an aptitude test but hire only those who fail it.

You should use them, just not for hiring. Can be a wonderful self-assessment vehicle for your people.

Holding an audition

We’re more dependent on workers’ abilities to communicate to each other than their abilities to communicate with machines. The hiring process needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication traits. The best way we’ve discovered to do this is through the use of auditions for job candidates.

You ask a candidate to prepare a fifteen-minute presentation on some aspect of past work. The candidate chooses a subject.

Hold a debriefing of those present. Each one gets to comment on the person’s suitability for the job and whether he or she seems likely to fit well into the team.

One caveat, make sure the candidate speaks about something immediately closely related to the work your organization does.

Childhood’s end

Technology and its opposite

One generation’s technology is the next generation’s environment.

Turnover: the obvious costs

Average employee longevity of 15 to 36 months. The average person leaves after a little more than two years.

A reasonable assessment of start-up cost is therefore approximately three lost work-months per new hire. The total cost of replacing each person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of employee cost or about 20% of the cost of keeping that employee for the full two years on the job.

The hidden costs of turnover

Employee turnover costs about 20% of all manpower expense.

In companies with high turnover, people tend toward a destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just aren’t going to be there very long. Nobody is willing to take the long view.

If people only stick around a year or two, the only way to conserve the best people is to promote them quickly. Near beginners being promoted into first-level management positions.

This could easily end up with 15% of the staff doing work, and 85% managing.

Not only is the structure wastefully top-heavy, it tends to have very lightweight people at the bottom. Products that are developed by workers with an average age in their twenties, and average experience of less than two years.

From the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health.

Why people leave

• A just-passing-through mentality.
• Feeling of disposability. Management think of workers as interchangeable parts.
• A sense that loyalty would be ludicrous.

Turnover engenders turnover. The feeling that the company sees nothing extraordinary in the worker makes the worker feel unappreciated as individual.

A special pathology: the company move

Injecting misery into workers’ lives makes the managers feel positively god-like.

Usually the real reason for moving the company to another place, is a political deal, or a chance to build a new edifice, or reduction of the boss’s commute.

The more egocentric the manager, the more intense the fondness for the company move.

Corporate move comes down hard on the couple’s relationship at a very delicate point.

A mentality of permanence

Companies with low turnover seem to have a preoccupation with being the best. It provides common direction, joint satisfaction and strong binding effect. The sense that you’d be dumb to look for a job elsewhere.

In the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being the best. And that’s a long term concept.

People tend to stay because there is a widespread sense that you are expected to stay.

A common feature of companies with lowest turnover is widespread retraining. When people need new skills to make a change, the company provided those skills. No job is a dead end.

Retraining helps to build the mentality of permanence that results in low turnover and strong sense of community.

Human capital

An expense is money that gets used up. At the end of the month the money is gone. An investment, on the other hand, is use of an asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used up, but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an expenditure as an investment instead of an expense, you are capitalizing the expenditure.

How about people?

You send that same worker off to a training seminar. His salary and the seminar have been spent on something that is not “gone” at the end of the month. Whatever he has leaned persists in his head through the coming months. It’s an investment.

Assessing the investment in human capital

How much does your company have invested in you and your colleagues? When someone leaves your company, it will be the investment required to put up to speed the newcomer. Including how much it will cost to recover the past investment in skills and capabilities.

Playing up to wall street

The object of the exercise is upsizing, not downsizing.

Companies that downsize are frankly admitting that their upper management has blown it. What’s conveniently forgotten is the investment in the people.

Growing productive teams

The challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is important because it gives us something to focus together. The challenge is the instrument for our coming together. Team interactions are everything.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Common definition of success or any identifiable team spirit is a phenomenon we call jell.

Concept of a jelled team

A group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. Almost unstoppable, a juggernaut for success. You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of their way. They’ve got momentum.

Management by hysterical optimism

Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naive managerial optimism.

The guns of Navarone

Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary. But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome. Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to.

There is very little true teamwork required in most of our work. But team are still important, for they serve as a device to get everyone pulling in the same direction.

The purpose of a team is not a goal attainment but goal alignment.

Sign of a jelled team

• Low turnover, members aren’t going anywhere till the work is done.
• Strong sense of identity. Teams may congregate at lunch out at the same watering hole after work.
• Sense of eliteness. Team members fell they are part of something unique.
• Joint of ownership of the product. Participants are pleased to have their names grouped together on a product or part of one.
• Obvious enjoyment. Interactions are easy, confident and warm.

Teams and cliques

The jelled work group may be cocky and self-sufficient, irritating and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager’s real goals than any assemblage of interchangeable parts could ever do.

Teamicide

You can’t make teams jell. You can hope they will jell.

We should stop talking about building teams, and more of growing them.

Defensive management

You can’t protect yourself against your own people’s incompetence. If your staff isn’t up to the job at hand, you will fail. You should get new people. Once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. Any defensive measure taken to guarantee success will only make things worse. Let them make some mistakes. That doesn’t mean you can’t override a decision occasionally or give specific direction to the project.

The right to be right is irrelevant; it’s only the right to be wrong that makes you free.

Bureaucracy

Just telling your people that the goal matters won’t be enough if you also have to tell them they should spend a third of their time pushing paper.

Physical separation

With physical separation there is no casual interaction. There is no group space, no immediate and constant reinforcement, no chance of a group culture forming.

Physical separation of people who are expected to interact closely doesn’t make much sense.

Fragmentation of time

People should be assigned to one and only one project at a time.

Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it’s also bad for efficiency. When trying to be part of four working groups, you’ll have four times as many interactions to track. You spend all the time changing hears. No one can be part of multiple jelled teams.

The quality reduced product

The typical steps we take to deliver a product in less time result in lower quality.

Self-esteem and enjoyment are undermined by the necessity of building a product of clearly lower quality than what people are capable of.

An early casualty of quality reduction is team identification. Co-workers who are developing a shoddy product don’t even want to look each other in the eye.

Phony deadlines

Tight deadlines can be sometimes demotivating. There are certain cases where a tight but not impossible deadline can constitute an enjoyable challenge. What’s never going to help, however, is a phony deadline.

If you say the product absolutely has to be out the door by some arbitrary date, they will ask “why”?

Clique control

Teams can’t be allowed to stay together for one job to another. Organizations take no specific steps to disband teams, but miss every opportunity to keep them together.

Those damn posters and plaques

Motivational accessories are a triumph of form over substance. They seem to extol the importance of Quality, Leadership, Creativity, Teamwork, Loyalty, and a host of other organization virtues. But they do so in such simplistic terms as to send an entirely different message: Management here believes these virtues can be improved with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent. The presence of the posters is a sure sign of the absence of hard work and talent.

Overtime: an unanticipated side effect

Members of good teams are never uniform in any respect, certainly not in their abilities to “borrow” time from their personal lives.

If a team starts normalizing overtime, people who don’t share the pain will become, little by little, estranged from the others.

Competition

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Coaching cannot take place if people don’t feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached or you coaching someone else that may pass you by. Managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:

• Annual salary or merit reviews
• Management by objectives
• Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
• Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
• Performance measurement in almost any form

Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.

Competition

Internal competition in work team is fostered by managers with lack of time, respect, attention and affection for his or her own people.

Does it matter? the importance of coaching

Team members themselves provide most of the coaching. A well-knit team in action, you’ll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time. Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge.

Coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction.

What matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

A spaghetti dinner

Your chances of jelling into a meaningful team are enhanced by your very first experience together.

Good managers provider frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. Tiny pilot subprojects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together. The best success is the one in which there is no evident management. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed”.

Open Kimono

Some managers are pretty good at helping teams to jell. The characteristics of these team-oriented managers are.

Calling in well

Managers of well workers are careful to respect autonomy, once granted. They’ve prepared to suffer the occasional setback, a direct result of failure by one of their people.

Open Kimono is the exact opposite of defensive management. You take no steps to defend yourself from the people you’ve put into positions of trust. A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.

The entire staff was assembled as our corporate lawyer handed Jerry the contract and told him to read it and sign on the last page. “I don’t read contracts” Jerry said, and started to sign. “Oh, wait a minute,” said the lawyer, “let me go over it one more time.”

This was not the time to be defensive, it was time to assume and depend on the competence around him.

It is this kind of Open Kimono management that gives teams their best chance to form.

The getaway ploy

The most common means by which bosses defend themselves from their own people is direct oversight. Looking for incompetence about to happen.

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out their hair occasionally. An easily separable task is perfect opportunity. There is no real management required for such work. Send them away. Find a remote office.

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

You may succeed someday in building a productive office environment. In the short run, use any excuse to get your people out.

There are rules and we do break them

Skunkworks (insubordination), management says no and the project goes anyway. People at all levels know whether some sensible insubordination is acceptable or not.

Who is in charge here?

The best bosses take chances on their people. They do this only by exercising their natural authority. Between master craftsman and apprentice there is a bond of natural authority. An insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority.

Each of the workers is known to have some special area of expertise, and is trusted by all as a natural authority in that area.

Chemistry for team formation

Chemistry is the optimal mix of competence and trust and mutual esteem and well-person sociology that provides perfect soil for the growth of jelled teams.

The cult of quality

Still-imperfect product is “good enough” is the death knell of a jelling team. This cult of quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation. It bind the team together because it sets its members apart from the rest of the world.

Your marketplace, your product consumers, your clients, and your upper management are never going to make the case for high quality. Extraordinary quality doesn’t make good short-term economic sense. When team members develop a cult of quality, they always turn out something that’s better that what their market is asking for. They can do this, but only when protected from short-term economics. In the long run, this always pays off.

Satisfying closure

The human creature needs reassurance from time to time that he or she is headed in the right direction. This is closure.

Team members need to get into the habit of succeeding together and liking it. It builds momentum.

The chemistry-building manager takes pains to divide the work into pieces and makes sure that each piece has some substantive demonstration of its own completion. Each new software version is an opportunity for closure.

Build a sense of eliteness

People require a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with themselves, and they need to be at peace with themselves to let the jelling process begin.

The mediocre manager is too insecure to give up the trappings. The great manager knows that people can’t be controlled in any meaningful sense anyway. You give some control, or at least the illusion of control when it jells.

Identity is an essential ingredient of a jelled team. The team needs to be unique in some sense, not in all senses.

Preserve and protect successful teams

If a team does knit, don’t break it up. Give people the option to undertake another project together.

Provide strategic but not tactic direction

Teams are made of peers that function as equals. That’s why managers are usually not part of the teams they manage. On the best teams no one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.

The structure of a team is network, not hierarchy.

Allow and encourage heterogeneity

A bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to created a jelled team.

Fertile soil

The self-healing system

Deterministic and nondeterministic systems

The reason that nondeterministic systems can often heal themselves painlessly is that the humans who make up the system have an easy familiarity with the underlying goals.

Making systems deterministic will result in the loss of its ability to heal itself.

The covert meaning of methodology

Methodology is the fat book that specifies in detail exactly what steps to take at any time, regardless of who’s doing the work, regardless of where or when. People who write Methodology are smart, people who carry it out can be dumb.

Methodology makes all the decisions; the people make none. The organization becomes entirely deterministic. Workers can be proceeding operations that could be making no sense to them at all.

The difference between Methodology and methodology is that the small m methodology is a basic approach one takes to getting the job done. Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking.

Methodology madness

Methodologies can do grievous work:

• A morass of paperwork. Encouraging people to build documents instead of work.
• A paucity of methods. There are a very few competing methods for most of the work we do.
• An absence of responsibility. The fault is with the Methodology, not the people making the environment virtually responsibility-free.
• A general loss of motivation. Nothing could be more demotivating that management thinking workers are incompetent.

The issue of malicious compliance

Unworkable products and meaningless documentation.

The baby and the bathwater

Methodologies are not the only way to achieve convergence. Better ways:

• Training
• Tools
• Peer review

You can’t really declare something is standard until it has already become a de facto standard.

The high-tech illusion revisited

The belief that what really matters is the technology. Even with best imaginable Methodology may only give a small improvement in the technology.

Dancing with risk

Not running away from risk

Project risk is a good thing. Projects that have real value but little or no risk were done ages ago. The ones that matter today are laden with risk.

The one risk we almost never manage

The risk of our own failure. The real reason for risk management is not to make the risk go away, but to enable sensible mitigation should they occur.

It’s perfectly reasonable not to manage a risk for which the probability of occurrence is extremely low. It’s not reasonable to leave unmanaged the risk for which the consequences are “just to awful to think about”.

Meetings, monologues and conversations

Some organizations are so addicted to meetings that work has to take second place.

The “technological enhanced” meeting

Technology provides an escape for people from the pointlessness of what’s happening around them. What technology enhances is the dreadfulness of meetings.

Stand-up meetings

They are fine if short, with a clear purpose and focus.

Basic meeting hygiene

Called to get something done might be called working meeting. Called to reach a decision. The people that need to agree should be invited. An agenda relevant to its purpose is essential. The meeting is done when a decision has been reached.

Ceremonies

A meeting that is ended by the clock is a ceremony. It’s all FYI. At any given moment, two people are involved, the other are nominally listening.

Conversations are a good thing. What’s not such a good thing is all the non-listeners locked in the room while the conversations take place.

A ceremony might be called to celebrate some accomplishment, to lay out a strategic change of direction, or to evaluate a project at its end.

Too many people

The cost of a meeting is directly proportional to the number attending.

Open-space networking

Common for professional conferences or congress. The real value of the experience is in the interstices. An Open-Space conference is essentially all coffee break and lunch. The same idea can be useful in meeting planning.

Prescription for curing a meeting-addicted organization

Your goal should be to eliminate most ceremonial meetings and spend time in one-on-one conversation. Apply the “What ends this meeting”?

The ultimate management sin is…

Wasting people’s time.

Status meetings are about Status

Any regular get-together is suspect as likely to have a ceremonial purpose rather than a focused goal of consensus. A status meeting is usually not for serving information to be boss, but for reassurance. To state that the boss is boss. Attendance is expected and hierarchy is being respected.

Early overstaffing

Projects begin with planning and design, activities that are best carried out by smallish team. For a two-year project, the bulk of the staff would not come on board until the project is six months to a year underway.

PEOPLE
│                     ■■■■■  │
│                  ■■■░░░░░■■│
│                ■■░░░░░░░░░░│
│              ■■░░░░░░░░░░░░│
│   ■■■■■■■■■■■░░░░░░░░░░░░░░│
└──┬─────────────────────────┼──────── TIME
   BEGIN                     END


PEOPLE
│                  │  ■■■■■  │
│                  ■■■▒▒▒▒▒■■│
│                ■■│▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│  EFFORT THAT COULD
│              ■■░░│▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│  NOT BE APPLIED
│   ■■■■■■■■■■■░░░░│▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒│
└──┬───────────────┼─────────┼──────── TIME
   BEGIN           IMPOSED DEADLINE


PEOPLE
│  │   ■■■■■■■■■■■■■
│  │  ■▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒■ SAME EFFORT
│  │ ■▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒■■│ APPLIED EARLIER
│  │ ■▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒■■░░│
│  │■■■■■■■■■■■░░░░│
└──┼───────────────┼────────────────── TIME
   BEGIN           IMPOSED DEADLINE

Early added effort would just be wasted.

Fragmentation again

Fragmenting any knowledge worker’s time over many different tasks assures that he or she will be thrust into two or more different work groups, none of which is likely to jell into a real team.

It is guaranteed to waste the individual’s time. The worker will spend significant part of each day switching gears. This time is largely invisible.

Fragmentation is particularly injurious when two of the tasks involve qualitatively different kinds of work habits. The mix of a design task with a support task is sure to make progress virtually impossible. People who suffer from this problem are all too likely to blame themselves.

Respecting your investment

The human capital invested in your workforce also represents a ton of money. Wasting the time of that huge investment is money poured down the drain.

E(vil) mail

Yes, your e-mail In-box is full. Very impressive. But what is it full of?

In days of yore

We’re coordinating an order of magnitude more than we ever did before.

In a relationship over-functions, the others are sure to under-function. When you over-coordinate the people who work for you, they’re likely to under-coordinate their own efforts.

A decent coach understands his or her job is not to coordinate interaction, but to help people learn to self-coordinate.

What does “FYI” even mean?

For your information, but if you didn’t know it, of what value is the information?

Is this an open organization or a commune?

It’s nice people allow you to pull information from them about what they’re doing, but less nice if they push it on you.

Repeal passive consent

Silence gives consent.

Spending hours each day reading through stuff that is of no value to you, just because you worry about your consent being taken for granted because your name is on the CC line.

An effective repeal, is to explicitly establish that only giving consent gives consent.

Building spam-less self-coordinating organization

Start by stating in explicit terms that corporate spam is unwelcome.

Each time you’re inclined to send a coordinating e-mail to a colleague think about what steps you have to make to coach that person to self-coordinate. Telling someone what to do is easy, while instilling self-coordinating abilities in that same person is much more complicated.

Making change possible

People hate change.

While you risk making enemies to those who have mastered the old ways forcing them back to the uncomfortable position of novice, you receive only minor support from those who would gain. Uncertainty is more compelling than the potential for gain.

That’s a swell idea, boss. I’ll get right on it.

Resistance-to-change continuum, resistance in increasing order:

1. Blindly loyal (ask no questions)
2. Believers but questioners a. Skeptics (show me) b. Passive observers (what’s in it for me?) c. Opposed (fear of change) d. Opposed (fear of loss of power)
3. Militantly opposed (will undermine and destroy)

Blindly loyal: fairly powerless, and they will jump onto whatever appears hot. They will withdraw their support as quickly as they give it.

Believers but questioners are the only meaningful potential allies of any change. Blindly loyal and militantly opposed are the real enemies.

When we argue logically for change, one tactic is to contrast how the new world will be (good) compared to the current situation (bad). Never demean our old ways. Instead, celebrate the old as a way to help change happen. Any improvement involves change.

A better model of change

Naive model of how change happens

┌────────┐                      ┌────────┐
│ OLD    │                      │ NEW    │
│ STATUS ├─────────────────────→│ STATUS │
│ QUO    │          ↑           │ QUO    │
└────────┘     A BETTER IDEA    └────────┘

Satir’s change model

┌────────┐         ┌───────┐              ┌─────────────┐   ┌────────┐
│ OLD    │         │       │              │ PRACTICE    │   │ NEW    │
│ STATUS ├────────→│ CHAOS ├─────────────→│ AND         ├──→│ STATUS │
│ QUO    │    ↑    │       │       ↑      │ INTEGRATION │   │ QUO    │
└────────┘ FOREIGN └───────┘ TRANSFORMING └─────────────┘   └────────┘
           ELEMENT           IDEA

Change involves at least the four stages. Change happens upon the introduction of a foreign element: a catalyst for change.

When you try to institute change, the first thing you hit is chaos. Suffering from the dip in the learning curve. It is frustrating and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long mastered only to become a novice again.

The transforming idea is something that people in Chaos can grab as offering hope that end of suffering is near. Structured huddle is sometimes the best medicine.

The practice and integration is not yet completely comfortable, but you perceive that the new is now beginning to pay off. You have reached the new status quo when what you changed to becomes what you do.

Chaos is an integral part of change. When you’re looking for it, your changes of dealing sensibly with it are much improved.

Safety first

Change won’t even get started unless people feel safe, not to be demeaned or degrade for proposing change. Temporary loss of mastery is embarrassing enough.

Change only has a change of succeeding if failure is also okay.

Organizational learning

Non-learners cannot expect to prosper for very long.

Experience and learning

Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.

When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can’t take place at all.

The key question about organizational learning

The most natural learning center for most organizations is at the level of middle management. Learning organizations are always characterized by strong middle management.

The management team

Another ingredient required is that middle managers must communicate with each other and learn to work together in effective harmony.

Danger in white space

If middle managers can act together as the redesigners of the organization, then the benefits of learning are likely to be realized.

The making of community

What great managers do best is making of community. A need for community is something that is built right into the human firmware.

We have strong need for community. Towns no longer satisfy this need. The workplace is where we have our best change of finding a community.

Digression of corporate politics

Community doesn’t just happen. It has to be made.

The science of making communities, making them healthy and satisfying for all is called politics.

Refusing to be a political in the Aristotelian sense, is an abnegation of the manager’s real responsibility.

Why it matters

Satisfying community tends to keep its people. When people leave they tend to time their departures to minimally inconvenience the community. This means that workers are unlikely to leave during the project.

It’s supposed to be fun to work here

Work should be fun.

Chaos and order

Without chaos, we’d be bored to tears. Managers tend to be greedy. The manager’s job in this approach is to break it up and parcel it out. The people down below get to have the real fun of putting things shipshape.

Progress is our most important problem

Nostalgic fondness for the days when everything wasn’t so awfully mechanical. Progress toward more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The thoughtful manager feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder with a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder with:

• Pilot projects
• War games
• Brainstorming
• Provocative training experiences
• Trainings, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats

Pilot projects

Try some new and unproven technique. The Hawthorne Effect will boost in energy and interest.

Projects that try out any modified approach, tend toward higher-than-average net productivity.

One caveat about pilot projects: Don’t experiment with more than one aspect of development technology on any given project.

War games

It can be an enjoyable experience to try your hand at set of tailored problems, and to be able to compare your performance to statistical performance profile of your peers. Game results won’t be used against you, security and confidentiality should be guaranteed.

War games help you evaluate your relative strengths and weaknesses and help the organization to observe its global strengths and weaknesses.

Brainstorming

Structured interactive session, specifically targeted on creative insight. People get together to focus on a relevant problem. Strive for quantity of ideas, not quality. Discourage negative comments.

Training, trips, conferences, celebrations and retreats

Combining travel with their peers and one-of-a-kind experience. Better if the travel is to somewhere exotic.

When a team is forming, it makes good business sense to fight for travel money to get team members out of the office together.

Free electrons

The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose. Their own direction is more unerringly in the best interest of the organization than any direction might come down from above. It’s time to get out of their way.

Sociology matters more than technology or even money. It’s supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn’t, then there’s nothing else worth concentrating on.