51–60 of 99 posts
Meanwhile, Facebook and Uber get great scores on the measure.
There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion. In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way,…
Treating team members and colleagues as human beings who bring their whole self to work is, imho, essential to enabling people to deliver their best work. Understandably, but somewhat irrationally at the same time, companies as they mature tend to put formalized processes over individuals. The reason for this may be to institutionalize knowledge or scale better as the company grows which I do see the point of. An unw…
I know of a team (~20 devs, a handful of managers) in the middle of a fantastic experiment in burning out the developers. First, a new remote senior leader took over. He doesn't visit the team or understand them well. He puts pressure on the managers to deliver projects that make his bosses happy by looking sexy, even if they cause more operational issues for the customers. Operational issues = oncall hell, so more d…
https://www.inc.com/michael-schneider/google-thought-they-kn...
"Google’s “Project Artistotle” investigates why some teams work better than others. Its analysis shows that the combination of individuals making up the group is unimportant. Instead, a team’s “group norms” – its “traditions, behavioral standards and unwritten rules” – are essential to how well the group performs. Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional states. These factors produce a situation in which members of the group feel comfortable, or “safe,” and therefore more willing to contribute. Google’s data show that what Harvard business professor Amy Edmondson called “psychological safety” within the group leads to an increase in the group’s collective IQ and therefore its effectiveness and productivity."
"1. Dependability. Team members get things done on time and meet expectations.
2. Structure and clarity. High-performing teams have clear goals, and have well-defined roles within the group.
3. Meaning. The work has personal significance to each member.
4. Impact. The group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good.
Yes, that's four, not five. The last one stood out from the rest:
5. Psychological Safety.
We've all been in meetings and, due to the fear of seeming incompetent, have held back questions or ideas. I get it. It's unnerving to feel like you're in an environment where everything you do or say is under a microscope.
But imagine a different setting. A situation in which everyone is safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard. That's psychological safety.
I know, not the quantitative data that you were hoping for. However, Google found that teams with psychologically safe environments had employees who were less likely to leave, more likely to harness the power of diversity, and ultimately, who were more successful.
Engineering the perfect team is more subjective than we would like, but focusing on these five components increases the likelihood that you will build a dream team. Through its research, Google made the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle proud by proving, "The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts."
Teams are successful if their group norms lead to equal speaking time for all individuals within the group and an awareness of others’ emotional states.
I think this is tricky if a problem and observably true. The teams I've been involved with mesh easier when each are able to commune easily and this normally means equal chances speaking time. Whenever I've seen an imbalance I can safely say it is because the person had obvious narcissistic personality traits which were always destructive long term.
Here's the primary source for the survey in question: http://blog.teamblind.com/index.php/2018/08/20/tech-workers-... How useful is a survey like this? The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition. Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression? Can they also reliably indicate the cause for the burnout, esp…
> The survey does not define burnout to employees, leaving them to guess at the definition.
Think about how a more rigorous alternative might work.
1. We come up with some more precise definition of "burnout." Perhaps we define it as "an average of X 'frustration' events in the workplace over Y days, combined with a steadily declining sense of 'enthusiasm'"
2. OK, great, but now we need precise definitions of 'frustration' and 'enthusiasm.' Is 'frustration' the momentary frustration we feel when the compiler complains about something? Is it a barely-restrained feeling of wanting to smash one's keyboard over somebody's face? For how many seconds should that feeling be experienced to qualify? Likewise with 'enthusiasm.' Same problem we had in step 1.
3. Alternatively, we could monitor people's cortisol levels, blood pressure levels, and have them spend their workdays in an fMRI machine or something. Although even that would have limitations; that seems more likely to measure acute symptoms than something chronic like "burnout."
> Can employees reliably self-diagnose burnout and differentiate it from similar conditions - i.e. actual depression?
As you say, surely x% of respondents will confuse depression with burnout.
However, the value of x% will surely be nearly the same at all companies.
This is a woefully inadequate article, and a woefully inadequate survey. So what if 'poor leadership' is the number one cause for burnout? That insight isn't useful. As an employee, I'd like to figure out how to avoid burnout. And as a employer, I'm not sure how to reduce burnout — get better leadership? How do I do that? But it turns out there are good ideas we can try that may be found in the academic literature. C…
Thank you for writing this all up. I found this all really interesting but one question remains: what should we do when we have burnout? It's easy enough to say "just employ one of your coping mechanisms" but presumably there are real resentments underlying the situation? I guess this is the crux really. Is burnout merely an arbitrary expression of exhaustion and overwork, which carries thoughts and resentments that…
If you’ve got resentments you’ll need to work through them. Get help. Debrief your role in the causes. Regrets probably exist at first but you’ll find moving on with new is healthiest approach after you’ve worked out the details of the old.
Work on frustration tolerance. Little things should stay little. Laughter may help. Or not.
Reconnect with purpose. Find a purpose. Make it clear. Make it detailed. Plan. Execute.
You will need to change. What that means is up to you.
Check in with exercise, diet, social circles. Don’t disconnect from any of these. Fix any deficiencies.
After all that maybe you can forgive, forget and move on.
There are so many articles that blame leadership for all that ails a company. To me, it seems a bit like saying "most program crashes are caused by runtime errors". While both are true, there are deeper explanations that can be more helpful in starting a discussion. In the case of crashing a program, maybe it's because of a misused raw pointer or a type error in an untyped language. As soon as you frame it that way,…
This opinion is nice but not actionable. That means that it is less useful if you are in the role of an employer, wanting to reduce burnout in your org. See my comment below for actual mental models you can use to prevent burnout in your organisation.[1] I personally find JD-R more useful, because it prescribes a model of 'jobs demands outstripping job resources', which then implies that you as manager can seek ways…
But leaders are practically impossible to reliably hire at rates the business owner can realistically afford, and if the whole zeitgeist of business starts paying more for effective leadership, then that just makes the problem a hundred times worse.
Leadership isn't teachable, but management is. Learning management will teach you the rudimentary skills of coordinating people to accomplish a goal, but it won't by itself make you a leader.
Firms can hire more managers, that solves the problem, I call a team with more than one competent manager, 'well-managed'. But good managers, like good leaders, wind up getting overworked across projects and so they just miss things. A leader doesn't miss anything, they're laser focused on the overall business goals of the project.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've never experienced inconsiderate coworkers? Like coworkers who talk loudly on the phone in a nearby work area, coworkers with hygiene issues, coworkers who don't carry their weight or respond well to training?
All of these issues should be addressed by the manager.
Meanwhile, the competition is not stupid and is not crazy and is not waiting for us to get our act together. Suddenly we have a year to do the thing that the worker-bee level Cassandras were saying was the right thing to do in the first place. Maybe 14 months to bring up hardware, port or write three major hunks of software, get third parties ramped up on development, write tools and do the million things you need to do to ship. Oh, and the team writing the OS we're mandated to use has been ordered not to talk to us and has gone dark, removing our access to their releases and documentation.
So there's a meeting of all the software folks, and management tells us "Okay guys, the next year is going to be hell. You'll be allowed to take vacation, probably, we'll tell you when." I'd seen this coming and was sitting in the back of the room with an offer letter in my pocket, trying not to be angry because a bunch of people I like working with a lot are getting shafted. I should be elated at the offer (which is quite good), but instead I just feel sad.
I leave.
Six months later one of my friends working on the project sends me a picture of his front lawn. He has been unable to find the time or energy to mow it and it is 18 inches high. Eventually they ship (late, of course), to lackluster reviews. My friend has since moved on; most of the people I know there have. They don't like talking about that year-long deathmarch, followed by a year of patching the living crap out of things in the field and struggling for market share. Meanwhile, the competition's product does very, very well.
Last I checked, the latest crop of execs there were gunning for the same crazy. Maybe technology has moved on sufficiently and the specific crazy is possible now, but I have numbers indicating things are pretty much the same. I don't know which side to cheer for. Where do they get these lunatics?
No car company would allow a CEO who doesn’t understand how cars work, let alone one who has no respect for those who design cars.
But most tech companies are lead by tech illiterate MBA types who disdain engineers, and so engineers are managed by people who don’t understand engineering.
I’ll give you a particular example but this is not the exception, this was the norm in %85 of the dozen tech companies I’ve worked at:
At Amazon my boss was a guy trained to be a prison guard, who was selling pot on campus on the side, who got his job managing engineers because of a political connection. He had difficulty operating Microsoft Office. He was borderline computer illiterate.
After a re-organization my bosses’ boss was replaced with a woman whose previous career was literally managing state DMV offices. Hey it’s management, right?
Notably both of these people resented the fact that we were getting paid close to as much as they were (yet they with no skills, not even good management skills were still getting paid more!)
At that point between me and Bezos there were no engineers in management and nobody who respected engineering (and that included Bezos, this was early enough I worked a lot of tickets with Bezos involved, saw him literally stop us from fixing a problem in October only to go ballistic the day before thanksgiving when the problem surfaced again.)
Meanwhile Amazon has this propaganda campaign about how they “raise the bar” in hiring- and it’s true I’ve seen brilliant engineers not hired because of the objections of the “bar raiser”— only that person was the woman whose qualifications was a history keeping he nose clean working for the state!