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Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#21

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

sally_glance wrote: post #18
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #10

I ran a pretty high-functioning team of experienced C++ image processing pipeline programmers, for 25 years. We were part of a much larger, international (and interdisciplinary) team. We worked for one of the most renowned imaging companies in the world. Some of the folks we dealt with, were the top people in their field, and not everyone was especially good at getting along with others. Everyone thought they had The…

25 years is a long time, I'm intrigued. Looking back, can you single out any specific rules, workflows or cultural reasons which made this possible? Also, how much fluctuation in team members did you experience? I'm currently managing multiple teams, some of which are experiencing challenges with clashes between top talent. I'm sure there is no magical bullet, but still very interested in anecdotal data on this.

Well, the biggest “secret,” was keeping people on board, for a long time. It was almost impossible to hire folks that could “hit the ground running,” as the tech was very proprietary, so investment in training was a big deal.

When they finally wrapped up our team, the person with the least tenure, had been there a decade.

Keeping people for a long time, is a big topic, on its own.

Also, everyone believed in The Mission. Inspiring talented, smart people, is not easy. It requires a great deal of Integrity and Humility, on the part of the management. That’s rare as hen’s teeth, these days.

It’s an old-fashioned Japanese “craftsman” company, with a 100-year-plus history of making some of the best optical equipment in the world, so there was a lot of inspiration (and very difficult minds to change, which could be a challenge).

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#22

Post by tekla »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #19
tekla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but if you're never getting heated, the work doesn't matter in the first place.

I genuinely don't know how to respond to that. The idea of connecting anger to the relevancy of one's work seems so strange to me.

Ok, lets go with this, because empathy is hard, and it seems that most here have not experienced working on complex projects. I've personally experienced this.

We have a project to develop a new engine, its teklaover budget, very late, and requires a ton more work and excuses are running thin.

My team is running barebones with 60-70 hour weeks trying to get the ratings done, the test team is waiting on us for the ratings to get their work done and THEIR manager is pissed because they're billing for time on their books waiting for us to get our shit together. There is no more room to delay the tests because another team also needs their project tested and has waited for the test team to free up.

Meanwhile, my bosses boss is pressuring my boss to submit what ratings data we have to get approved to start testing. The test teams boss is begging us to submit the data too so he doesn't have to bill time for being idle on standby.

Tired of fighting, we submit the ratings data and tests starts. And boom 2000 hours into testing the gearbox fails and blows out the back of the engine at 4am. The test facility is now inoperative until cleanup finishes and several hundred hours are now needing to be spent figuring out why a $3 million engine just blew itself up.

The cleanup team is now being paid a fuckton of overtime to clean up the mess, and an army of people are being summoned to provision a new test engine.

The test team now needs to spend extra time writing reports, the ratings team now needs to go overtime to detail why they fucked up and why we suck so much at our jobs, on top of their normal work, and the customer is super fucking pissed.

So yeah, there is no anger if stuff doesn't matter. When stuff does matter, anger happens. It's very easy to sit back and claim "no heated discussions" when it doesn't involve millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of other peoples time when its your team that caused the fuck up

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#23

Post by generic92034 »

wood_spirit wrote: post #16

How do people cope in teams where some or even most members are vocal but actually always completely wrong and you’re the only one seeing it?

Well, if everyone you are encountering on the street is driving in the wrong direction, the probability that you are the wrong-way driver might be slightly increased. ;)

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#25

Post by viraptor »

tekla wrote: post #22
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't know how to respond to that. The idea of connecting anger to the relevancy of one's work seems so strange to me.

Ok, lets go with this, because empathy is hard, and it seems that most here have not experienced working on complex projects. I've personally experienced this. We have a project to develop a new engine, its teklaover budget, very late, and requires a ton more work and excuses are running thin. My team is running barebones with 60-70 hour weeks trying to get the ratings done, the test team is waiting on us for the rat…

Have you considered you internalised and normalised working in environments that are messed up 5 steps before the final problem? Crunch, angry managers, thinking "(they're) waiting for us to get our shit together" when planning/communication failed at higher level, "boss is begging us to submit the data" which has likely no impact on your speed of work, "and several hundred hours are now needing to be spent figuring out" is a thing that you have a process for and you know it can happen so the risk should be accounted for ahead of time and not surprising, "why they fucked up and why we suck" when things you know can fail do fail, "the ratings team now needs to go overtime" means more planning failure, etc.

This is toxic BS and mismanagement. It's people not accounting for and communicating risk properly. None of that anger and finger pointing makes this work faster or better. Everything here could happen exactly as it happened, but without anger, if people communicated risks properly and took the failure (which will happen) as part of the process, people would be less stressed about it, and maybe they'd make fewer mistakes too.

Maybe it was correct to progress without better data, or maybe the cost of doing that was too high. Either way, someone should've redone the schedule to match reality, so blocked teams don't get anxious. Then someone should've done the risk/benefit analysis and signed off on the "proceed with testing anyway, we are aware of and accept the risk" path, so nobody talks about fucking up, but concentrates on doing the best they can instead.

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#26

Post by bob1029 »

wood_spirit wrote: post #16

How do people cope in teams where some or even most members are vocal but actually always completely wrong and you’re the only one seeing it?

Sometimes the fastest way to win is to completely disengage. If these people are actually wrong all of the time, they will spiral even faster without your intervention.

Alternatively, use your opponent's momentum against them. Reorient your thinking and accelerate the destruction of their bad ideas by encouraging them.

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#27

Post by InsideOutSanta »

tekla wrote: post #22
InsideOutSanta wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don't know how to respond to that. The idea of connecting anger to the relevancy of one's work seems so strange to me.

Ok, lets go with this, because empathy is hard, and it seems that most here have not experienced working on complex projects. I've personally experienced this. We have a project to develop a new engine, its teklaover budget, very late, and requires a ton more work and excuses are running thin. My team is running barebones with 60-70 hour weeks trying to get the ratings done, the test team is waiting on us for the rat…

Nothing you describe is normal, healthy, worthy of emulation, or good.

I've worked in large cross-company teams on extremely complex products with millions of LOC and thirty-year-old obsolete code handling millions of US$s of bank transactions. I've been in situations where people made mistakes, systems went down, and transactions were lost. I've been in incredibly stressful situations.

Do you know what would have made none of these situations better? Anger.

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#28

Post by roxolotl »

Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read.

This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe.

Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict.

Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#29

Post by viraptor »

makeitdouble wrote: post #13

> Ideas get challenged based on what they are, not who said them Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ? It's not just that single quote, the whole article felt like a Don Quixote battling the windmills that keep silencing the wise engineers bearing their valid criticism as a spear. Or perhaps it was aimed at dictat…

> Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ?

You'd think it's basic. But then you can read up on the history of checklists and how lives were saved by empowering nurses to point out that surgeons forgot some step.

Or Toyota empowering any worker to stop the production line if they suspect a defect.

Or any number of "we should treat other teams and people as worth listening to instead of dismissing them" which in IT seems like a really common problem between dev and test.

> But then, will they even listen to this author ?

People causing the issue will not. But their teams may learn that this is not normal and start enacting change themselves. Or at least do things differently in the future in their own projects.

> Who's raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ?

Nobody says this directly. (Just like almost nobody says "I discriminate against ...") But listen to how people internally refer to other teams, and ask yourself if they would consider/accept the outside perspective without a needless fight. Have you already met people who will in conversations say "those idiots in (other team)"?

Re: Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

#30

Post by jcelerier »

InsideOutSanta wrote: post #19
tekla wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe, but if you're never getting heated, the work doesn't matter in the first place.

I genuinely don't know how to respond to that. The idea of connecting anger to the relevancy of one's work seems so strange to me.

Had multiple girlfriends for whom having regular fights was an essential part of a "healthy" relationship, e.g. told me clearly the relationship was dead if we didn't have any conflicts. I guess that's the same mindset ..
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