Effective teams don’t keep secrets
theadamthomas.com
Effective teams don’t keep secrets
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Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#2> If I don’t believe that other members of my culture have my best interests at heart, I may decide to keep as many secrets as possible to prevent information from being leveraged against me.
The biggest challenge for me here is that I don’t believe a team or company can have my best interest at heart, as they often conflict with the best interests of the company.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#3While I agree in principle, the main issue I've seen many times is this usually rolls down to apply to engineering only. "Oh you devs can't fix that bug or refactor that without talking to 'the team'". "Why is that architect suggesting and interfering with 'the team'"? etc, but then UX and product have their own planning, initiatives, roadmaps, etc that are totally off the books and never discussed by this so called team.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#4> If I don’t believe that other members of my culture have my best interests at heart, I may decide to keep as many secrets as possible to prevent information from being leveraged against me. The biggest challenge for me here is that I don’t believe a team or company can have my best interest at heart, as they often conflict with the best interests of the company.
Is your main goal in life not to maximize stockholder profits? How strange!
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#5Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems.
I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us.
In order to make everyone's lives easier, I will sometimes work in secret on prototypes of more "controversial" ideas to bring before the team. I find starting the conversation with "Here's a new thing you can actually see and play with" eliminates 99% of the annoying bullshit you get out of non-technical folks.
It takes some discipline to do this correctly (i.e. don't ferret away on a secret prototype for more than ~1 week). That said, I can't imagine how you would scale an organization if everyone had to know everything always.
Also, none of this stuff is actually secret. It's more of a need-to-know basis. If someone explicitly asked me about one of these efforts, I would tell them everything they wanted to know and then some.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#6Privacy over secrecy is an alright goal, but the rest of it sounds like consultant double-talk.
In theory, "eliminating secrets" means the manager listening to the report's reservations and addressing them effectively. In practice, it means rooting out dissent and silencing opposition. The manager has created an environment where their reports don't feel safe talking to them. Instead of asking hard questions like "how the hell did I, the manager, screw up so badly", the article suggests easy answers like Project Retros or 1:1s.
The article is further undermined by author's inexperience in product management. Brand building as an "expert" with only a few years in industry is a red flag.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#7Unfortunately the effectiveness of a team doesn't necessarily support the individuals within it. If a worker feels expendable, which they typically are, they may keep "secrets" regarding the functioning of certain aspects of a process or maintain the exclusivity of some relevant relationship to make the team more dependent on them. A team needs to support the necessary incentives for the members of that team to feel the team's success translates to their own personal success.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#8This is a simplistic take. Of course trust is a pre-requisite to a healthy team, and people should feel comfortable speaking out, there's no debate about that. However, transparency is not a silver bullet. I've seen plenty of teams that trust each other but don't get very much done. And if what you are doing is large and involves more than a two-pizza team or challenging tradeoffs then effective communication becomes much harder. If everyone just speaks their unfiltered thoughts without thinking about how those words will be perceived there is a high likelihood of confusion and churn. There is also the matter of expertise, and the fact that many important truths may not be grokked by all stakeholders, so just blurting them out may lead to furrowed brows and unproductive lines of questioning—or worse—a bad decision fueled by misunderstanding.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#9Privacy over secrecy is an alright goal, but the rest of it sounds like consultant double-talk. In theory, "eliminating secrets" means the manager listening to the report's reservations and addressing them effectively. In practice, it means rooting out dissent and silencing opposition. The manager has created an environment where their reports don't feel safe talking to them. Instead of asking hard questions like "ho…
This part I felt was especially specious:
> Both backchanneling and micromanaging are easy to identify. When there are different answers to the same question, that’s the result of backchanneling. When you see clones instead of people, it’s a sign of micromanagement. The good news is that once you see these trends emerging in your team, there are some concrete steps you can take to roll them back.
First of all, there are plenty reasons to have a private conversation, and backchanneling is not a priori a bad thing. And the part about micromanagement leading to people "being clones" is gobbledygook—what does that even mean? And then the suggestion that those things are magically fixed just by the most basic entry level management practice of 1:1s and retros.
Frankly, it feels as though the author has tried to generalize some personal experience and completely lost the script. In reality, management is very hard and very contextual. For any given action there is a time and a place. Specifics matter.
Re: Effective teams don’t keep secrets
#10Sometimes letting someone know about a piece of information too early can cause problems. I have some very anxious team members who will get on edge when the development team starts to use key words like "refactor" and "iterate". Our organization has a historical track record of certain technical efforts being a complete dumpster fire and the PTSD of that has stuck around with many of us. In order to make everyone's…
This. Sometimes holding information until things are ready is the kindest thing to do for anxious people.