There Is No Individual
Principles for Leading Software Teams: Part V
“The team is paramount…” Wise words uttered by Bill Campbell as recorded in Trillion Dollar Coach. Most people would probably agree with that, but many software leaders don’t behave like they do.
As our next principle for leading software teams, I’ll put it this way: there is no individual — only the team. I like to think of the team as the indivisible, atomic unit that can do work within an organization. In other words, as a manager, don’t worry about who is doing what inside the team; worry about what the team is doing.
I’ll let Bill explain his thinking further (again, Trillion Dollar Coach):
There is [a] critical … factor for success in companies: teams that act as communities, integrating interests and putting aside differences to be individually and collectively obsessed with what’s good for the company. Research shows that when people feel like they are part of a supportive community at work, they are more engaged with their jobs and more productive. Conversely, a lack of community is a leading factor in job burnout.
additionally,
…teams of people who subordinate individual performance to that of the group will generally outperform teams that don’t.
Good stuff, but to be honest, I didn’t arrive at this principle because of what Bill said. His thinking just became a confirmation for what I had been observing empirically. I’ve always been more of a rugged individualist. If I can’t accomplish this on my own, I don’t deserve to be employed. Leaning on a team felt like cheating. The more experienced I became as a manager though, I just began to see the numerous benefits that came with favoring the team over the individual.
The Benefits
So let’s enumerate those benefits.
To start with, relying on a team eliminates single points of failure. If someone on the team is unavailable, no worries. That person wasn’t responsible for anything anyway. The team was. You’ll never have to worry about whether or not you can approve someone’s vacation request. So long as the team coordinates within itself, you don’t have to worry about someone being away. That’s antifragile.
A team has broad shoulders. No single person is carrying a burden alone (like a production outage). You’ve always got your teammates in the trenches next to you. That reduces stress, and remember: stress robs you of your ability to think strategically.
Let’s take a short digression on diversity. Studies repeatedly show that it breeds creativity and innovation. It makes sense, right? If everyone in the room brainstorming on an activity has the same background, no one is thinking “outside the box”. While I can’t lay my finger on it right now, I once heard that innovations on the hyperloop open source project were largely coming from people working outside of their official area of expertise. (Maybe someone can pass along a supporting link?) David Epstein’s Range makes the point that an individual that has been exposed to a wider more diverse background will outperform the specialists. It’s an exciting thought.
What does all of that have to do with teams? If all work is accomplished by a team (rather than an individual), so long as the team’s collaboration dynamics are good you’re forcing diversity of thought on how that work is being done. That gets us innovation.
Teams are an incubator for psychological safety. At my company, we favor small, durable teams. The small size and being together over months and years through “thick and thin” makes space for establishing the kinds of relationships that breed safety. Of course, this assumes you have good people on the team. See my later point about hiring for collaboration.
Surprisingly, a team can also do a good job of performance management. A wise mentor of mine made the case that it matters more what your peers think of your performance than what the boss thinks. You can fool the boss. You can’t fool your peers. Bad performance just pisses them off. A high performing team will expel an underperformer. That feeds productivity.
The Objections
There are a couple of common objections to this approach. The first seems to stem from the notion that you have to have one accountable person — a “throat to choke.” Or put another way: “If everyone is responsible, then no one is responsible.” To be honest, I just haven’t had a problem with this. I’ll take a stab at why. I have definitely seen situations where a group of people will agree to care for something as a group, and that thing eventually just falls through the cracks. Every scenario where I have seen that, the thing being cared for is often a second or third job — not anyone’s primary responsibility. If you do a good job of setting clear goals for a team and you limit work in progress, then everyone on the team will feel “on the hook” to accomplish the goal. No need to have a “point person”.
A second concern is that you can end up with groupthink or in extreme circumstances the Abilene Paradox. This, on the other hand, is a serious concern. I’ve seen it in action. This is where a good manager or team coach can shine. We typically have our teams go through some basic ceremonies: take personality tests, establish a “team canvas”, write up some working agreements. If you have the team members take the “big five” personality test and discover that everyone on the team is highly agreeable, you have some work ahead of you. Bottom line? Be vigilant.
The Practices
In that spirit, if you really want to harness the power of the team, here are a few suggestions.
Avoid hero worship. It’s tempting when you have someone that always wants to jump into the fire to save everyone, but don’t give in. It undermines the team and leaves the organization vulnerable to a single point of failure.
Hire for collaboration. We have a hierarchy of priorities that we evaluate when we’re interviewing people (which I stole from this wise mentor of mine that I keep mentioning). The most important trait of all? Personality. If you want your teams to be productive and effective, you need to hire people that don’t want to be lone wolves and that are good at getting along with others. I’m getting ahead of myself a bit (future essay), but too many people get hung up on the productivity of one person. That shouldn’t matter to you as a manager. Your biggest concern is the productivity of the overall system, and as Google found out in project Aristotle, putting all your rock stars on a team doesn’t necessarily make for a rock star team.
I’m going to get some hate mail for this, but you should prefer having the people on your teams colocated (as in, working in the same office). This is a much longer topic with a lot of facets, but in this context, it’s worth sharing the case made by Daniel Coyle in Culture Code. In that book, there is a chapter on “How to Design for Belonging” where Coyle introduces us to the Allen Curve. The Allen Curve was discovered during the Cold War. That environment gave Thomas Allen a perfect laboratory for studying the success and productivity of teams. What he discovered was that the most successful projects were completed by teams that sat closely to one another. From the book:
“Something as simple as visual contact is very, very important, more important than you might think,” Allen says. “If you can see the other person or even the area where they work, you’re reminded of them, and that brings a whole bunch of effects.”
Allen decided to dig deeper, measuring frequency of interactions against distance. “We could look at how often people communicated and see where they were located in relation to each other,” he says. “We could see, just through the frequency, without knowing where they sat, who was on each floor. We were really surprised at how rapidly it decayed” when they moved to a different floor. “If you’re on a different floor in some organizations, you may as well be in a different country.”
Further,
As scientists have pointed out, the Allen Curve follows evolutionary logic. For the vast majority of human history, sustained proximity has been an indicator of belonging — after all, we don’t get consistently close to someone unless it’s mutually safe. Studies show that digital communications also obey the Allen Curve; we’re far more likely to text, email, and interact virtually with people who are physically close. (One study found that workers who shared a location emailed one another four times as often as workers who did not, and as a result they completed their projects 32 percent faster).
Of course, it’s not just as simple as forcing everyone into the office. Working from home has obviously become commonplace in our COVID era, and regardless of how the industry shakes out over the coming months and years, working from home will be a perk/benefit that many will seek out. Even so, it’s worth understanding this dynamic if you desire to make the team “paramount”.
Finally, embrace being what Bill Campbell calls a “tension spotter”. One of your most important jobs as a manager is caring for team dynamics. Being able to observe and artfully intervene when necessary will keep your teams from grinding to a halt. What Bill means by tension is some obstacle that the team isn’t able to get past, likely because they’re uncomfortable discussing it (maybe tempers flare when it comes up or possibly it isn’t clear who has the authority to make a decision). Bill’s style was to “‘beat the politics out of the situation’ by bringing up the problem clearly, then forcing everyone to focus on it.” If that’s not your cup of tea, find people in your organization that can help.
What do you think? Was this all stuff you already understood? Or maybe you find yourself having trouble letting go at that level and don’t trust that the team will just figure it out and do the right thing. Leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
Curious to Learn More?
Check out Principles for Leading Software Teams: A Guide for related articles and reference materials.
Postscripts
A few tidbits related to this topic that I have stumbled across since posting:
- An interesting episode of Hidden Brain mentioned the Proximity Principle which states basically that the closer you are to someone physically (e.g., in a work setting), the closer you will be to that person relationally — interestingly similar to the Allen Curve.
- Famous article in the New Yorker makes a number of great points about teamwork, collaboration, and collocation. Particularly poignant quote on proximity: “The best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten metres of each other; the least cited papers tended to emerge from collaborators who were a kilometre or more apart.”
- We’re attempting to follow The Silicon Valley Product Group’s approach to product management. I was interested to learn that their founder Marty Cagan is a believer in collocation.
- Ed Catmull in Creativity, Inc.: “Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.”
- From Team Topologies: “…teams working as a cohesive unit perform far better than collections of individuals for knowledge-rich, problem-solving tasks that require high amounts of information. Even previously hierarchical organizations such as the US Army have adopted the team as the fundamental unit of operation.”
