Managing Teams


I try to distill some hard-earned experience in leading and managing groups into a few basic instructions for success. The blend of leadership and management strategies I describe are effective for both product- and service-related efforts. If you've ever been in a leadership position, you may find that I am articulating much of what you've already discovered through experienceand by applying common sense.

1. Focus on building a strong team that can solve hard problems and add genuine value for the customer

The key words here are focus, team, hard problems, and the customer. You need to have a focus; otherwise, your energy will not be well-directed.

And, as it is your team that will ultimately produce the results you need, your main focus should be on building and supporting that team.

The best definition of "team" I've found is that of Katzenbach and Smith:[1]

[1] Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams (New York: Harper Business, 1993).

A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.

Your first challenge is to find the right combination of people with the right combination of skills and personal qualities. Then, to maintain a sharp edge, the team you assemble needs a performance challengeto tackle and solve hard problems. There is no point in forming a superb team and then letting it loose on a trivial problem.

These problems also need to be customer-focused. Avoid tasking your team with self-serving internal research and development work. If you keep the customer in your sights, there is a much better chance that you will be aiming at a real target. More fundamentally, you need to produce something that adds real value to the customer's situation. Sometimes this involves understanding what customers really need, as opposed to what they think they want.

2. Leaders inspire; managers enable. To be both a good leader and a good manager, you need to communicate the vision and understand the details

There is a difference between leadership and management. In an ideal world, we'd all embody the best attributes of great leaders and effective managers, and avoid the stereotypical failings of each.

Leaders are often charismatic, but they do not have to be. A leader who displays quiet determination and steadfast endurance can be as inspirational as one who breathes fire. What the best leaders do is transmit a sense of missiona visionto the rest of the team that inspires and sustains; they lead by example. This encourages teams to accomplish great deeds.

Managers, like leaders, also need to understand the big picture (vision) that drives each project. But they also need to grasp the details that will allow the team to fulfill that vision. Managers need to be enablers: planners, negotiators, pulse-takers, and removers of obstacles. You cannot do this kind of work effectively without understanding the details. And, the more technically challenging the problem domain, the more important this understanding becomes.

Managers and leaders need to know one another's business but remember that they have distinct specialties. A leader's primary job is to communicate the vision. The manager's primary job is to understand the details and enable the team to work effectively and move forward.

Rarely do outstanding leadership and managerial qualities reside in one person. If you are charged with setting up a team, finding one person to fill both roles may be too hard. Instead, understand whether your primary candidate is mainly a leader or a manager, and then find a complementary person for him or her to work with. And analyzing your own strengths and weaknesses will pay dividends when you select a partner to help you lead or manage your next project.

3. Anticipate obstacles, and eliminate them while they're small

Nothing fancy here. Most problems seem small when they're either far off in the future or way back in the pastbut in their own "time neighborhood," they loom large. This is partly a trick of perspective, but there are other, more insidious reasons, too.

The simple fact is that small problems, left unattended, grow over time. This is certainly true for employee discontent; left unaddressed, it festers and becomes worse. Better to brush plaque from your teeth every day than to let it build up and destroy them.

Some items, such as capital equipment acquisition, are naturally "long lead." If you address them far enough in advance, you can handle such needs administratively. You can budget for capital equipment, order it, plan for it, install it, and so on. Ordinarily, it's not a problem. But what if you don't do the required homework well in advance? You'll have to beg, borrow, or steal when lack of equipment becomes a crisis. The small obstacle will become a big one.

Typically, two types of management animals wind up in this situation: ostriches (problem avoiders) and sloths (procrastinators). The ostriches never lift their heads out of the sand to look for present and future obstacles, so they are perpetually being unpleasantly surprised. The sloths know about the problems but put off doing anything about them. The problems, of course, take no offense; they'll stick around whether or not anyone pays attention to them.

To lead well and manage effectively, you must aggressively seek out potential obstacles and attack them. There's no excuse for getting blindsided: good management is the art of intelligent anticipation.

4. Take the time to listen to others carefully, but don't worry too much about what other people think

Not listening is a cardinal sin. If you think you're too busy to listen, then you have your priorities wrong. You don't have to listen to absolutely everyone, and you don't have to listen to everyone equally, but listening is a must.

Scientists know that they ignore data at their peril. You may want to discount certain data after gathering it. But get the data. And get it first-hand whenever possible. Raw, unfiltered data is always valuableeven redundant data, because it allows for cross-checking.

Remember, however, that you don't have to be a slave to your data givers. Sometimes you'll come up with ideas that others find strange or unpopular, and they'll let you know it. Listen to them, weigh what they're telling youboth the words and the musicand then choose your course. Don't let what others think dissuade you when you know what needs to be done. You are not being paid to be popular; you are being paid to get a job done. If you worry too much about the opinions of others, then you will succumb to the weathervane effectyou will change direction every time the wind does.

This counsel may be controversial, because we live in a time and a culture that favors consensus. But consensus-based decisions can be wrong or, in some cases, represent bad compromises that a team makes when driven by severe time constraints. If your team can't achieve a strong consensus and paralysis sets in, it becomes imperative for you, the leader, to make a decision and go forward. In such cases, whatever decision you make will inevitably leave some, or even all, of the participants unhappy, at least for a time. What you must make clear to everyone is that making no decision is the worst course; a decision, after all, will inevitably have to be made, and in the meantime, valuable time is being lost. You'll achieve the best outcome in these situations if you make sure that all the players feel they've "had their day in court"that you've heard them out. They don't have to agree with the decision, but they do have to accept it. This is fundamental to team success.

5. Focus on facts

For many reasons, we frequently violate this guideline, almost always with disastrous consequences. Deal with reality. Always relate to what is, not to what you would have liked or what could have been or what might be in the future. Stay in the present, and deal with the facts.

Separate facts from opinions. Also separate facts from their consequences or implications; often people report these concurrently or confuse them.

When engaged in discussions, evaluations, critiques, and other issues that involve performance, stay focused on the facts as opposed to the personalities of the people involved. Evaluate data based on its factual content, not on the source. Gather facts first and reserve judgment until later.

I have found that writing things down helps me focus on facts. Sometimes this involves making lists, writing things in a standard format, or just creating notes for future reference. When I do this, it becomes very clear when I can legitimately use verbs like "is" and "are" rather than verbs like "appears to be" and "seems to."

6. Provide stability by being an attenuator, not an amplifier

This is an important attribute.

Most of our information channels are "noisy." Every organization has a rumor mill that is constantly churning out misinformation. As managers and leaders, we need to avoid amplifying the noise so that we don't mask the signal. Rarely is a new situation as good or as bad as it looks at first. Take in the data, absorb it, and then decide on appropriate action. A measured response is almost always best. As crises spike within your organization, remember that "this, too, shall pass," and be the one who sets an example for the rest of the team. To lead effectively, you must keep your head while those around you are losing theirs. Your job is to dampen the spikes and surges and restore regularity to the daily flow of energy.

Occasionally, you may be forced into acting quickly, or an "unmeasured" response may even be desirable. For example, if someone lures away a key employee with a "Godfather offer,"[2] then you need to react quickly if you hope to turn the situation around. Or if your team makes a major breakthrough, you'll want to react with unbridled enthusiasm, no holds barred. You'll recognize these exceptional situations when they crop up.

[2] A "Godfather" offer is one that cannot be refused. It comes from the film of the same name.

7. Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence

If someone says or does something that may affect you or your team in an adverse way, be very careful not to jump to the wrong conclusion; paranoia can get you into a lot of trouble. If the act seems wrongheaded, first assume that it was a mistake. Try to imagine the erroneous set of assumptions that might have led the person to this action. Put yourself in his or her shoes.

Only after eliminating all possible "error scenarios" should you even entertain the notion that impure motives were at work. Why? Consider the consequences. If you assume malice and you are wrong, then you will almost certainly make an enemyand enemies have a nasty habit of accumulating. It's silly to make them unnecessarily.

If you incorrectly assume incompetence, on the other hand, then, yes, you may get burned. But you will be burned only once. When you give the perpetrator a chance to reconsider his "mistake," then he's sure to expose his true colors. In the long run, you'll have earned the trust of other team members by treating your enemy with respect.

I also believe that incompetence is far more widespread than evil. This may be a naïve view, but I believe statistics are on my side when I take this approach.

8. Cultivate a sense of humor as a counterweight to intensity: take the job seriously and yourself lightly

I have sometimes been called an intense person. This quality is both a blessing and a curse.

Intensity is the flame to brilliancy's spark. It allows you to focus, and it can help transmit a sense of purpose to the rest of the team. The refusal to give up, even in the face of adversity, is important.

But there is a dark side to intensity. It violates the Greek ideal of "everything in moderation": There's no such thing as "moderately intense." If you're a person who doesn't let go easily, then you need to be careful; don't let large, ongoing doses of your intensity poison your team.

Having a sense of humor helps. Even in times of crisis, you may need to step back enough to recognize the absurdity of it all. Laugh. Make fun of yourself. Recognize your mistakes and be proud of them, even though it hurts. My theory is that you have already paid for the mistake, and getting a laugh out of it at least brings you a little return on your investment.

I'm not talking about gallows humor here, which is scarcely better than no humor at all. I mean a real, robust appreciation for the follies that inevitably go along with working in an organization, trying to create something out of nothing, and being human.

Teams will forgive a lot of transgressions on the part of their managers, but incompetence, sloth, lack of reward for performance, and humorlessness are not among them.

9. Have a life outside of work, and read 25 books a year

Go back and read number 8 again. Work is a part of our lives. Sometimes we get so caught up in what we are doing that "life" seems to be an adjunct to our work. This is an out-of-balance situation, and you cannot be a good manager if you are chronically out of balance.

You cannot lead effectivelyor even surviveif you don't have something else to think about besides your job. For me, it has been family, physics, golf, and a few other miscellaneous interests. Go out to the movies, see plays, play poker, dance, howl at the moon. Whatever works for you. But remember, alcohol is a depressant.

Hot baths and long walks have also helped me. I've found that you have to do some kind of exercise to stay in shape, even if the only muscle you use during the day is your brain. That's why world champion chess players do rigorous physical training.

If the stress gets really bad, then talk to people outside your project and your company. They can help you gain perspective. Inside the company, your chief architect and your boss should be your main confidants.

Regular reading is another activity that's crucial for effectiveness and survival. As we grow older, we tend to recycle what has worked in the past instead of learning and trying new approaches. We gain more and more knowledge through experience, and less and less through formal channels. In addition to periodicals, you should set a goal of 25 books a year, which comes out to a book every two weeks. They don't all have to be new, and they don't all have to be technical. If travel is a part of your job, reading is an excellent way to use the time you might otherwise waste waiting around in airports or on the plane.

10. Trust your instincts: if it doesn't feel right, then it probably isn't

It's easy to get overly analytical. Sometimes we run the numbers until we're blue in the face without bothering to examine the underlying assumptions that went into collecting those numbers. Then, we come to a conclusion that doesn't feel right.

What's maddening about these situations is that we're unable to articulate the reasons for our discomfort. Nevertheless, fearing that this perverse situation will paralyze us, we forge ahead with the analysis and then take action, even though it doesn't feel right.

In the vast majority of these cases, I have regretted the decision. Here's my advice: If it really doesn't feel right, then trust your instincts. You didn't accumulate your "gut wisdom" overnight; you are feeling the sum total of all your past experiences when this happens. At the very least, force yourself to try to understand what is causing the discomfort and then address it.

In my case, most of these bad decisions have revolved around hiring. Never hire someone with whom you don't feel comfortable, which is not to say that you should never take a risk. If the risk level is high enough to make you uncomfortable, however, go with your gut, and don't make the offer. Hiring mistakes are among the most expensive you can make.

I've always believed that it's better to make a bad decision than to make no decision at all. When your important decisions and your tummy disagree, however, be careful!

Summing Up

If the 10 ideas I've presented seem like a bit of a grab bag, that's because they are. Management and leadership are still arts, not sciences; disciplines that attach the word "science" to themselvessuch as computer science, management science, and social scienceare suspect.[3] We learn what works empirically: by trying things, observing success and failure over a large number of attempts, and then trying to discern patterns. These 10 ideas have worked for me over an extended period of time, and all I can do is pass them on for your consideration and use. Your results may vary, because it is all in the application.

[3] This observation was originally communicated to me by Wayne Meretsky, a former developer at Rational.




The Software Development Edge(c) Essays on Managing Successful Projects
The Software Development Edge(c) Essays on Managing Successful Projects
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2006
Pages: 269

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