No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.
No matter how much I try to explain to some executives that you don't want the most productive individuals, you want the most productive team, they just don't get it.
Imo a good example are soccer teams. To be in the top 5 the team has to work as one hivemind which only works if the people making up the team (coaches and players) actually work together on both the sport side as well as on the social side of things.
Different to corporate jobs those teams spend tremendous amounts on scouting, analysis etc.. They don't just look for the best player but also one who fits as a person.
I think the core issue is that management hasn't picked this up yet and understanding team chemistry etc is totally undervalued. I'd argue this is partly due to this being hard to measure and very hard to do.
The real test of this is whether a manager can fire their single most productive employee because he/she is ruining the social harmony of the team.
I've seen managers in my career bend over backward to protect people who were outright abusive to their coworkers but were individually very productive. Those managers didn't go very far. Your team is not a car collection.
It's hard because you have to constantly make "sub-optimal" decisions. If you optimise for things you can measure, or at least see right now, you get a low performing team of high performers, or you get a collection of local maxima. Optimising for a global maximum requires making decisions that have unclear pay-off, that are harder to justify. Another problem is that one of these decisions that was actually wrong, vs one that hasn't paid off yet, look the same.
I suspect executives very much get it, but realise that there's no obviously good answer here.
Part of me wonders whether trying to optimise at all is the problem.
The worst managers I've had were optimisers (and had the worst teams), and the best managers with the best teams weren't optimisers.
The best ones didn't care about metrics at all, but would work to get their teams the tools and/or conditions they wanted to do a good job. Of course it probably only works with a certain level of talent and alignment in the team
There's also the executive's incentives, and "I'll be gone, you'll be gone": the payoff for that is very long, and it will be hard for them to take credit, and their own tenure might not be as long as that team's.
Executives can fire individuals and keep the train running for a while. They can't fire "teams" unless they know that product doesn't need to be maintained anymore.
This might just be hanlon's razor and I'm overthinking it, but part of me wonders if it's less "executives don't get it" and more "executives do not want to get it".
AI seems to compound this issue. One person can appear incredibly productive, say by submitting a huge volume of PRs, but that can slow down the rest of the team by deluging them with PRs and operational issues that they have to solve.
This is why I strongly like on-call.
A lot of people hate it, but if you have a rotation, that will force this person to deal with what they create during their rotations, and the operational issues will be an explicit part of your job when you're dealing with them.
When it kind of goes to random people, the conscientious people who fix the bugs and operational issues look unproductive, and the aggressive people throwing slop over the wall who never bother look great.
Forcing this through a rotating cast, and having other people not worry about it unless management decides it's too much for one person and they need help during this rotation, really avoids some of the most toxic outcomes around this.
On-call doesn't have to mean someone is getting paged at 3am. It does mean everyone rotates through, and it is clear who has the monkey, so you don't have passive-aggressive vs. conscientious behavior hiding issues like that.
Sometimes they get it but don't know the recipe to cook it themselves so they get takeout (talent acquisition)