[Summary] Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd ed.

[Summary] Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd ed.

1)
Owning part of a good work somehow feels better than owning all of it. This
may seem like an odd notion, but if you've ever been part of a well-formed
team or a harmonious work group, you'll know what we mean.

2)
It's only after you're finished that you know how the thing really should
have been done.

3)
The folklore is full of easy remedies: Take the worker's
estimate and double it. Keep the pressure on. Don't let people
work at home, they'll only goof off.

4)
Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they've got
more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage
that way.

5)
The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than
the human side of the work is not because it's more crucial, but
because it's easier to do.


6)
Development is inherently different from production.


7)
You may be able to kick people to make them active, but
not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.

Even if kicking people in the backside did boost their short term
productivity, it might not be useful in the long run.

8)
The project that has to be done by an impossible fixed date is the very one
that can't afford not to have frequent brainstorms and
even a project dinner or some such affair to help the individual participants
knit into an effective whole.


9)

Nobody can really work much more than forty hours, at least not
continually and with the level of intensity required for creative work.

Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last
hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if
you start sprinting in the first mile, you're just wasting time.


10)
People under time pressure don't work better;
they Just work faster.
In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality
of the product and their own job satisfaction.


11)
In the workplace, the major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem.


12)
Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines.
They don't think about their action in such terms; they think
rather that what they're doing is throwing down an interesting challenge
to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence.

12-1)
Workers know that under the gun, their efforts will be overconstrained.
There will be no freedom to trade off resources to make on-time
delivery possible.
They won't have the option of more people or reduced function.
The only thing to give on will be quality. Workers kept under
extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will push
problems under the rug to be dealt with later or foisted off onto the
product's end user. They will deliver products that are unstable and
not really complete. They will hate what they're doing, but what
other choice do they have?


13)
The notion that work expands to fill the time allocated for it,
now known as Parkinson's Law.


14)
Programmers seem to be a bit more productive when they can do the estimate
themselves,
compared to cases in which the manager does it without even consulting them.
When the two do the estimating together, the results tend to fall in between.

15)
The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible
for people to work.


16)
There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get
one back.


17)
• Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1.
• Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median
   performer.
• Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the
   other half by more than 2:1.


18)
Do you often interrupt a discussion with co-workers or friends
to answer a phone? Of course you do. You don't even consider not
answering the phone. Yet what you're doing is a violation of the
common rules of fairness, taking people out of order, just because
they insist loudly (BBBRRRRHINNNNGGGGG!) on your attention. Not
only do you do this to others, you let them do it to you. And you're
so inured to this abuse that you hardly take note of it.

19)

The Timeless Way of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979




20)
THE RIGHT PEOPLE
The final outcome of any effort is more a function of who
does the work than of how the work is done. Yet modem management
science pays almost no attention to hiring and keeping the right
people.


21)
Management science is much more concerned with the boss's
role as principal strategist and tactician of the work. You are taught
to think of management as playing out one of those battle simulation
board games. There are no personalities or individual talents to be
reckoned with in such a game; you succeed or fail based on your
decisions of when and where to deploy your faceless resources.

22)
• get the right people
• make them happy so they don't want to leave
• turn them loose

23)
For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment
the team is formed and the initial directions set out. With talented
people, the manager can almost coast from that point on.



24)
Born Versus Made
A recurrent theme through all the novels is Hornblower*s gloomy
presentiment that achievers are born, not made.


25)

So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less
the same
at the end as they were at the beginning. If they're not right for the
job from the start, they never will be.

---
Parents do have a shaping effect on their children over the years,
and individuals can obviously bring
about huge changes in themselves. But managers are unlikely to
change their people in any meaningful way. People usually don't
stay put long enough, and the manager just doesn't have enough
leverage to make a difference in their nature.
So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less
the same
at the end as they were at the beginning. If they're not right for the
job from the start, they never will be.


26)

The managers with shaky self-confidence are uncomfortable with any
kind of behavior that is different from average. They need to impose
safely homogenized mores on those beneath them to demonstrate
that they are in charge.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising
and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager
is almost by definition unprofessional. So popcorn is unprofessional.
Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male
head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head.

Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be
considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like
everyone else, a perfect drone.

----

An anti-popcorn standard or even a dress standard might be
understandable if you worked in the Customer Relations Department
or in Sales. But in any other area, it makes no sense at all. There is
seldom if ever a client wandering through such space. These
"standards" have nothing to do with the organization's image as
perceived by outsiders. It's the image perceived by insiders that
matters. The insiders in question—typically second- and third-level
managers with shaky self-confidence—are uncomfortable with any
kind of behavior that is different from average. They need to impose
safely homogenized mores on those beneath them to demonstrate
that they are in charge.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising
and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager
is almost by definition unprofessional. So popcorn is unprofessional.
Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male
head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head. Posters of
any kind are unprofessional. Comfortable shoes are unprofessional.
Dancing around your desk when something good happens is unprofessional.
Giggling and laughing is unprofessional. (It's all right to
smile, but not too often.)
Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be
considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like
everyone else, a perfect drone.
Of course, this perverted sense of professionalism is pathological.

27)
Corporate Entropy
Entropy is levemess or sameness. The more it increases, the less
potential there is to generate energy or do work. In the corporation
or other organization, entropy can be thought of as uniformity of
attitude, appearance, and thought process. Just as thermodynamic
entropy is always increasing in the universe, so too corporate
entropy is on the rise:
SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT:
Entropy is always increasing in the organization.
That's why most elderly institutions are tighter and a lot less fun
than sprightly young companies.
There is not much you can do about this as a global phenomenon,
but you've got to fight it within your own domain. The
most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy
to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though
they may deviate from the corporate norm. Your organization may
have rigor mortis, but your little piece of it can hop and skip.


28)
Holding an Audition
The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more
dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than
their abilities to communicate with machines. So the hiring process
needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication
traits. The best way we've discovered to do this is through
the use of auditions for job candidates.
The idea is simple enough. You ask a candidate to prepare a
ten- or fifteen-minute presentation on some aspect of past work. It
could be about a new technology and the experience with first trying
it out, or about a management lesson learned the hard way, or about
a particularly interesting project. The candidate chooses die subject.
The date is set and you assemble a small audience made up of those
who will be the new hire's co-workers.
Of course the candidate will be nervous, perhaps even reluctant
to undertake such an experience. You'll have to explain that all
candidates are nervous about the audition and give your reasons for
holding one: to see the various candidates' communication skills,
and to give the future co-workers a part in the hiring process.
At the end of the audition and after the candidate has left, you
hold a debriefing of those present. Each one gets to comment on the
person's suitability for the job and whether he or she seems likely to
fit well into the team. Although it's ultimately your responsibility to
decide whether to hire or not, the feedback from future co-workers
can be invaluable. Even more important, any new person hired is
more likely to be accepted smoothly into the group, since the other
group members have had a voice in choosing the candidate.


29)
HAPPY TO BE HERE
This chapter begins with a pop quiz:
Ql. What annual employee turnover has your organization
experienced over the last few years?
Q2. How much does it cost on average to replace a person
who leaves?
Score yourself as follows: If you had any answer at all to the two
questions, you pass. Otherwise you fail. Most people fail.
In all fairness, perhaps it's not your job to know about such
things. Okay, we'll re-score your quiz. You pass if anyone in your
organization has a real answer to the two questions. Most people
still fail. We avoid measuring turnover for the same reason that
heavy smokers avoid having long serious talks with their doctors
about longevity: It's a lot of bother that can only result in bad news.
Turnover: The Obvious Costs


30)
The total cost of replacing each
person is the equivalent of four-and-a-half to five months of
employee cost or about twenty percent of the cost of keeping that
employee for the full two years on the job.

31)
The Hidden Costs of Turnover
Employee turnover costs about twenty percent of all manpower
expense. But that's only the visible cost of turnover. There is an
ugly invisible cost that can be far worse.
In companies with high turnover, people tend toward a
destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just
aren't going to be there very long. So if you find yourself campaigning
for better workspace for your staff, for example, don't be
surprised to bump into someone up the hierarchy who counters with
an argument like this:
"Hold on there, Buster. You're talking about big bucks.
If we gave our engineers that much space and noise protection
and even privacy, we might end up spending fifty
dollars per person per month! Multiply that times all the
engineers and you're into the tens of thousands of dollars.
We can't spend that kind of money. I'm as much
in favor of productivity as the next guy, but have you
seen what a terrible third quarter we're having?"
Of course, the irrevocably logical answer to this is that investing
now in a sensible environment will help to avoid terrible third quarters
in the future. But save your breath. You have encountered a
short-term perspective that no amount of irrevocable logic is going
to sway. This person is on his or her way out of the company. The
short-term cost is very real, but the long-term benefit has no meaning
whatsoever.

32)
In an organization with high turnover, nobody is willing to
take the long view. If the organization is a bank, it will lend money
to the Ugandan Development Corporation because the twenty-two
percent interest looks terrific on this quarter's books. Of course, the
UDC will default in a couple of years, but who's even going to be
here then? If the organization is a development shop, it will optimize
for the short term, exploit people, cheat on the workplace, and
do nothing to conserve its very lifeblood, the peopleware that is its
only real asset. If we ran our agricultural economy on the same
basis, we'd eat our seed corn immediately and all starve next year.
If people only stick around a year or two, the only way to
conserve the best people is to promote them quickly. That means
near beginners being promoted into first-level management positions.
They may have only five years of experience and perhaps
less than two years with the company.

33)
There is something very disconcerting about these numbers.
A person with a work life of, say, forty years will spend five years
working and thirty-five managing. That implies an exceedingly tall,
narrow hierarchy. Fifteen percent of the staff is doing work, with
eighty-five percent managing. As little as ten percent of the cost
could be spent on the workers, with ninety percent going to reward
the managers. Even Marx didn't foresee such top-heaviness of capitalistic
structures.
Not only is the structure wastefully top-heavy, it tends to have
very lightweight people at the bottom. This is somewhat true
throughout the industry, but strikingly true in high-turnover companies.
It's not unusual to see serious, mature companies turning
out products that are developed by workers with an average age in
their twenties, and average experience of less than two years.


34)
Many of us have come to believe that companies that promote
early are where the action is. That's natural, because as young
workers we're eager to get ahead. But from the corporate perspective,
late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low
turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes
only after as much as ten years with the company. (This has long
been true of some of the strongest organizations within IBM, for
example.) The people at the lowest level have on the average at least
five years'experience. The hierarchy is low and flat.

35)
Why People Leave
For the individuals considering a change in job, the reasons can be
as many and varied as the personalities involved. For the organization
with pathologically high turnover (anything over fifty percent),
a few reasons account for most departures:
? a just-passing-through mentality: Co-workers engender no
feelings of long-term involvement in the job.
? a feeling of disposability: Management can only think of
its workers as interchangeable parts (since turnover is so
high, nobody is indispensable).
* a sense that loyalty would be ludicrous: Who could be
loyal to an organization that views its people as parts?

The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover.
People leave quickly, so there's no use spending money on training.
Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual
thinks nothing of moving on. New people are not hired for
their extraordinary qualities, since replacing extraordinary qualities
is too difficult. The feeling that the company sees nothing extraordinary
in the worker makes the worker feel unappreciated as an individual.
Other people are leaving all the time, so there's something
wrong with you if you're still here next year.

36)
You can prove that community gardens don't make any sense
at all in the short term. Whatever costs there are will come right out
of this quarter's bottom line. At most companies, that would be
enough to quash the concept immediately. But in the best organizations,
the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters
more is being best. And that's a long-term concept.
People tend to stay at such companies because there is a
widespread sense that you are expected to stay. The company
invests hugely in your personal growth. There may be a Master's
program or an extensive training period for new hires, as much as a
year in some places. It's hard to miss the message that you are
expected to stay, when the company has just invested that much in
your formation.

A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is
widespread retraining. You're forever bumping into managers and
officers who started out as secretaries, payroll clerks, or mail-boys.
They came into the company green, often right out of school. When
they needed new skills to make a change, the company provided
those skills. No job is a dead end.
Again, one can prove that retraining is not the cheapest way to
fill a new slot. It's always cheaper in the short run to fire the person
who needs retraining and hire someone else who already has the
required skills. Most organizations do just that. The best organizations
do not. They realize that retraining helps to build the mentality
of permanence that results in low turnover and a strong sense
of community. They realize that it more than justifies its cost.


37)
Methodology Madness
Of course, if your people aren't smart enough to think their way
through their work, the work will fail. No Methodology will help.
Worse still, Methodologies can do grievous damage to efforts in
which the people are fully competent. They do this by trying to
force the work into a fixed mold that guarantees
• a morass of paperwork,
• a paucity of methods,
• an absence of responsibility, and
• a general loss of motivation.

38)
Perhapsit's time to introduce this contrary and heretical notion:
Voluminous documentation Is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

40)
Concept of the Jelled Team
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is
greater than the sum of the parts. The production of such a team is
greater than that of the same people working in unjelled form. Just
as important, the enjoyment that people derive from their work is
greater than what you'd expect given the nature of the work itself.

41)
Management by Hysterical Optimism
Some managers are disturbed by the sentiments of the preceding
paragraph. They find it distasteful to consider any artifice for getting
workers to accept corporate goals. Why should we need to form
elaborate social units to do that? After all, professional developers
are supposed to accept their employer's goals as a condition of
employment. That's what it means to be a professional.
Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational
goals is the sign of naive managerial optimism. The mechanism by
which individuals involve themselves in the organization's objectives
is more complex than that. You wouldn't be surprised to
learn, for example, that the fellow you know as a database specialist
is more inclined to describe himself as a father, a boy scout leader,
and a member of the local school board. In these roles, he makes
thoughtful value judgments all the time. What would be a surprise
is if he stopped making value judgments when he arrived at work.
He doesn't He is continually at work examining each claim for his
individual energies and loyalty. Organizational goals come in for
constant scrutiny by the people who work for the organization, and
most of those goals are judged to be awfully arbitrary.

The dilemma here is that as boss, you have probably accepted
the corporate goal (bring the project home by next April for less than
$750,000), and accepted it wholeheartedly. If your staff isn't just
as enthusiastic, you're disappointed. Their lack of interest might
seem almost treasonous to you. But hold on here, is it possible that
your own strong identification with a corporate goal stems from
something beyond mere professionalism? Isn't it true that some artful
engineering on the part of your boss and the powers above has
made that corporate goal line up exactly with one of your own?
Meeting the corporate aims is certain to lead directly to more authority
and responsibility for you: "Today the Sysboombah Project,
tomorrow the world!" Throughout the upper ranks of the organization,
there is marvelous ingenuity at work to be sure that each manager
has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals.
Only at the bottom, where the real work is performed, does this
ingenuity fail. There we count on "professionalism" and nothing else
to assure that people are all pulling in the same direction.
Lots of luck.


42)
The Guns of Navarone
Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people—
corporations seem arbitrary to people—but the arbitrariness of
goals doesn't mean no one is ever going to accept them. If it did,
we wouldn't have sports. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary.
The Universe doesn't care whether the little white ball goes
between the posts at Argentina's end of the field or those at Italy's.
But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome.
Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to.
Those at the periphery of a team may be mildly interested in
the team's success or failure, but their interest is tiny compared to
that of the team members. People who work on jelled teams often
get so involved that they're psyched up enough to storm the guns of
Navarone, all just to pass the version 3 acceptance test for the pension
trust system. You have to remind them that what they're striving
to accomplish is not the Moral Equivalent of War.

43)
Signs of a Jelled Team
A few very characteristic signs indicate that a jelled team has
occurred. The most important of these is low turnover during projects
and in the middle of well-defined tasks. The team members
aren't going anywhere till the work is done. Things that matter
enormously prior to jell (money, status, position for advancement)
matter less or not at all after jell. People certainly aren't about to
leave their team for a rinky-dink consideration like a little more
salary. Sadly, managers often miss this strong indication of their
own success. They are disinclined to pay attention to turnover even
when it's killing them; when turnover is low, they don't think about
it at all.


44)
Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity.
The teams you hear discussed in the industry have colorful names:
the "Okie Coders" at General Electric, etc.


45)
Teammates may all use the same catch phrases and share many injokes.
There may be obvious team space. The teams may congregate
at lunch or hang out at the same watering hole after work.
There is a sense ofeliteness on a good team. Team members
feel they're part of something unique. They feel they're better than
the run of the mill. They have a cocky, SWAT Team attitude that
may be faintly annoying to people who aren't part of the group.


46)
There is invariably a feeling of joint ownership of the product
built by the jelled team. Participants are pleased to have their names
grouped together on a product or a part of one. The individual is
eager for peer review. The team space is decorated with views of
the product as it approaches completion.
The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that
people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The interactions
are easy and confident and warm.


47)

There's one area, though, where defensiveness will always
backfire: You can't protect yourself against your own people's
incompetence. If your staff isn't up to the job at hand, you will fail.
Of course, if the people are badly suited to the job, you should get
new people. But once you've decided to go with a given group,
your best tactic is to trust them. Any. defensive measure taken to
guarantee success in spite of them will only make things worse. It
may give you some relief from worry in the short term, but it won't
help in the long run, and it will poison any chance for the team to
jell.

48)
Bureaucracy
Studies conducted by Capers Jones in the 1970s and 1980s reported
on systems development costs by work category. One of the
categories was "Paperwork." What Jones calls paperwork is
more or less mindless paper pushing, since the thinking time necessary
to decide what to put on the paper is categorized as some
other activity, such as analysis, design, or test planning. In other
words, his "paperwork" category is pure bureaucracy. Jones concluded
that paperwork is the second largest category of systems
development work. It accounts for more than thirty percent of the
cost of producing a given product.
There is a depressing modern trend to make development
workers more and more into bureaucrats. Perhaps this is a sign of
epidemic defensive management


49)
Mindless paper pushing is a waste. It ought to be attacked
because it keeps people from working. But our point here is a
slightly different one. It is that bureaucracy hurts team formation.
The team needs to believe in whatever goal it forms around. That
goal can be arbitrary, but at least it has to exist. There has to be
some evidence that management believes in it. Just telling your
people that the goal matters won't be enough if you also have to
tell them they should spend a third of their time pushing paper.
Paper pushers just can't get themselves into SWAT Team mode.
They can't see themselves hellbent for success.


50)
Fragmentation is bad for team formation, but it's also bad for
efficiency. (Perhaps you've begun to pick up a trend here.) People
can keep track of only so many human interactions. When they try
to be part of four working groups, they have four times as many
interactions to track. They spend all their time changing gears.
No one can be part of multiple jelled teams. The tight interactions
of the jelled team are exclusive. Enough fragmentation and
teams just won't jell. The saddest thing is we allow far more fragmentation
than is really necessary. We tend to concede this battle
without even a fight.


51)
In the typical phony deadline spiel, the manager announces
that the work must be done on such and such a date. The date mentioned
is impossible to meet, and everyone knows it. The effort will
certainly slip (so much for the idea that the deadline is absolute).
The work has been defined in such a way that success is impossible.
The message to the workers is clear: The boss is a Parkinsonian
robot with no respect or concern for them. The boss believes they
won't do a stroke of work except under duress. Don't expect a
jelled team on that project.


52)
The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again
without the team members knowing they've been "managed." These bosses are
viewed by their peers as just lucky. Everything seems to break right
for them. They get a fired-up team of people, the project comes
together quickly, and everyone stays enthusiastic through the end.
These managers never break into a sweat. It looks so easy that no
one can believe they are managing at all.


53)
The more comforting it is to the manager, the more it saps
the lifeblood of the team.

54)
ITS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN
TO WORK HERE
Somewhere deep in our ancestral memory is buried the notion
that work is supposed to be onerous. If you enjoy doing something,
it isn't really work. If you enjoy it enough, it's probably sinful.
You ought not to do it too much or even at all. You certainly
shouldn't be paid for it. What you really ought to do is find something
else to work at, something that feels like work. Then you can
be bored, tired, and generally miserable like everybody else.
If you're a manager, this vestigial memory requires you to
make sure that your people never have any fun on the job. Any evidence
of pleasure or joy in the workplace is a sure sign that some
manager is not doing the job properly. Work is not being extracted
with maximum efficiency from the workers, otherwise they
wouldn't be having such a good time.
Of course nobody ever says outright that work ought not to be
fun, but the idea is there, burned into our cultural subconsciousness.
It turns up in the guilty sheepishness we feel if we're ever caught
giggling in delight at the task at hand. It surfaces in our reluctant
acceptance of the dress code, the anti-popcorn code, and the general
furrowed-brow attitude that distinguishes so-called professionals
from people who are enjoying themselves.

55)
In any event, progress toward
more orderly, controllable methods is an unstoppable trend. The
thoughtful manager doesn't want to stop the trend, but may
nonetheless feel a need to replace some of the lost disorder that has
breathed so much energy into the work. This leads to a policy of
constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder.
Once the idea is stated so baldly, it's simple enough to compile
a list of ways to implement this policy:
pilot projects
war games
brainstorming
provocative training experiences
training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats
For this list, we've limited ourselves to disorder-reintroduction
techniques that we have seen used successfully. Your own list
ought not to be so limited.


56)
A pilot project is one in which you set the fat book of standards
aside and try some new and unproved technique. The new technique
will be unfamiliar initially, and so you can expect to be inefficient
at the start in applying it. This is a cost of change. On the
other side of the ledger is the improvement in productivity gained
from using the new technique. Also on the plus side of the ledger is
the Hawthorne Effect, the boost in energy and interest that infuses
your people when they're doing something new and different.

--
the Hawthorne Effect, the boost in energy and interest that infuses
your people when they're doing something new and different.

57)
As facilitator, you want to impress on everyone to strive for quantity
of ideas, not quality, and to keep the proceedings loose, even silly.
Sometimes an apparently foolish idea, one that wouldn't even be
mentioned in a more formal session, can turn out to be the prize.
There is no evaluation of proposed ideas during the brainstorming.
The evaluation phase comes later. Discourage negative comments,
like "That's a dumb idea," since dumb ideas often lead others to
think of smart ideas.

As facilitator, try these ploys to restart participants' thinking
when the idea flow slows down:
• analogy thinking (How does nature solve this or some
similar problem?)
• inversion (How might we achieve the opposite of our
goal?)
• immersion (How might you project yourself into the
problem?)


58)
Management here believes that these virtues can be improved
with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent.
Everyone quickly understands that the presence of the posters is a
sure sign of the absence of hard work and talent.


59)
Overtime: An Unanticipated Side Effect
You may already have picked up a certain bias in the book's original
chapters against the use of overtime. It has been our experience
that the positive potential of working extra hours is far exaggerated,
and that its negative impact is almost never considered.
That negative impact can be substantial: error, burnout, accelerated
turnover, and compensatory "undertime." In this section, we
examine yet another negative effect of overtime: its teamicidal
repercussions on otherwise healthy work groups.

60)
What's happened here? A team that was positively humming
with the good effects of jell has been pried apart by an overtime
policy that could not be applied uniformly to the team members.
But the members of good teams are never uniform in any
respect, certainly not in their abilities to "borrow" time from their
personal lives. In almost any team of four or five or six people,
there are bound to be a few who can't be expected to put in the
kind of overtime that might fit pretty well into some of the others'
lives. All that can be shrugged off as unimportant if the overtime
is only a matter of a few long evenings and maybe one extra
weekend day. But if the overtime drags on over months and starts
to exact a real toll on even the most willing team members, there
is bound to be damage to team cohesion. The people who aren't
sharing the pain will become, little by little, estranged from the
others. And the team magic will be gone.

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique,
anyway. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by
the negative side effects. This is true even if you don't consider
the disruption of the team.

61)
Most managers have at least a suspicion that overtime doesn't
help, that projects that work a lot of overtime are not much of a
credit to their managers' skills and talents. But they end up allowing
or encouraging overtime, anyway. Why is this? Jerry
Weinberg has an answer of sorts: He suggests that we don't work
overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves
from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on
tune.


62)
Does It Matter? The Importance of Coaching
What is the long-term effect of heightened competition among
people who need to work together? One of the first victims is the
easy, effective peer-coaching that is ubiquitous in healthy teams.
As a manager, you may have convinced yourself that you
ought to be the principal coach to the team or teams that report to
you. That certainly was a common model in the past, when hightech
bosses tended to be proven experts in the technologies their
workers needed to master. Today, however, the typical team of
knowledge-workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the
boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the
team members. What of the others? We are increasingly convinced
that the team members themselves provide most of the
coaching.
When you observe a well-knit team in action, you'll see a
basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time.
Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When
this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their
roles tend to switch back and forth over time with, perhaps, A
coaching B about TCP/IP and then B coaching A about implementation
of queues. When it works well, the participants are
barely even aware of it. They may not even identify it as coaching;
to them it may just seem like work.
COMPETITION 183
Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor
in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as
personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend
to look back on significant coaching we've received as a near
religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have
coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by
coaching others.
The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't
feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be
crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached; it would
be a clear indication that you knew less than your coach about
some subject matter. You would be similarly crazy to coach
someone else, as that person may eventually use your assistance
to pass you by.
Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult
or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings
of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition
within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal. Here are
some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal
side effects:
• annual salary or merit reviews
• management by objectives (MBO)
• praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
• awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
• performance measurement in almost any form
But hold on here, aren't these the very things that managers spend
much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet
these actions are likely to be teamicidal.


63)
If you are already a CMM Level 2 or higher organization,
remember this:
The projects most worth doing are the ones that will
move you DOWN one full level on your process scale
Maybe those are the only ones you can afford to do.

64)
MANTRA: The fundamental response to change is not
logical, but emotional.
As systems developers, we have selected ourselves into the
world of cool, calming, rational thought. Either our code compiles,
or it doesn't. The compiler is never happy for us, nor mad
at us. Perhaps this is why we tend to apply logic as our main
device for resolving disputes.


65)
Organizations have need of ceremony. It's perfectly reasonable
to call a meeting with a purpose that is strictly ceremonial,
particularly at project milestones, when new people come on
board, or for celebrating good work by the group. Such meetings
do not waste anyone's time. They fulfill real needs for appreciation.
They confirm group membership—its importance and its
value. Ceremonial meetings that only celebrate the bossness of
the boss, however, are a waste.
When bosses are particularly needy, the burden of ceremonial
status meetings can grow almost without bound. We know of
one organization, for example, where daily two-hour status meetings
are the norm. When participants are off-site during a meeting,
they are expected to call in and participate by speakerphone
for the whole duration. Nonattendance is regarded as a threat and
is subject to serious penalties.

--
Ceremonial meetings that only celebrate the bossness of
the boss, however, are a waste.

66)
Projects begin with planning and design, activities that are
best carried out by a smallish team. When design is important (as
it is for anything but a simple formula project), it can require as
much as half the full project duration.

67)
The waste is concealed
in the slow restart of his or her design work, the direct
result of interrupted flow.
Fragmentation is particularly injurious when two of the
tasks involve qualitatively different kinds of work habits. Thus,
the mix of a design task (which requires lots of immersion time,
relative quiet, and quality interaction time with a small group)
with a telephone support task (which requires instant interruptibility,
constant availability, quick change of focus) is sure to make
progress on the more think-intensive of these tasks virtually
impossible. The time wasted continually trying to get restarted is
perceived only as frustration by the worker. You may never hear
about it, because the people who suffer from this problem are all
too likely to blame themselves.


68)
Community doesn't just happen on the job. It has to be made.
The people who make it are the unsung heroes of our work experience.
The science of making communities, making them healthy
and satisfying for all, is called politics. We hasten to add that it's
not the shameless shenanigans of corporate infighting that we're
going to address here; those are the pathologies of politics. What
we need to look at instead is "Politics, the Noble Science," as first
described by Aristotle.

Aristotle included Politics among the five interlinked Noble
Sciences that together make up Philosophy. The five are
• Metaphysics: the study of existence, the nature of the
universe and all its contents
• Logic: the ways we may know something, the set of permissible
conclusions we may draw based on our perceptions,
and some sensible rules of deduction and inference
• Ethics: what we know about man and what we may
deduce and infer (through Logic) about acceptable interactions
between pairs of individuals
• Politics: how we may logically extend Ethics to the larger
group, the science of creating and managing such
groups consistent with ethical behavior and logical
recognition of the metaphysical entities—humans and
the community made up of humans
• Aesthetics: the appreciation of symbols and images of
metaphysical reality, which are pleasing to the extent
that they are logically consistent and that they inform us
about ethical interaction and/or political harmony

69)
Aristotelian Politics is the key practice of good management.
Refusing to be political in the Aristotelian sense is disastrous; it is
an abnegation of the manager's real responsibility. Similarly,
senior workers at all levels share some responsibility for community-
building. They are the elders of whatever community does form.