7 ms·

Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

80 points by dotmanish 1y ago

InsideOutSanta 1y ago
I think this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. I've found that in mature teams with high trust, people don't have heated arguments precisely because they are not afraid that their voices will be ignored. There is no need to become heated because you trust that the other people on the team will hear you out and consider your viewpoint. >code that nobody questions usually crashes in production I don't understand what that means.
- ArinaS 1y ago
  > I don't understand what that means. Probably "code that nobody critiques will fail in production". That's not always true I guess.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    On the first team where we did code reviews, I found in RCAs for the bad bugs that snuck in that there was a dearth of comments on the CR that introduced it. But usually the severity was more correlated with a lack of comments on the tests. Giant holes in test cases meant giant bugs. So don’t call a PR ready to land until you’ve gotten a few substantive critiques. Because the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For the bugs I introduced (I am highly bug-averse) it was either zero comments on tests, or bugs introduced by the CR process - changes I was coerced into making that I felt were wrong. And I can’t say which sort of subconscious resistance was at work there. Self sabotage for making changes I don’t want to, or my sixth sense for robust code telling me the suggestion is an antipattern. Probably both. What I learned from that last, which I confirmed in subsequent years, was that as a team you should only tolerate major pushback on a CR/PR at the beginning of the review process. Anyone who jumps in late with Needs Work demands, especially after a round of feedback changes has already landed, has lost their right to participate in the review. Because as a PR drags on, everyone gets tired of looking at it and has a less critical eye for spotting bugs that have been introduced by committee. It quickly becomes better odds that the original bugs the early reviewers did not catch are less dangerous than the ones that will be introduced by work-hardening the PR. It’s the same mechanic that makes pushing code or a deployment after 4pm a bad idea. Confirmation bias is greatly amplified by a desire to be somewhere else.
- ArinaS 1y ago
  > this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. Doesn't the article refute exactly this point of view? In "The hidden cost of “nice” teams" section: "Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. The disagreements still existed; they just went underground."
  - generic92034 1y ago
    In my eyes a critical discussion does not mean that the disagreements went underground. If the team is doing its best to resolve the issue, what else are you going to do? I certainly do not believe that yelling at each other is helpful. A toxic consensus culture usually does not even allow for a serious, critical discussion, but dissenters are just ignored or verbally patted on the head.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
    >Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. In my experience, this is not true because, in high-trust teams, there is "harmonious conflict." People offer criticism without getting heated. Getting heated often results from a strong opinion combined with a lack of faith that other people are genuinely considering your opinion. People who get heated feel they have to be forceful to convince others to listen. Knowing your opinion will be hard and carefully considered, you don't need to get heated.
    - tekla 1y ago
      I find the heated discussions happen in teams where things actually matter. If arguments never get heated, its because everyone knows it doesn't matter in the first place and you can just get by with silently nodding.
      - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
- voidspark 1y ago
  > I don't understand what that means. Shit code or architecture that other devs didn't call out.
- blueboo 1y ago
  > …in mature teams with high trust, people don’t have heated arguments… This dynamic flourishes when the stakes and/or uncertainty are low enough. High stakes and high uncertainty means everyone’s pushing their intuition and their reasoning as far as they can. They’re at their limit of what can be communicated efficiently. This results in an uneven distribution of communication bandwidth across the edges in the team network. Accountability induces leadership and competing views are ascendant and in decline. I think it’s reasonable to wonder that, if the temperature never rises about room temperature, the team might not be fully challenging itself.
  - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
    >I think it’s reasonable to wonder that, if the temperature never rises about room temperature, the team might not be fully challenging itself. I suspect this only seems reasonable if you've never experienced a healthy work environment. I probably would have agreed with you when I was in my twenties, working at a startup with another bunch of twenty-year-old guys and a CEO who was in over his head. It wasn't unusual for the whole company to yell at each other in a meeting room. The stakes seemed high then, but they seem ridiculous in hindsight, as does my own behavior. Thirty years later, the stakes are much higher, and the temperate is much lower. This is precisely because we can't afford this behavior, and we can't afford to deal with people who can't control themselves and behave professionally in high-pressure situations.
    - blueboo 1y ago
      My experience agrees with you — which is why I tried to hedge in my statement — but meanwhile tech culture treasures its stories (perhaps just-so stories) of demanding leaders getting better performance from outrageous targets.
mocmoc 1y ago
100%
sorokod 1y ago
One learns more from friendly critics than from uncritical friends.
ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
I ran a pretty high-functioning team of experienced C++ image processing pipeline programmers, for 25 years. We were part of a much larger, international (and interdisciplinary) team. We worked for one of the most renowned imaging companies in the world. Some of the folks we dealt with, were the top people in their field, and not everyone was especially good at getting along with others. Everyone thought they had The Answer, and everyone was totally passionate about doing their best work. Needless to say, we often had heated discussions. For the most part, we did excellent work (not always, but team infighting was not the reason for issues). My personal experience, is that creative, passionate, high-talent teams can be pretty messy, and managing them, is tricky.
- sally_glance 1y ago
  25 years is a long time, I'm intrigued. Looking back, can you single out any specific rules, workflows or cultural reasons which made this possible? Also, how much fluctuation in team members did you experience? I'm currently managing multiple teams, some of which are experiencing challenges with clashes between top talent. I'm sure there is no magical bullet, but still very interested in anecdotal data on this.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
    Well, the biggest “secret,” was keeping people on board, for a long time. It was almost impossible to hire folks that could “hit the ground running,” as the tech was very proprietary, so investment in training was a big deal. When they finally wrapped up our team, the person with the least tenure, had been there a decade. Keeping people for a long time, is a big topic, on its own. Also, everyone believed in The Mission. Inspiring talented, smart people, is not easy. It requires a great deal of Integrity and Humility, on the part of the management. That’s rare as hen’s teeth, these days. It’s an old-fashioned Japanese “craftsman” company, with a 100-year-plus history of making some of the best optical equipment in the world, so there was a lot of inspiration (and very difficult minds to change, which could be a challenge).
    - 1y ago
narag 1y ago
"Psychological safety" sounds awfully creepy.
- bravetraveler 1y ago
  The kind of thing an abuser would want to manage. Or those with good intentions. Hard to say! I'm just here to do good stuff and not starve, man. Y'all doing too much.
- coffeefirst 1y ago
  It's Therapy Speak for "pitching ideas and asking questions is encouraged, you will not be reamed or looked down on if some of those are bad." This is a good idea. Unfortunately, using therapist jargon in other contexts sounds very strange, shibolethy and throws people off.
  - relaxing 1y ago
    It’s not so jargony, is it? You’ve heard the word psychology before, and everybody knows what safety is. You can’t handle the two concepts applied together? If so, what would you say in its place? It’s hard to write an article about a concept if you have to say "pitching ideas and asking questions is encouraged, you will not be reamed or looked down on if some of those are bad" every paragraph. The irony of tech people complaining about jargon.
    - coffeefirst 1y ago
      Sure, but I know what it means. Anecdotally, I've found for a lot of these borrowed phrases, unless the people I'm talking to are already familiar with family, I still have to explain what I'm talking about and how to apply it if I want to be understood. And indeed, much irony.
- codr7 1y ago
  I know, feel the same about codes of conduct. People who need those kinds of rules are the least likely to follow and most likely to weaponize them. But I think we can agree it's a good thing to feel assured that having different opinions and occasionally being wrong is not going to be a problem, that this is something that could potentially affect the team in positive ways?
makeitdouble 1y ago
> Ideas get challenged based on what they are, not who said them Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ? It's not just that single quote, the whole article felt like a Don Quixote battling the windmills that keep silencing the wise engineers bearing their valid criticism as a spear. Or perhaps it was aimed at dictator types of figures who reign fear on their troups ? But then, will they even listen to this author ? > My best engineering teams were never the quiet ones—they were the ones where technical debates got spirited, where different perspectives were welcomed, and where we could disagree while still respecting each other. Who's raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ? -- The previous piece discussed here [1] was definitely more interesting and bringing more to the table as a thought piece. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652024
- viraptor 1y ago
  > Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ? You'd think it's basic. But then you can read up on the history of checklists and how lives were saved by empowering nurses to point out that surgeons forgot some step. Or Toyota empowering any worker to stop the production line if they suspect a defect. Or any number of "we should treat other teams and people as worth listening to instead of dismissing them" which in IT seems like a really common problem between dev and test. > But then, will they even listen to this author ? People causing the issue will not. But their teams may learn that this is not normal and start enacting change themselves. Or at least do things differently in the future in their own projects. > Who's raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ? Nobody says this directly. (Just like almost nobody says "I discriminate against ...") But listen to how people internally refer to other teams, and ask yourself if they would consider/accept the outside perspective without a needless fight. Have you already met people who will in conversations say "those idiots in (other team)"?
  - makeitdouble 1y ago
wood_spirit 1y ago
How do people cope in teams where some or even most members are vocal but actually always completely wrong and you’re the only one seeing it?
- generic92034 1y ago
  Well, if everyone you are encountering on the street is driving in the wrong direction, the probability that you are the wrong-way driver might be slightly increased. ;)
- bob1029 1y ago
  Sometimes the fastest way to win is to completely disengage. If these people are actually wrong all of the time, they will spiral even faster without your intervention. Alternatively, use your opponent's momentum against them. Reorient your thinking and accelerate the destruction of their bad ideas by encouraging them.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    Sometimes it blossoms into a shitstorm which can be used to justify excessive hiring where you get diluted even further. Never underestimate the dysfunction of Fortune500
- throwawee 1y ago
  Keep your head down or bail. Being right doesn't matter if you aren't calling the shots; you can't cash in those I-told-you-so points for anything. Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.
darthrupert 1y ago
Once I was in a team that had built for themselves a bubble of happiness, because the CTO / second founder of the company was a toxic scumbag. At the time I thought it was the best team ever but the bubble was cracked in a very ugly way, revealing the horrific situation.
roxolotl 1y ago
Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read. This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe. Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict. Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.
- steveBK123 1y ago
  Exactly - the teams where everyone agrees are generally the least safe.. thats why everyone just nods along to every word from the boss.
fidotron 1y ago
The truth on this is even simpler: the absence of a clear decision making hierarchy in big A "Agile" processes dooms every non operational task to at best mediocre outcomes. * One of the key benefits of hierarchical decision making is that people have the opportunity to privately challenge opinions, which can lead to radical levelling up of everyone involved. Since the introduction of infantile nonsense like "sprint planning poker" everything descends to being an argument, facepalming defeatism, or fake niceness while everyone hopes everyone else does the bare minimum to keep things going while we all smile about it. * My more managerial friends and colleagues claim this is a feature, not a bug, in that they prefer predictable mediocrity over unpredictable success.
willjp 1y ago
This is true in any relationship. The goal is not “winning”, but making sure everyone’s needs are met.
steveBK123 1y ago
One counter to this over 20 years in this game is there are plenty of people who confuse "having heated discussions" with being high functioning. That is - I've been on lots of low functioning teams riven with conflict. Prima donna developers who publicly call managers/teammates stupid in meetings. Managers giving negative feedback in public instead of in private. Stubborn veteran team members telling newer team members to get a new job if they don't like how things are done. One pattern I've seen in lower functioning teams with lots of conflict is some members being very well spoken, typically more classically trained like a philosophy background, probably a past debate club type kid. "Strong opinions, loosely held" type behavior where bad ideas were passionately argued by the more eloquent & aggressive team member until everyone else was exhausted and just let it run. The kind of guys that would steamroll the rest of the team as a bunch of idiots for not agreeing with him, but flip to a charismatic "ah good point" when incontrovertible proof of their idea not being correct was presented. The problem is you can't provide incontrovertible proof in real time in most cases, and lots of managers confuse their passion/certitude for correctness. So high functioning teams can have heated arguments & difficult people, but heated arguments do not in themselves lead to high functioning teams.
- mistersquid 1y ago
  > One pattern I've seen in lower functioning teams with lots of conflict is some members being very well spoken, typically more classically trained like a philosophy background, probably a past debate club type kid. "Strong opinions, loosely held" type behavior where bad ideas were passionately argued by the more eloquent & aggressive team member until everyone else was exhausted and just let it run. > The kind of guys that would steamroll the rest of the team as a bunch of idiots for not agreeing with him, but flip to a charismatic "ah good point" when incontrovertible proof of their idea not being correct was presented. The problem is you can't provide incontrovertible proof in real time in most cases, and lots of managers confuse their passion/certitude for correctness. The problem is not that incontrovertible proof cannot be provided real time. Yielding evidence from complex, esoteric systems is always difficult and time-consuming. The problem is the well-spoken people in the above example are not well-listening. Hearing a poorly-worded argument whose conceptual outlines might be worth considering is an important skill. Ignoring an argument because it is not eloquently delivered is hubris. Because such people do not listen well, they cannot claim to have “Strong opinions, loosely held”. Requiring hard-to-yield evidence before changing one’s mind is “Strong opinions, tightly held”. In the end, heated arguments are usually an indicator of dysfunction, even in high functioning teams. Teams are usually better off having honest, dispassionate debate.
deleted 1y ago
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80 points by dotmanish 1y ago

I think this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. I've found that in mature teams with high trust, people don't have heated arguments precisely because they are not afraid that their voices will be ignored. There is no need to become heated because you trust that the other people on the team will hear you out and consider your viewpoint. >code that nobody questions usually crashes in production I don't understand what that means.

ArinaS 1y ago
> I don't understand what that means. Probably "code that nobody critiques will fail in production". That's not always true I guess.
- hinkley 1y ago
  On the first team where we did code reviews, I found in RCAs for the bad bugs that snuck in that there was a dearth of comments on the CR that introduced it. But usually the severity was more correlated with a lack of comments on the tests. Giant holes in test cases meant giant bugs. So don’t call a PR ready to land until you’ve gotten a few substantive critiques. Because the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For the bugs I introduced (I am highly bug-averse) it was either zero comments on tests, or bugs introduced by the CR process - changes I was coerced into making that I felt were wrong. And I can’t say which sort of subconscious resistance was at work there. Self sabotage for making changes I don’t want to, or my sixth sense for robust code telling me the suggestion is an antipattern. Probably both. What I learned from that last, which I confirmed in subsequent years, was that as a team you should only tolerate major pushback on a CR/PR at the beginning of the review process. Anyone who jumps in late with Needs Work demands, especially after a round of feedback changes has already landed, has lost their right to participate in the review. Because as a PR drags on, everyone gets tired of looking at it and has a less critical eye for spotting bugs that have been introduced by committee. It quickly becomes better odds that the original bugs the early reviewers did not catch are less dangerous than the ones that will be introduced by work-hardening the PR. It’s the same mechanic that makes pushing code or a deployment after 4pm a bad idea. Confirmation bias is greatly amplified by a desire to be somewhere else.
ArinaS 1y ago
> this article confuses an absence of "heated arguments" with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. Doesn't the article refute exactly this point of view? In "The hidden cost of “nice” teams" section: "Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. The disagreements still existed; they just went underground."
- generic92034 1y ago
  In my eyes a critical discussion does not mean that the disagreements went underground. If the team is doing its best to resolve the issue, what else are you going to do? I certainly do not believe that yelling at each other is helpful. A toxic consensus culture usually does not even allow for a serious, critical discussion, but dissenters are just ignored or verbally patted on the head.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- InsideOutSanta 1y ago
  >Those teams weren’t actually harmonious—they were conflict-avoidant. In my experience, this is not true because, in high-trust teams, there is "harmonious conflict." People offer criticism without getting heated. Getting heated often results from a strong opinion combined with a lack of faith that other people are genuinely considering your opinion. People who get heated feel they have to be forceful to convince others to listen. Knowing your opinion will be hard and carefully considered, you don't need to get heated.
  - tekla 1y ago
    I find the heated discussions happen in teams where things actually matter. If arguments never get heated, its because everyone knows it doesn't matter in the first place and you can just get by with silently nodding.
    - InsideOutSanta 1y ago
voidspark 1y ago
> I don't understand what that means. Shit code or architecture that other devs didn't call out.
blueboo 1y ago
> …in mature teams with high trust, people don’t have heated arguments… This dynamic flourishes when the stakes and/or uncertainty are low enough. High stakes and high uncertainty means everyone’s pushing their intuition and their reasoning as far as they can. They’re at their limit of what can be communicated efficiently. This results in an uneven distribution of communication bandwidth across the edges in the team network. Accountability induces leadership and competing views are ascendant and in decline. I think it’s reasonable to wonder that, if the temperature never rises about room temperature, the team might not be fully challenging itself.
- InsideOutSanta 1y ago
  >I think it’s reasonable to wonder that, if the temperature never rises about room temperature, the team might not be fully challenging itself. I suspect this only seems reasonable if you've never experienced a healthy work environment. I probably would have agreed with you when I was in my twenties, working at a startup with another bunch of twenty-year-old guys and a CEO who was in over his head. It wasn't unusual for the whole company to yell at each other in a meeting room. The stakes seemed high then, but they seem ridiculous in hindsight, as does my own behavior. Thirty years later, the stakes are much higher, and the temperate is much lower. This is precisely because we can't afford this behavior, and we can't afford to deal with people who can't control themselves and behave professionally in high-pressure situations.
  - blueboo 1y ago
    My experience agrees with you — which is why I tried to hedge in my statement — but meanwhile tech culture treasures its stories (perhaps just-so stories) of demanding leaders getting better performance from outrageous targets.

mocmoc 1y ago

100%

sorokod 1y ago

One learns more from friendly critics than from uncritical friends.

ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago

I ran a pretty high-functioning team of experienced C++ image processing pipeline programmers, for 25 years. We were part of a much larger, international (and interdisciplinary) team. We worked for one of the most renowned imaging companies in the world. Some of the folks we dealt with, were the top people in their field, and not everyone was especially good at getting along with others. Everyone thought they had The Answer, and everyone was totally passionate about doing their best work. Needless to say, we often had heated discussions. For the most part, we did excellent work (not always, but team infighting was not the reason for issues). My personal experience, is that creative, passionate, high-talent teams can be pretty messy, and managing them, is tricky.

sally_glance 1y ago
25 years is a long time, I'm intrigued. Looking back, can you single out any specific rules, workflows or cultural reasons which made this possible? Also, how much fluctuation in team members did you experience? I'm currently managing multiple teams, some of which are experiencing challenges with clashes between top talent. I'm sure there is no magical bullet, but still very interested in anecdotal data on this.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y ago
  Well, the biggest “secret,” was keeping people on board, for a long time. It was almost impossible to hire folks that could “hit the ground running,” as the tech was very proprietary, so investment in training was a big deal. When they finally wrapped up our team, the person with the least tenure, had been there a decade. Keeping people for a long time, is a big topic, on its own. Also, everyone believed in The Mission. Inspiring talented, smart people, is not easy. It requires a great deal of Integrity and Humility, on the part of the management. That’s rare as hen’s teeth, these days. It’s an old-fashioned Japanese “craftsman” company, with a 100-year-plus history of making some of the best optical equipment in the world, so there was a lot of inspiration (and very difficult minds to change, which could be a challenge).
  - 1y ago

narag 1y ago

"Psychological safety" sounds awfully creepy.

bravetraveler 1y ago
The kind of thing an abuser would want to manage. Or those with good intentions. Hard to say! I'm just here to do good stuff and not starve, man. Y'all doing too much.
coffeefirst 1y ago
It's Therapy Speak for "pitching ideas and asking questions is encouraged, you will not be reamed or looked down on if some of those are bad." This is a good idea. Unfortunately, using therapist jargon in other contexts sounds very strange, shibolethy and throws people off.
- relaxing 1y ago
  It’s not so jargony, is it? You’ve heard the word psychology before, and everybody knows what safety is. You can’t handle the two concepts applied together? If so, what would you say in its place? It’s hard to write an article about a concept if you have to say "pitching ideas and asking questions is encouraged, you will not be reamed or looked down on if some of those are bad" every paragraph. The irony of tech people complaining about jargon.
  - coffeefirst 1y ago
    Sure, but I know what it means. Anecdotally, I've found for a lot of these borrowed phrases, unless the people I'm talking to are already familiar with family, I still have to explain what I'm talking about and how to apply it if I want to be understood. And indeed, much irony.
codr7 1y ago
I know, feel the same about codes of conduct. People who need those kinds of rules are the least likely to follow and most likely to weaponize them. But I think we can agree it's a good thing to feel assured that having different opinions and occasionally being wrong is not going to be a problem, that this is something that could potentially affect the team in positive ways?

makeitdouble 1y ago

> Ideas get challenged based on what they are, not who said them Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ? It's not just that single quote, the whole article felt like a Don Quixote battling the windmills that keep silencing the wise engineers bearing their valid criticism as a spear. Or perhaps it was aimed at dictator types of figures who reign fear on their troups ? But then, will they even listen to this author ? > My best engineering teams were never the quiet ones—they were the ones where technical debates got spirited, where different perspectives were welcomed, and where we could disagree while still respecting each other. Who's raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ? -- The previous piece discussed here [1] was definitely more interesting and bringing more to the table as a thought piece. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43652024

viraptor 1y ago
> Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn't have been obvious otherwise ? You'd think it's basic. But then you can read up on the history of checklists and how lives were saved by empowering nurses to point out that surgeons forgot some step. Or Toyota empowering any worker to stop the production line if they suspect a defect. Or any number of "we should treat other teams and people as worth listening to instead of dismissing them" which in IT seems like a really common problem between dev and test. > But then, will they even listen to this author ? People causing the issue will not. But their teams may learn that this is not normal and start enacting change themselves. Or at least do things differently in the future in their own projects. > Who's raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ? Nobody says this directly. (Just like almost nobody says "I discriminate against ...") But listen to how people internally refer to other teams, and ask yourself if they would consider/accept the outside perspective without a needless fight. Have you already met people who will in conversations say "those idiots in (other team)"?
- makeitdouble 1y ago

wood_spirit 1y ago

How do people cope in teams where some or even most members are vocal but actually always completely wrong and you’re the only one seeing it?

generic92034 1y ago
Well, if everyone you are encountering on the street is driving in the wrong direction, the probability that you are the wrong-way driver might be slightly increased. ;)
bob1029 1y ago
Sometimes the fastest way to win is to completely disengage. If these people are actually wrong all of the time, they will spiral even faster without your intervention. Alternatively, use your opponent's momentum against them. Reorient your thinking and accelerate the destruction of their bad ideas by encouraging them.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  Sometimes it blossoms into a shitstorm which can be used to justify excessive hiring where you get diluted even further. Never underestimate the dysfunction of Fortune500
throwawee 1y ago
Keep your head down or bail. Being right doesn't matter if you aren't calling the shots; you can't cash in those I-told-you-so points for anything. Sometimes a project gets funded by someone who wants the team to look and act a certain way and actual productivity doesn't even factor in. You're not 'right' if you've fundamentally misunderstood what you're doing there in the first place. Either take their money and play along or leave. That's the call you can make.

darthrupert 1y ago

Once I was in a team that had built for themselves a bubble of happiness, because the CTO / second founder of the company was a toxic scumbag. At the time I thought it was the best team ever but the bubble was cracked in a very ugly way, revealing the horrific situation.

roxolotl 1y ago

Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read. This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe. Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict. Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.

steveBK123 1y ago
Exactly - the teams where everyone agrees are generally the least safe.. thats why everyone just nods along to every word from the boss.

fidotron 1y ago

The truth on this is even simpler: the absence of a clear decision making hierarchy in big A "Agile" processes dooms every non operational task to at best mediocre outcomes. * One of the key benefits of hierarchical decision making is that people have the opportunity to privately challenge opinions, which can lead to radical levelling up of everyone involved. Since the introduction of infantile nonsense like "sprint planning poker" everything descends to being an argument, facepalming defeatism, or fake niceness while everyone hopes everyone else does the bare minimum to keep things going while we all smile about it. * My more managerial friends and colleagues claim this is a feature, not a bug, in that they prefer predictable mediocrity over unpredictable success.

willjp 1y ago

This is true in any relationship. The goal is not “winning”, but making sure everyone’s needs are met.

steveBK123 1y ago

One counter to this over 20 years in this game is there are plenty of people who confuse "having heated discussions" with being high functioning. That is - I've been on lots of low functioning teams riven with conflict. Prima donna developers who publicly call managers/teammates stupid in meetings. Managers giving negative feedback in public instead of in private. Stubborn veteran team members telling newer team members to get a new job if they don't like how things are done. One pattern I've seen in lower functioning teams with lots of conflict is some members being very well spoken, typically more classically trained like a philosophy background, probably a past debate club type kid. "Strong opinions, loosely held" type behavior where bad ideas were passionately argued by the more eloquent & aggressive team member until everyone else was exhausted and just let it run. The kind of guys that would steamroll the rest of the team as a bunch of idiots for not agreeing with him, but flip to a charismatic "ah good point" when incontrovertible proof of their idea not being correct was presented. The problem is you can't provide incontrovertible proof in real time in most cases, and lots of managers confuse their passion/certitude for correctness. So high functioning teams can have heated arguments & difficult people, but heated arguments do not in themselves lead to high functioning teams.

mistersquid 1y ago
> One pattern I've seen in lower functioning teams with lots of conflict is some members being very well spoken, typically more classically trained like a philosophy background, probably a past debate club type kid. "Strong opinions, loosely held" type behavior where bad ideas were passionately argued by the more eloquent & aggressive team member until everyone else was exhausted and just let it run. > The kind of guys that would steamroll the rest of the team as a bunch of idiots for not agreeing with him, but flip to a charismatic "ah good point" when incontrovertible proof of their idea not being correct was presented. The problem is you can't provide incontrovertible proof in real time in most cases, and lots of managers confuse their passion/certitude for correctness. The problem is not that incontrovertible proof cannot be provided real time. Yielding evidence from complex, esoteric systems is always difficult and time-consuming. The problem is the well-spoken people in the above example are not well-listening. Hearing a poorly-worded argument whose conceptual outlines might be worth considering is an important skill. Ignoring an argument because it is not eloquently delivered is hubris. Because such people do not listen well, they cannot claim to have “Strong opinions, loosely held”. Requiring hard-to-yield evidence before changing one’s mind is “Strong opinions, tightly held”. In the end, heated arguments are usually an indicator of dysfunction, even in high functioning teams. Teams are usually better off having honest, dispassionate debate.

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