leftovers - summer vacation (toa rewind - in theory, in practice)

As I mentioned last week, TOA is ready for reopening, but... it looks like it will be next week. Let's fill the time for now with a classic TOA rewind. I picked out this post from January 2019 - "In Theory, In Practice" - because it had the most hits over the past thirty days, when the site was otherwise dormant.

Now, don't ask me why this post had so much popularity. I had no clue when I first saw the numbers, so I read it myself in a vain attempt to understand the result. My rereading led nowhere - in fact, I can't even say I thought the post was any good, though it definitely wasn't bad. I can at least tell you that it's from Peopleware, one of those Business Bro Books that I generally like to ridicule during my free time. However, this book is one of those proverbial exceptions that prove the rule. If you are interested in learning some of the "common sense" basics of management, presented through the lens of software development, then this is at the top of my recommendation list.

We'll be back, soon enough, with the official restart of TOA. Until then, thanks for reading!

leftovers - how to setup a workplace

The cubicle is a great example of a layout that attempts to meet my criteria for a productive workspace yet manages to fall short. In a way, the cubicle is the worst of both worlds, so to speak, because it retains the isolation of a private workspace without actually giving the worker any privacy. There’s a reason why ‘cube farms’ have such a negative connotation – it’s a good way to ensure very little work actually gets done.

Another thought is the open floor layout where there are no offices for anyone. The logic behind the idea isn’t automatically problematic – if people have freer access to each other, there will be more collaboration and it will be easier for a certain type of work to get done. But people have a strong inclination toward privacy for a reason and the benefits of this get lost in open floor layouts.

I also think transparent environments create pressure toward conformity in both appearance and action. What’s the benefit of a collaborative environment if everyone just says and thinks the same thing?

Footnotes / well, endnotes / my null hypothesis would involve some kind of work from home thing…

0. If anyone is aware of the following experiment, please reach out and let me know about it…

It’s worth noting that the authors of Peopleware said the open-floor office layout was implemented without any evidence of it being a better work environment than the alternatives.

how to setup a workplace

Imagine having the following conversation with your boss:

You: Boss, I have a great idea, can I run it by you quickly?

Boss: Well, I’m a little busy because, surprise, we’re behind on this urgent project and have this meeting in a minute, but, OK, explain quickly if you can, please!

You: Great, thank you. I’ve come up with a way to boost productivity.

Boss: OK, what are the details?

You: Well, we need to improve the office layout.

Boss: How will that boost productivity?

You: I think if everyone likes it more, they’ll be happier and work harder. Eventually, they’ll produce more. I bet it’ll make them more likely to stay here longer, as well.

Boss: I see. When will all this magic happen?

You: Well, probably in a few months, maybe longer. We’ll probably start seeing more projects get done on time, actually –

Boss: Wait, how will we know that productivity is going up due to the layout rather than people just naturally getting better at their jobs over a few months? And why wouldn’t the projects get done on time anyway?

You: Hmmm, well, I guess we won’t know for sure, but aren’t we always behind on projects? Like, didn’t you just say –

Boss: What does that have to do with future productivity?

You: Well –

Boss: And how will we know people are staying here because of the layout?

You: Hmmm, well, I guess we won’t know that for sure.

Boss: I think I understand. So you want to spend more money today, tomorrow, and every day afterward in exchange for a productivity boost we won’t be able to measure and a retention increase we won’t be able to attribute to the spending? And on top of it all, you, the genius behind the idea, will never even know if it’s working? How do you even know it’s a good idea?

You: Ah, well, when you put it that way…

It’s a tricky sell, right?

The question of how to best setup a workplace is the type of problem I always enjoy thinking about because it is a battleground for the classic dilemma facing all organizations – how to balance long-term investment with minimizing short-term costs. In the context of workplace environments, the challenge is looking past the easily measured costs associated with rent and services to understand how investing in productive workspaces decreases turnover and increases morale.

The big problem is that it’s not such an obvious thing to spend more money on workplaces to improve morale or retention. Even in the workplaces with the worst morale or the highest turnover, there are always plenty of people who feel good or stick around. Since everyone shares the same environment, it’s difficult to isolate the office layout as the root of any problem (unless there is a sudden exodus in the wake of an office layout change).

There is also the market-driven way to look at this. Most organizations recognize that prospective employees barely consider the office layout. This understanding is reflected in how per-employee spending in salaries and benefits is generally many magnitudes higher than spending on workspaces. Organizations understand that the reality of fixed rates of pay means most employees prefer higher compensation ahead of productive workspaces. Although I don’t know this for sure, I suspect employees paid directly by production care far more about a productive workspace compared to those who work salaried positions with no performance-based variable pay.

I think a couple of things need to happen before organizations start doing a better job of finding the best office layout for their workplaces. First, there should be some basic agreement on what environmental factors consistently lead to reduced productivity. These agreements could then be used as guidelines to prevent them from becoming a source of reduced productivity in the workplace.

What might be some good candidates for this agreement? Noise is a good place to start because of its strong association to errors. In fact, when an employee complains about noise, what it usually means is that someone should start checking the employee’s work for errors. As noise is roughly proportional to density, a smart way to address the issue might be to ensure each worker has enough space.

Another common factor is interruption. An interruption is like a red light – not only do you have to stop, you also have to decelerate before the stop line and accelerate to get rolling at the previous speed again. A workplace that accounts for the negative effect of interruptions would make workspaces private while also allowing workers the ability to silence or divert incoming communications. A good approach here would be to design the space so that intimacy increases as people move to the interior. This would corral visitors at the edges and entrances, establish spaces for teams and groups as people moved toward the center, and designate space at the core for quiet thinking by individuals.

A third factor is forced uniformity. A workplace where everyone works the same hours makes a lot of sense so long as everyone’s work is best completed in those hours. But a team responsible, say, for the ongoing functionality of a website is very different from one responsible for direct sales to businesses. The environment should be designed within the governing principle of maximizing high-quality work. This means local variation must be encouraged within the broad limits of organization-wide governing principles (1).

A quiet, customizable workspace where employees are empowered to divert interruptions – sounds obvious, right (2)? And yet, given how difficult the benefits are to prove, the only way I can come up with to measure the productivity boost of these changes is through an experiment. I would simply choose a sample of workers to shift to workspaces that meet these criteria and measure their productivity against those who remain in the old setup. A well-executed random trial should determine, once and for all, the type of layout that best serves a given organization.

Footnotes / a look behind my curtain, so to speak, if I had enough space for one

0. Curtain call…

Over the past few weeks, I surprised myself by writing so much about Peopleware. What I thought would be one or two posts quickly expanded as I realized how much this book covered important yet generally unexplored ground about management.

1. The workers should design the workplace…

A lot of companies operate under an axiom of ‘the people doing the work should decide how it gets done’. Sounds nice on paper but in practice an organization that uses top-down decision making to design a workspace isn’t managing by this principle.

The best way to identify this problem is to look for clues that the layout serves the interests of management ahead of an employee. Does infrequently used furniture or an unnecessary plant take up more space than an employee? If so, it is time to rethink the layout.

2. Or at least, I think these are the numbers – it’s noisy here and hard to concentrate…

At my new job, it is almost impossible to have less space than I do now. I have roughly seventy-five cubic feet of space – my desk is four feet wide, three feet deep, and about six feet above the ground when I raise it into a standing position. For the record, the authors of Peopleware recommend seventy-five square feet of space.

Space isn’t the only issue. Our instant messaging tools make interrupting others more efficient than at any point up to now in world history – it is almost costless. The most customizable feature of anyone’s desk is the brand of headphones used to ‘drown out’ the complete lack of privacy. It is, in short, not a productive workspace.

leftovers: in theory, in practice (the environment)

One more ‘in theory, in practice’ idea that I didn’t quite fit into my original post…

In theory… your environment is a dynamic, ever-changing presence.

In practice… what existed when you grew up is the environment.

The thought above relates to technology. For most people, environment means the tools and gadgets that existed as they grew up. Technology means every new thing that comes as they get older. In general, most people feel pretty good about this process and encourage the advancement of the new and improved.

However… it would be nice if some things could stay the same, right?

The longing for returning to a home that always is just as it was seems like one of the strongest human instincts. I think this feeling is reflected in the broadest way when we talk about global warming. The conversation has always had two sides – one side demanding immediate course correction to prevent ongoing human induced climate change while the other contends that things aren’t so bad and maybe the science needs further review.

Notably absent is a third side – the one saying that it is OK to change the environment. For whatever reason, this point of view is a non-starter. The debate is about whether it is happening or not – both sides accept the idea that humans causing climate change is a bad outcome.

in theory, in practice

Hi all,

Peopleware consistently presented counter-intuitive observations about the office. It did so by restating common theory into how the matter usually plays out in practice. Below are some of my favorites, arranged into the ‘good this, bad that’ structure I’ve used in the past.

In theory… I could go on explaining this for another thousand words.

In practice… I should probably just start, right?

Thanks for – in theory – reading.

Tim

******************

In theory… working overtime gives managers a defense if the project does not get done on time.

In practice… what incomplete project wouldn’t benefit from more time?

When a project doesn’t get done on time, it means the real reason cannot be identified or cannot be stated.

In theory… an autonomous employee is free to do something differently than the manager would have.

In practice… an autonomous employee makes the same decisions the manager would have made.

Autonomy does not mean teaching a team to think like its manager. Managers who do not allow or accept decisions that differ from what they would have done stamp out any semblance of autonomy in their teams.

In theory…  a person without autonomy is of no use to a manager.

In practice… a manager prefers predictable and obedient.

A manager can motivate the team merely by trusting it with his or her reputation. Trust is the highest form of motivation.

In theory… companies with low turnover must be doing something amazing.

In practice… companies with low turnover must retrain constantly.

High turnover can mean departing employees are unable to find new roles within the organization. This is often due to a failure to retrain for new roles. Since many employees leave when they are not being trained very well to begin with, having better training can improve retention in two ways – employees will have less reason to leave a role and will have more opportunity to transition into new roles.

In theory…innovation is desired.

In practice… busyness limits innovation.

The most common way to limit innovation is to keep everyone busy. If employees have no time for anything except their assignments, when will they have time to innovate? In the worst organizations, innovation is framed as insubordination because innovations are evidence that an employee is spending time on something other than a specific assignment.

In theory… uniformity creates a sense of unity, camaraderie, and togetherness.

In practice… uniformity exposes the insecurity of management.

Too many companies suffer today because they lead through an outdated model of ‘the assembly line that produces widgets’. This method of management works if employees are indistinguishable from each other, the desired work output is always clear, and the method of production is primarily based on manpower. The less these factors apply, the less appropriate the assembly-line model of management.

In theory… professional means knowledgeable or competent.

In practice… professional means unsurprising.

I have nothing to add.

In theory…productivity improvements are permanent.

In practice…most easy productivity improvements have already been implemented.

This thought explains how problems we’ve solved keep coming back. Congestion is a good one. An extra lane of traffic is added to reduce traffic – next week, those who used to stay home because of the traffic start driving again… and create the next traffic jam.

In theory… a big project backlog is full of good projects to work on.

In practice… a big project backlog is a list of bad ideas to throw out.

Organizations always implement projects that will bring in a profit. This is a direct contradiction to the theory of the backlog – a list of ‘profitable’ projects that are mysteriously not being implemented. Once someone calculates the true cost-benefit ratio, a project in the backlog usually moves to the reject pile.

In theory… music does not inhibit thinking.

In practice… music may inhibit sudden bursts of inspiration or creativity.

This is all ‘left brain, right brain’ stuff (not an upcoming post!) and I’m not entirely sure I understand all of it. The basics are that since music is processed in the same side of the brain that also handles creativity, listening to music while working crowds out brain space and makes it less likely that a given worker will come up with creative solutions.

In theory… motivational posters remind employees of important concepts.

In practice… motivational posters confirm management’s fears.

The employee who looks at these posters all day eventually realizes that managers do not believe employees are capable of remembering critical job concepts on their own.

In theory… deadlines drive action and communicate importance.

In practice… deadlines reveal a reluctance to fund a low-value project beyond a particular date.

This point is better understood with a quick reminder about deadlines – if the project really must get done, everyone involved understands it and no one requires a deadline to keep things on track. The chief at a fire, for example, does not walk around reminding the firefighters of deadlines.

In theory… a ‘working meeting’ is a clever, value-added variation on the traditional meeting.

In practice… if there is ever such a thing as a ‘working meeting’, it implies the rest are ‘nonworking meetings’.

Easily negated adjective go a long way…

A similar phenomenon is the ‘stand-up meeting’. These are designed to move with greater efficiency and urgency than the traditional ‘sit-down meeting’. But all this really does is confirm that the traditional ‘sit-down meeting’ is inefficient and not urgent. Instead of having everyone stand up for certain meetings, a better use of time would involve studying sit-down meetings and determining why they are so unproductive.

the business bro presents: good team, bad team

Good morning,

Last time, I shared my imitation of Ben Horowitz’s ‘Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager’ expectations. The version I came up with used my reading notes from Peopleware to compare and contrast a variety of different managerial behaviors.

Today, I’ll do the same as it relates to teams.

Signed,

The Business Bro

******************

Good teams coach each other. They recognize that internal competition has gone too far when peers no longer coach one another. Bad teams do not coach. In bad teams, those learning fear being seen as weak while those teaching suspect a student will use the new skills to leapfrog them in the team hierarchy.

Good teams establish reliable methods of self-coordination. They naturally mitigate problems by knowing how to form ad-hoc coalitions in response to a problem. Bad teams do not coordinate themselves. They must eliminate risk because they are unable to come together to solve simple yet unpredicted problems.

Good teams tolerate error, initiative, and experimentation. Their members do not treat each other as interchangeable pieces and benchmark themselves against challenging but achievable standards. Bad teams create conformity pressure and stamp out all signs of individuality in team members. Their members benchmark themselves against the average team member.

Bad teams talk freely about change without understanding its nature. They assume the new status quo comes quickly and without additional effort. Good teams know that change means chaos. They prepare for the challenge and support each other when outsiders try to reverse the change. Good teams recognize that with change comes a loss of mastery. They teach others how the change will benefit them and work with them to help them achieve a level of mastery in the new status quo. Bad teams do not understand that their colleagues fear making fools of themselves in the process of learning a new tool, method, or process.

Good teams lock into a productive goal and focus on the work until the goal is met. Bad teams constantly stop to refocus attention on company or individual interests.

Bad teams look for overnight solutions to team building problems. They do not make small, incremental contributions to the team every day. Good teams recognize that strong teams are built over time. They watch out for all the ways progress can be undone and intervene whenever they notice a problem in progress.

the business bro presents: good manager, bad manager

Longtime readers of TOA will recall my appreciation for Ben Horowitz’s ‘Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager’. He wrote the document to clarify his expectations for the Product Manager role in the organization he was leading at the time. This document, Horowitz said later in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, proved a valuable resource for increasing the productivity of these Product Managers.

As I recently reviewed my notes on Peopleware, I noticed that many of the managerial insights were stated in the same ‘good this, bad that’ sort of way. I worked with my notes until I came up with my own version of this expectations document for managers.

Signed,

The Business Bro

******************

Good managers do not waste time. They recognize time as the only finite resource – once lost, time cannot be regained. Bad managers leverage the unlimited number of ways to waste time.

Good managers continuously teach others about the organization and its goals. They take the time to repeat themselves and are not beneath answering any question until everyone is on the same page. Bad managers naively assume everyone accepts the organization’s goals. They give away their authority by redirecting questions to different sources.

Bad managers worry about efficiency by default. They never stop to wonder if resources are scarce or abundant. Good managers first ask for context. They question if a given task should be done at all. They do not worry about efficiency until a given resource becomes scarce. They measure productivity by work achieved in a fixed time period. Bad managers measure productivity by work extracted from a given hour of pay.

Good managers expect their teams to work. They train and motivate their teams to perform and trust them to complete their assignments. Bad managers suspect employees will not work. They place their teams under duress and use phony deadlines as a motivational tool. A good manager uses schedule pressure only when the reasoning is obvious to all concerned.

Good managers cultivate uniqueness. They replace departing team members through process adjustment and adapt the work to fit the strengths of remaining team members. New hires are brought in to support star performers. Bad managers address turnover by reducing the importance of individual initiative until no single person is irreplaceable.

Good managers understand that a reputation for high quality is built slowly and crumbles quickly. They allow their teams to set high standards for quality and support the team in achieving it. Bad managers see quality as a variable attribute. They see quality like a pizza topping – it becomes available when the market demands it. Good managers recognize high quality as a leading indicator of high productivity.

Good managers use the medium of communication to set priority. If the issue is urgent, they communicate in person or over the phone. If the receiver sets the priority, they use email. Bad managers cannot conceive of the idea that the receiver sets the priority.

Good managers limit meetings only to those who must agree before finalizing a decision. They run meetings where all participants might need to speak to each other. Bad managers run ceremonies, not meetings. Their meetings end by the clock or are simply ‘FYI’. Good managers end meetings when the purpose of the meeting has been achieved.

Bad managers hoard talent instead of building teams. They measure themselves and their teams by aggregating the ability of the individuals. Good managers measure teams by how well the team serves the organization. If a person has outgrown a place on the team, a good manager works to realign the employee so the organization derives the maximum benefit.

this business bro identifies future managers

I was deleting my unread TOA emails en masse the other day when a little blurb caught my attention. In spite of my better instincts, I clicked open the note and read it. It was a post was about Peopleware, a book I thought would go right over TOA’s head about building strong work teams (and for the most part, it did). However, he did make a rare insightful comment into how most firms struggle to promote new managers based on their aptitude for management.

This is a common refrain among the many business bro books I read. They point out that most firms simply promote their top performers into manager roles and hope for the best. Is this a good strategy? The authors of these books – and I suppose TOA – would probably say no, and say so with the same smarmy, eye-rolling, know-it-all exasperation of a regular Dilbert reader.

However, the only way for a firm to value performance is to reward performance. If employees are never promoted despite strong performance, it sends a very clear message to employees that performance does not matter. This raises another question – is it better to work in a firm with some unfit managers or in a firm that does not care one iota about performance? I’d go with the former here, reader. A bad manager might be tough to work for but a firm that does not care about performance probably isn’t going to stay in business very long.

I think the solution is pretty simple. First, create a promotion track entirely devoid of management responsibilities. This will allow a firm to promote based on performance without forcing top employees into manager roles they are unfit for. And if a top performer wants to ‘try’ managing but it becomes clear after some time that they are not a good fit for the role, the parallel track allows for easy reassignment.

Then, make sure to look for the right skills when promoting new managers. The single biggest skill is probably time management for two reasons. First, a manager’s main function is to make the most out of available resources. Second, time is generally the only resource an individual performer is fully in charge of. So, if an individual performer is good at managing time, it is a strong signal of managerial capability (1).

Finally, if a firm is going to promote non-managers into management, then it must take the time to train them. The specific skills a new manager needs to learn will vary by the size of the organization and the scope of the work. The firm must take responsibility for identifying these skills and teaching them to the new manager.

Signed,

The Business Bro

Footnotes / rampant speculation

1. Editorial comment here… but I feel right about this…

I think this ‘time management’ aspect gets lost in the assessment when top performers are misidentified as manager material. From my experience, the top performers in any individual role are those who tend to work longer hours and take on more assignments than their peers. It would be accurate to say these employees produce more than their peers.

However, this volume-based measure of production does not account at all for how well someone uses time. A good rule of thumb for this skill is to ask – does the top performer get things done on-time? If yes, make sure to follow up by asking whether the work completed on-time required a Herculean effort in terms of late nights or early mornings.

A new manager with poor time management skills is going to really struggle to do some of the role’s most important tasks – such as implementing process improvements, training employees, or gathering information – because all of these tasks are best completed within standard business hours. If the manager needs more time to complete these tasks, the skill required is knowing how to make better use of time, not the willingness to stay late or come in early.

reading review - peopleware

Last time, I wrote about this book’s insights into how a manager should approach team building. Today, I’ll take a closer look at how Peopleware approached the manager’s larger task of making it possible for people to work.

For authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, the importance of this managerial function could not be overstated. They felt that the strongest organizations always learned from the middle and that the manager’s primary responsibility was to serve as the knowledge center for the organization. The more importance a given organization placed on learning, the more important the manager was within that organization. The manager could serve this function by sharing knowledge in both directions on the organizational chart.

The primary method to help the rank and file learn is through training. A manager might train employees on the basics of job relevant tasks or impart knowledge to colleagues about the organization’s mission, history, and culture. Managers might also create resources such as FAQs and process documentation to help reduce the complexity of the work or eliminate the need for time-consuming ‘FYI’ meetings (1).

A manager helps leadership learn through performance measurement. A strong manager informs superiors while also motivating employees. However, when mishandled, measurements become threatening or burdensome. A good rule of thumb is to measure performance in a way that aggregates data as it is reported upward. This way, employees are not singled out any time a team falls short of an objective.

One up: Peopleware occasionally twists expressions or phrases to help bring new light to old thinking. One example is workaholism – the authors note how the analogy is to the wrong illness. They think a better comparison is to a cold and suggest the manager’s role is to help guide employees through these brief bouts of madness that any employee is susceptible to come down with from time to time.

The other thought covers Parkinson’s Law – work expands to fill the allotted time (2). They note that in these situations, managers should determine if the employee in question is truly procrastinating or if they are overwhelmed by the difficulty of their other work. It could also be the case that the employee needs better connection with colleagues to help complete certain tasks. Lacking these things may be why the worker is trying to hide behind the perception of busyness. Since it is the manager's job to reduce the difficulty of the work and help employees connect with each other, it is also the manager's job to know when these needs are not being met (3).

One down: Sometimes, good managerial advice reveals how poorly most managers handle a task. A good example from Peopleware is their insight into how an organization builds chemistry:

-They make a cult of quality and build a sense of eliteness.
-They provide satisfying closure.
-They encourage heterogeneity.
-They preserve strong teams.
-They provide strategy without detailing tactics.

What this told me was that most unhealthy organizations must regularly do the following things:

-They have no sense of quality and make everyone feel mediocre.
-They never provide satisfying closure.
-They epitomize uniformity.
-They regularly dismantle strong teams.
-They provide detailed tactical overviews without linking it to strategy

Just saying: This is not the first book I’ve ever read that pointed out how most firms do not promote managers based on their aptitude for management. So, what to do?

Peopleware does not offer any suggestions. However, they do make a couple of helpful observations. They note that leadership without formal authority means providing leadership as a service. It requires being well-prepared, finding ways to bring out the best in others, and interacting with humor and goodwill no matter what the nature of the task.

A firm struggling to identify future managers could probably do worse than assess non-managers with those qualities in mind. Does the employee prepare? Does the employee help lift the performance of colleagues? And most importantly, does the employee conduct business with humor and goodwill?

Footnotes / other management concepts

0. The theme...?

In one sentence - managers make it possible for people to work.

1. When to meet?

Meetings are often justified by the ‘monumental complexity’ of the organization (or even the given project). This observation makes everyone feel important. But most work is not so complex. A good manager should be able to spot the difference between a task that requires a meeting and one that does not.

A good rule of thumb for calling a meeting – do the employees know how to do the work? If not, meet. But if everyone knows what to do already… then why meet?

2. While on the topic…

So, what is subject to Parkinson’s Law? According to Peopleware, any busywork. It is possible that Parkinson’s Law, often framed as some kind of insidious truth about large organizations, is actually just exposing how little work actually needs to get done in a large organization.

3. Again, a reference to Andy Grove…

If the whole ‘train or connect with colleagues’ concept sounds familiar, it is because it echoes Grove’s thoughts from High Output Management about what a manager’s job is – train or motivate. It’s a thought I highlighted elsewhere in this post.

When someone cannot do the job, Grove thought it meant that the person either did not know how or was not motivated to do the work – thus, train or motivate. I like Grove’s answer a little better than the one I noted from Peopleware but I think the spirit of the two approaches is the same.

i read peopleware so you don't have to

Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (November 2017)

Authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister address the modern organization’s most important function – building strong teams – in this thorough yet easily digestible management book. Without strong teams, organizations almost always struggle to achieve any long-term success. Weak teams with high turnover and immediate short-term costs define these organizations. The workload is significant and yet no one expects to be around when the effort finally pays off, creating a cycle that constantly reinforces short-term thinking. By contrast, organizations comprised of strong teams with low turnover naturally adopt the long view because their teams expect to benefit from the eventual gains of their group efforts.

Managers who understand the factors that strengthen a team can meet this challenge. One factor is how a team gels whenever it succeeds together. Since most organizations have a continuous nature – they produced widgets yesterday, will produce widgets today, and will probably produce widgets tomorrow – the skilled manager must know how to create the arbitrary closure needed to help the team achieve regular, shared success. A manager can do this by subdividing work to create easily defined milestones or measuring performance against consistent time references.

Another approach is to focus on high quality. Most markets do not care for quality in the context of the production process but this should not stop a manager from encouraging a focus on process details from the team. A focus on quality can differentiate a team from its peers and help it become accustomed to caring about every detail in the process. A good approach for fostering this mentality is to frame every aspect of the product as a quality measure – lower price is higher quality cost control, better lead time is higher quality fulfillment process, high responsiveness is higher quality customer service, and so on. This way, teams become used to thinking of their work in terms improvement rather than on meeting objectives and learn how to frame their efforts in the context of what a customer values in the product.

A manager must also avoid making the common errors that weaken teams. Peopleware has plenty of insight into what to avoid doing rather than on what to do (perhaps a subtle comment that a manager is more capable of weakening rather than strengthening a team). A surefire way to divide a team is to allow members to take on multiple projects or work groups. A person with too many colleagues to keep track of and too many assignment details to organize will spend all day changing gears rather than working effectively.

Another example of a commonly misused tactic is compensation. If team members are rewarded unequally, competition for rewards will turn individuals against each other. Leadership by objectives is a closely related tactic that encourages a similar selfish competitiveness. Well-structured teams led through strong motivation and supported by regular investment will always work together better than teams constantly reminded by their leaders of individual goals, targets, or objectives.

The final obstacle I’d like to highlight today is the sport analogy. Though useful in the way it helps us all envision a group coming together to achieve a common goal, the analogy is dangerous in how it enables us to think of teams as groups comprised of similar people. Teams require a diversity of backgrounds, skills, and perspectives so that members can complement each other’s strengths and help bolster each other’s weaknesses. When teams lack variety or diversity, the group becomes more like a collection of contractors instead of a gelled unit.

The overall point Peopleware drives home is that teams usually achieve their destiny. A manager can influence this destiny with a combination of foresight and hard work. The key is understanding what results in strong teams, doing everything possible to keep the team on track for that outcome, and making sure to avoid anything that will definitely weaken the team along the way.

Footnotes / the obligatory bad pun reference

0. A final note before I go…

The title of the book is a play on the word software. When I roll my eyes at a pun, reader, we know it isn’t good, but it’ll have to do. For what it’s worth, the book is written in a logical, orderly structure – not all that much different than how software might be programmed.