Nature or Nurture: where do great teams come from?

Elizabeth Ayer
Nov 6 · 4 min read
Picture of eggs looking nervously at each other
Picture of eggs looking nervously at each other
Egg feather chicken eggs by emmagrau

“If you’ve worked hard to hire smart people,” Marty Cagan writes in the forward to Radical Focus, “this system will help you unleash their potential.” All the experts will tell you the same thing, hire smart people. This tweet from Neil Killick currently appears several times a day on my timeline:

I believe 100% in empowering teams, but there’s something about “Hire smart, motivated people” which doesn’t sit right for me.

For sure, it’s worth investing in hiring. If you follow the “smart, motivated” advice, you’re more likely to end up with a team that can reach consensus, execute together, and support each other. A group that can find its way without outside intervention. That’s good, right?

But let’s take apart “smart, motivated people.” It’s not a wrong phrase, but we should recognize it as a risky phrase.

The danger of “smart, motivated people” is that it conjures up an image of young and privileged people. I’ve seen managers pretty much give up on their teams because they’re “old and stuck in their ways,” or because they “can’t attract real talent.”

It may not be any one tech manager’s fault, but we the tech industry have demotivated tens of thousands of people, many of them marginalized for other reasons. To leave those people behind to focus on fresh grist to our mill is irresponsible and ultimately self-defeating.

Start from where you are

By all means, hire well. But these hires will be dropped into teams, and these teams will have incumbent employees. It’s not a blank slate: managers have to pay off the trust debt of the bad managers before them.

Even in highly constrained environments, you as a leader will often have some flexibility to

  • …make it easier to spend small amounts of money
  • …invest in personal development (and shut up about ROI)
  • …share context
  • …trust them when they tell you something’s important
  • …or most powerfully: stop distracting them or changing priorities

The point is, you can’t write off those who aren’t “smart, motivated people” (what, the dumb or demotivated?), especially since this industry broke many of these people in the first place.

What do we do with people who have learned to be wary of tech leadership? The same thing that we do with our “smart, motivated people”: we grow them.

As Chris Smith and I realized in 2017, being smart and motivated wasn’t enough. In order to meet challenges successfully and not burn out, most people need the active support of a skilled manager. That manager needs to build trust and help set the skills agenda; importantly, development cannot be solely based on pull from the team or individual. Skilled managers navigate this with sensitivity and kindness, but actively.

Commonly missing skills

Someday the skills for a successful product team will be endemic in the tech workforce. But that day is not today. Teams are still emerging from the “developers can’t talk to people” dark ages, learning the behaviors and patterns of cross-functional teamwork.

Product teams are also learning the options and the common failure modes of trying to match software to user needs. “Smart and motivated” doesn’t win you an innate knowledge of the counterintuitive parts of modern product (what? if something’s hard, you should do it more???)

Teamwork and product management, OK those aren’t ubiquitous, but they’re well-represented. What is incredibly uncommon is healthy team decision-making: the ability to incorporate all views, close down a discussion at the right time, revisit a decision at the right time, all without leaving people fuming or appealing to authority.

Just like with “smart, motivated people” in the first place, we already know who’s gonna get left out if decision-making practices are weak (hint: they’re already quiet). For a team who is clumsily figuring it out, it is extremely likely that the already-marginalized are the ones who will be steamrolled again.

Bizarrely, the net effect of the “smart, motivated” theory is to created an environment hostile to diversity. Even if you don’t have a moral aversion to uniform teams, and even if you don’t buy that diverse teams get better business results, it’s clear that our era is demanding we learn to incorporate a range of views. Diversity isn’t optional for problems that matter.

We’ve solved all of the privileged whitedude problems that are worth solving. Challenges like civic tech and climate, challenges at the forefront of empowerment, privacy, security, and tech bias, all of the interesting challenges now need to integrate perspectives, especially different experiences of power dynamics. Expecting a team to recognize the importance of inclusion — especially when it’s not the norm around them — well, that’s expecting a lot.

If your twitter is anything like mine, you’re seeing constant articles on biased AI (here’s one in case you don’t know what I’m talking about). In hindsight, we can see the racism/sexism/etc. in the algorithms. Diverse teams let us look with foresight instead, but diverse teams don’t form and gel automatically by hiring and empowering, no matter how smart and motivated the people are.

Solved: nurture not nature

Empowered teams are not a natural state to be protected from big bad bosses. Skills have to be grown, and someone needs to lead against the prevailing tide of uniformity in tech.

I feel like our generation is rediscovering the value of skilled managers. We’re rediscovering a humble, empowering role in place of the cultural trope of the toxic, authoritarian, pointy-haired boss.

We’re rediscovering heathy models of teams that hook together to achieve organizational goals, and just like we shouldn’t fetishize the end state of Agile, we also shouldn’t overindex on the empowered team.

I’ll go out on a limb and say that we don’t even know yet how empowered diverse tech teams operate. So for the foreseeable, it’s the journey to empowerment that counts.

Elizabeth Ayer

Written by

Improving users' experience of government at 18F. Ex-Portfolio Manager at @redgate. Infatuated by the possibilities of bringing product thinking to #govtech.

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