How to Destroy a Great Team (NOT)
I’m not a manager, leader or something like that, so you may be asking yourself “Why the hell are you going to talk about Teams and leadership stuff?”.
Well, I know I’m not a specialist to talk about that, but over the years in Software Engineering I’ve experienced and seen great examples of how to destroy a great team, and I believe that one of them is worth to share with you.
The hardest thing in software engineering is finding good teams to work with. Our job is very technical, and find good professionals willing a continuous evolution and dedicating ourselves as our job demands is very hard. There are many bad professionals, some average, and very few above average. When you combine this problem with the little social skill that engineers usually have (or do not have at all), well… it’s even harder to find good technical people with social skills.
Well, believe it or not, I’ve worked on a team where most of the people had these skills. Some more technical, some more social, but all in a way that together gave the team the perfect balance. We were a dream team. We could have gone far. Yes. We could.
What went wrong? Well, like every team we were not perfect, and we had some mediocre professionals. At some point our company started to face financial problems and had to lay off several people, this was very sad and impacted a lot on the team, but at the same time this happened the people who stayed made the team stronger, working even more together.
One of these guys that stayed was not so good technically, but he had incredible social skills and a lot of power convincing. I remember in a meeting someone saying, “We should not fire him. We should take advantage of what he has the best, let’s change his role.” And then this person gained more autonomy to work on managing people and clients. What at first seemed like a good idea, became our biggest mistake.
My mom aways told me:
“If you want to really know people, give them power.”
In a short time, this guy has become the biggest nightmare on earth. The conflicts were constant, the trust was over, the team was no longer the same. We got to the point of asking the company owner to fire him (more than 10 people unanimously). Instead, shortly afterwards, this guy became more influential than the whole team on the board and then the inevitable began to happen, the dream team began to dismount.
Some of us soon preferred to look for other jobs, and to confirm my theory that we were good (believe me) most of us were able to move to bigger and better companies. The last straw for me was when the guy I most admired technically and personally, a close friend of mine, and a trustworthy board member decided to leave.
He left the company to go to one of the biggest players in the market. I was very happy for him, but at the same time for me it was the definitive end of our team. The new hires no longer had the team spirit that we used to have, and the manager became so influential with the board that the team soon had no power. The new employees were already working for “the manager” and no longer for the team.
Our boss had the cast of American Gods and lost them all. The only one left was the god of lies. — (Other employe)
Today I’m in another company, but fell others still working there. The fact is: The team is gone and I definitively miss it. If the owner could have seen how good we were together, we may have done big things.
For me the main learning of it all is to be very sure of who deserves the power, and if most do not agree, there is something wrong. Be close to your employees or subordinates, listen to them, or it may be too late to fill things up as they are.
