Don’t mix A Players with B Players

What is this, Chess? What non-sense is this? If you know me, I tend to take a very inclusive stance and try to avoid elitism. A couple of days ago, someone posted something saying they are forming a group just for idea guys, no hackers allowed. In the realm of programming, ideas guys tend to be B Players, ie their chest of programming skill is not overflowing. But, this guy’s suggestion I liked. Why? Power Distance.

Power Distance refers to how much members of a group accept and expect that power is distributed unequally. When we refer to low power distance, we are talking about a culture that accepts that everybody is basically equal. The UK and US are two examples of cultures with low power distance. In the UK, it is common to refer to professors by their first name. In a culture with a higher Power Distance, calling a professor by their first name would be seen as disrespectful. As a group, software engineers have a very high power distance. With the generally accepted belief that “the best are 10x better than the worst”, I think I’m pretty accurate when I say they have a high power distance culture.

What’s so wrong with high power distance? The story of Korean Plane crashes is a common story told about the problems underlying high power distance cultures. What typically would happen is that the pilot would make a mistake that could be fatal and the second pair of eyes, the co-pilot, was suppose to identify these errors. But what would happen because of the high power distance is the co-pilot would refrain from telling the pilot that he made a fatal error. He might try to indirectly point to the possibility of a mistake but nothing strong enough to indicate definitely something is wrong here, until it is too late.

This infallibility of A Players that B Players think that defines A Players is what I’m against. A Players amongst other A Players would object to a wrong idea or decision, likewise so would B Players amongst B Players. When they are mixed, the scrutiny of ideas and decisions are not so thorough. Even the presents of an A Player would affect the optimal performance of a B Player. For instance, a B player might think to recheck some essential data for the client, but not wanting to delay the process and be seen as tardy by an A player, he might leave the data unchecked. Of course there are other reasons for not mixing them but it would be too long an article to write.

I think a separation would work to get the best out of everyone. A team full of B Players has always surprised me with what they were able to accomplish. Separating the two groups of people will reduce the intra-group power distance and hence the problems associated with high power distance.

I leave you with this equation: A Players > B Players >> Mix Team.