I wish I learnt how to deal with territorial people

We often encounter people at work who’re entrenched players just by virtue of getting there before you. They’ve valuable tribal knowledge about the system, why certain things behave a certain way and can offer insight about an old decisions. They should be your allies and building a relationship with them is mutually beneficial.

However, at times you encounter some folks who are very possessive about the territory and try to block you at every aspect. It might be very hard to get through them and make them realise your perspective.

Humans are territorial animals and our basal instincts kick in when someone new enters our territory. Any suggestion from the new team member might be perceived as a threat, until they’ve been inducted to the tribe officially.

I joined a new team and I was tasked with building something from day 1. While the programming language was new to me, the problem statement was straight forward and I dug in. It turned out that the folks had an implementation detail in mind but it was not shared with me not documented somewhere for reference.

We got on to a huddle with the folks to iron out the differences. I noticed a flaw in the other design which will end up costing us 100% more money, and wasn’t extensible for a requirement coming in the next 3 months. In the absence of an arbitrator, we were going in circles and in the end we went with the original design because the tribal lords weren’t giving in.

As the project was growing, we had to cater some other use case and we ended up building both of these solutions and spending twice as what we should have.

This had put the relationship under some stress and things never improved from there.

It could be argued that, the problem was with the set of folks involved in this, but over the years I’ve seen this behaviour several in various teams.

This is quite visible when we’ve a senior developer coming into a team, where the product has been built with some inexperienced devs. When there is a suggestion from the new person based on their past experience, it’s perceived as an insult to the work that they’ve been doing so far and people get defensive. We’ll not be able to progress further until this mistrust is fixed.

Most of us have been on both ends of this. Let me share an incident that happened early in my career. I was pairing with my mentor on one of my work streams and offered a few suggestions on an ideal number of changes per Pull request. At that point I thought he was slowing me down and I got defensive. He backed off that day but kept annoying me with this little tidbit everywhere(and I was persistent in ignoring him).

After a few months, I was managing a big project. The commits were growing on a PR and in the end it was a 200+ commit monster. It was very hard to manage this, and from that point on my PR’s rarely breach that ideal threshold that he told me earlier.

I went and apologised to him after this realization and our relationship improved significantly from that point. I can’t imagine our relationship surviving after work, if we didn’t have that pep talk that day.

As a senior developer, it’s our duty to guide the other team mates to improve upon the work quality and we’ve to be persistent about it.

However, this gets tricky when we’ve to deal with folks who don’t give in to their territory. Things could turn toxic and it’ll affect your productivity, career path and even mental health.

Looking back these are the lessons that I’ve internalised:

• Be aware of this while you join a new team. Take your time to build a relationship with the team first before contributing. (This is not always possible especially in teams which have unreasonably high expectations from day 1. Have that conversation with your manager upfront)
• Don’t assume that people will get your intent. Always start with an appreciation before offering a suggestion
• Get alignment from the team and your manager before going in to the meeting. If there are differences, have an arbitrator ready who can step in and resolve things
• We’ve all been territorial at some point or the other. Try not to take it personally
• You’ll not be able to get through everyone. Accept it and move on. Just be aware who those folks are and keep a healthy distance for both of your sake, until you build some amount of trust with them