At 7:30, six of us were faced with a problem: where to eat? By 7:45 we still had no answer. It was a well-defined, tractable problem with clear goals (eat) and fixed parameters (somewhere close). We were six bright, motivated and increasingly hungry people. But that’s the problem with self-directed teams. In theory, they should self-organise, efficiently allocate resources and reach consensus, driving together to a common goal. In practice, they just stand around looking lost.
Leaderful teams are as bad as leaderless ones. If we’d had different, strong opinions about where to eat, with nobody prepared to back down, we’d never have eaten, but we’d be angry about it too. An autocrat would just have bludgeoned everybody into following him to a place only he wanted to go to. Inspirational leaders are even worse – Ernest Shackleton would have inspired us on a doomed, ill-prepared and badly timed death march to Manchester, and then have claimed credit for getting us back alive, but still hungry.
What makes a good team? Or a bad team? What have the best and worst teams you’ve worked on looked like? Post your comments to this post.
I think it’s a complex problem, but not everybody agrees. Watch the video of Eric Sink’s BoS 2008 presentation, where he summarises all you need to know about people management on one slide, and compares product management to bringing up a child.
Eric Sink
Eric Sink is the author of Eric Sink on the Business of Software and Version Control by example. He is the founder of SourceGear, a source control system vendor. He also founded the AbiWord project, and lead the team that built the SpyGlass browser, now known as “Internet Explorer”. He’s the first to have coined the term “Micro-ISV”. This is his talk about selling Teamprise to Microsoft in 2010.
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