- If the team/company is in a burnout cycle, you will burn out too.
- For some companies, the burnout cycle is a way to avoid paying for overtime.
- Communication with the team should be with the team
, and not with individual representatives/leaders/managers, etc. - Email for team communication is evil; instant messengers with channels rule.
- If a process must be regularly performed by two or more people, automation can help.
- If you can be misunderstood, you will be misunderstood. Eliminate ambiguity. For particularly difficult cases, create a project dictionary.
- Absolute knowledge does not exist. There is experience of the past in the context of the past.
- Psychological safety in a team is when people in a team are not afraid to say something stupid about a work issue.
- The flood is an indicator of whether your team is alive or not.
Scroll to video I completely accidentally started talking about depression and burnout.
I am not an expert on burnout, just like someone who was sitting in a house during a fire is not an expert on fires. I simply survived the “fire” and told my feelings. I am a team specialist and I would like to talk today about the fact that everything depends not only on the individual, but also on the team as a whole. I'm an agile coach at Wiley and organize teams into something smart. Please take my words as a set of hypotheses. I have tried a lot and can share my experience on how to make the life of people in a team more acceptable for people. But we are always talking about agile teams.
I hope you find something useful for yourself.
Wiley is engaged in education: selling scientific journals, access to knowledge bases, training, and the company began as a publishing house. I am creating product teams in the Russian office of Wiley.
Plan:
I see abnormal people
- the reason for my report.
I don’t understand what a team is
—how can you figure out whether you’re a team or a collection of random people who collided in the same office?
How to talk to these people
- how to build communication.
Why should I do all this
- where will you be in this communication?
“Ilya, you gave us a cool report on depression and burnout. Everyone in my office was burned out. Everyone is depressed,” they tell me. “How can I help them” is a good wording. Or “What should I do with them” is not a very good formulation.
And this is a difficult request. People are accustomed to testing new knowledge not on themselves, but on others.
You know what to do: sports, walks, nutrition. We have already dealt with this (Ilya Yakyamsev: Efficiency does not work).
When people talk about burnout, they usually advise leaving the office. But we spend at least 6 hours a day in the office. What to do there?
In many hierarchical organizations, a team is defined as “a group of people under someone.” It doesn’t matter whether they know each other or whether they have any common practices.
I perceive the team as a person. A team is normal when you can say: “Hey, team, give me an answer,” and the team will give one answer that everyone can understand.
When you talk to a person, you do not ask separately for his left hand: “Dear Vasily, or rather his left hand, do something for me.” If your left hand does something for you separately from Vasily, then everything is absolutely wrong with Vasily. Yes, you communicate through your head, but the head is the receiver. He is a complete person. It's exactly the same with the team.
When I talk about a team, I ask: “Can your team make a decision? Do you have any commitments at the team level? Do you have a team history? Do you have team principles? Can the team protect itself from the outside world?”
In psychology this is called “subjectivity”; a person is subjective if he can make decisions and carry them out. The team must be able to make decisions at the team level, not just one person.
When people come to me asking for something from the team, the first thing I do is check to see if the person asked the team. Not her leader. In my world, which I persistently promote, agile teams do not have a leader; they work as a single organism. And the team is a separate element of the system. They communicate directly with the team.
When we accept that the team is also a person, it becomes clearer how to communicate with them. The team has all the psychological properties of a person. The team has memory, collective skills, collective behavior. The more general skills, the greater the opportunity to make decisions in one direction.
The team can also burn out. Remember that the team can kill you. You won't understand this at the interview, but you need to determine this during the probationary period.
This is not a burnout cycle, in fact, it is a diagram taken from the process of attention disorder:
Burnout cycle
:
- Hyperfixation
- Patterns and procrastination
- Self-medication
- Self-flagellation
- Paralysis
- Refusal
Hyperfixation
- a person in a very excited state takes on a lot of tasks, i.e. there is a hyper-idea of results based on nothing, while the person invests a lot of energy and hope in the result.
Patterns and procrastination
- in this state, a person discovers that some tasks are uninteresting for him, some do not bring development. Sometimes there are too many tasks. Sometimes a person comes up with a refactoring in a zero task, often out of boredom. Procrastination begins because you chose tasks on an emotional high, and not on logic. And no one needs these tasks. Procrastination is a logical thing in such a situation. Do you see the dog above is a little askew? She just looks at the seagulls with one eye and the fire with the other. And she can’t choose what to do.
Self-medication
- a person decides that he needs to change in order to accomplish these tasks. At the same time, a person does not work with a scope of tasks, he tries to change himself. A person starts drinking energy drinks, stops sleeping, stops doing non-work activities, and stops going somewhere.
Self-flagellation
- the person understands that he will not do anything, there is a complete loss of strength. He thinks that he is bad, he will never succeed. The person completely runs out of energy. The remains of it are used to get out of bed in the morning.
Paralysis
- a person stops doing anything at all. Maybe even go to work.
Refusal
— there is a complete reset of obligations. In the most severe and advanced cases, it can lead to self-sawing.
And this is not about depression yet, it’s just a cycle of distracted attention when you’ve gone overboard with tasks. The main problem is that at the beginning of the cycle, decision-making is already taking place against the backdrop of long-standing history.
This whole cycle affects the team as a whole. Moreover, there are teams where the burnout cycle is the basis of the work process. If you are on a team with these people, you will burn out 100% because you will work in a burnout cycle for 6-12 hours.
The burnout cycle is not gradual. The stages are not going according to schedule. They are mixed and overlapped.
For example, at the stage of self-medication, a person realized that he needed to throw out a task, but because of hysteria, instead of throwing out the task, the person took on a new one - hyperfixation.
Same with the team. If during your development cycle a manager comes in and pushes new tasks without throwing out the old ones, you’re screwed. People will leave. I have a friend who stopped programming altogether. He went off to saw some wood, because the wood is finite - you can see it entirely.
The crux of the problem is that the burnout cycle can be perpetuated at the team level and at the organizational level.
One of the options for treating burnout in Scrum is to separate the stages by days. For example, we cram hyperfixation into planning. And then we don’t take on any further tasks. Those. We replace several burnout cycles with one, but controlled one.
When people ask me whether Scrum is good or bad, I explain that it is neutral. In Scrum, you can do everything well, or you can burn out.
I'm talking about Scrum and Agile, but you can find this burnout cycle in waterflow. And a good cascade system manager constantly removes tasks from each stage, adjusting the scope to the result. I don’t know of any project longer than a month that would meet the deadline with full scope.
A team, department, company, enterprise, industry can fall into a burnout cycle. The results in the burnout cycle will be random and minimal.
It’s not a fact that you can help a person who is burned out, but you can at least not push him further.
First and foremost, you must protect yourself. Many people in IT love their work, and it’s a shame to lose this love because the team is on fire.
I separate efficiency and emotions, although you need to do both things, you don’t need to mix them.
An effective team is breadcrumbs. Few people enjoy being an ironworker, although some find their charm in it.
Emotions are what glues a team together. You have no control over your emotions. Often a team is held together by negative emotions. For example, confronting the imposed cycle of burnout can greatly bring people together. I've seen teams write one type of code for the architect, and another type of code to make it work. And I sent the first type to code review. It worked.
What does it mean
We often write the phrase about the ability to work in a team in our resumes and constantly see it in job advertisements. But do we know what this very skill means? As psychologists explain, this is the ability to build relationships with colleagues in such a way as to jointly achieve their goals. What qualities are needed to behave this way in a team?
According to one Canadian company that surveyed a group of top managers, the most important qualities an employee must have to work productively as a team are the following:
- Ability to meet deadlines;
- Personal charm;
- Loyalty to the leader;
- Ability to avoid intrigue.
Making work efficient
Wiley doesn't all work on my approach. We have several options for how to move, we each try our own, we have such space.
Bringing communication outside
A team is a distance between people.
The simplest example of technical communication is the collective ownership of code and the resulting agreements. For many normal companies, this part of communication has already been taken outside. You can come, look at the code and understand how people communicate, what their patterns are.
When they tell me that programmers are closed... programmers speak every day with an “iron block” in human language. Try asking the refrigerator to do something for you. And programmers do this every day.
Programmers are very good at communicating information and are logical and efficient people. But the other side, in the classic management scheme, applies pressure through emotions. There is no emotion in the code. You can experience the emotions of
code, but emotions are taken out of the code itself. The code either works or it doesn't, and the conversation is mostly about how well it works.
Killing email
Email is a way for two people to communicate. By the third iteration, no one will read the correspondence history in the letter. If a letter goes beyond one screen, no one ever reads it behind the first screen. Loss of information begins: make a summary, the summary is a generalization, they forgot to add someone to the mailing list, and in the end no one remembers why they made such a decision.
Communication only within the team
Salvation is messengers. Smart people, such as programmers, are accustomed to looking for reasons
for decisions made. They may also forget something. So everyone wants the full story and access to it. So communicate only through channels.
If the question is specifically addressed to Vasily, it should be asked at the team level. Everyone sees Vasily’s words, perceives them as an addition to their picture of the world, and if they want to clarify or challenge, they can do so right there. If Vasily later needs to explain what happened, he will simply provide a link to this point of correspondence. No one has a copy of the letter with a different answer or solution.
If the team has a one-on-one discussion, there are three extra meetings. First, a meeting of two people. Second, a meeting of these two people with the entire team in order to explain their decision to them. Third, based on the results, because The team still didn’t understand where those two came up with the decision and ended up doing nothing at all.
Contacting the team provides publicly available references with arguments for all decisions on the project. When we started doing this, we reduced the communication time by 3 times.
Creating patterns
What could it be. You have frequent events that more than one team member needs to know about. Here's the direct pattern:
One of the commands contains a version of the deployment for the server type. The pattern is clearly described, it contains links to everything that may be useful, it is understandable to both the programmer and the manager, it suits everyone, it can even be sent to the external environment.
When such an announcement is made, people have no questions, there is nothing to discuss. A month after creating this pattern, we deployed to production by like. The producer liked it and it was sent to prod. No signatures or discussions.
The second pattern is the name. The code here is zero, the product designer needs to see what’s going on there. If this is not zero, the producer does not participate in the deployment decision.
The pattern is needed to reduce fuss over routine things.
In the example above, there are 6 teams on one pipeline, there can be 6 such messages per day. They don't bother anyone. People just read it, everyone understands, the day is over, we calculated what was happening based on the patterns.
How to create it. Take the most frequently repeated action, describe it in detail and throw it into the dictionary. Create a dictionary for the project. The pattern of the thing under discussion may change at any time by general agreement. After a while you will automate it, Jenkins, whatever you want, and you won’t think about them.
The main thing is that the team’s channel is available to the entire company. When someone needs to find out which deployments were on the team and how often, we don’t make a report. We send it to the channel, all the deployments are there.
Previously, for the “arrow” to happen, we spent 3 weeks: approvals, signatures. Now this happens in 30 seconds. I simply agreed that at the level of the entire company we clearly read this pattern.
The same patterns exist for everything: for builds, for creating increments, for “please leave the master alone.” This is all described in Confluence, that's what it's for.
When a new person comes, the first thing they are taught is vocabulary so that they understand what is going on and how we communicate.
I settled on patterns because this turned out to be the most effective idea. Time to market decreased from 2 months to 2 weeks after their implementation.
Characteristics of sociability
A sociable person easily opens up to his interlocutor and quickly makes contact. During a conversation, he tries to tell the listener both important and unnecessary information, without thinking about whether it will be perceived. In addition, such a person is always distinguished by many questions, the answers to which are not particularly interesting to him. The essence of the dialogue is in an active, dominant position, and sometimes in a monologue of a sociable subject. Such a person doesn’t care at all that they don’t want to listen to him, they dream of getting rid of him as soon as possible. Sociability is a good quality, but it is clearly devoid of significant benefits.
We introduce a culture of communication
When we take out the routine, boring bits of work and automate them, people have time to come up with something. But in order to come up with something together, you need to be able to communicate.
Interpretations
In Russian, almost every word has two meanings, and each meaning can be described by two more words.
When they tell me “detailed acquisition business,” I laugh out loud. I understand the numbers, they are difficult to interpret otherwise. If it is not written in numbers, you are more likely to be misunderstood. We reduce all interpretations. No verbal decisions. If you can't write down the solution, it's a bad decision.
Enter all controversial points in the dictionary so that people have the same understanding of how and what is called. Leave no room for ambiguity.
Use only data, not conclusions. The conclusions are either rounded, or incomplete, or transformed, or completely incorrect.
Store data in one place and apply filters to it. The simplest filter is search in the messenger.
We have all the information on the production process, agreements, and communications in Jira. The time for meetings and discussions has been greatly reduced. We all take information from the same source, everyone just cuts it up the way they need it. A person creates filters for himself and does not require reports from others. As a result, managers can work with the team rather than drafting papers. Managers stop working as transmitters of information and begin to work as adjusters.
Argumentation
If a person writes code and understands what logic is, he still may not understand what logic is in speech.
Logic in speech is not limited to if - else. In argumentation, everything is a hypothesis. There is no "knowing". Especially about the past. In the past there was a certain context, a certain situation. Any phrase is an offer to try something. The question is the cost of resources to “try”.
Respect. People have a lot of opinions to express. If you have one solution to one problem, then it is bad, even if it is good. You have nothing to compare with. It is neither good nor bad, it is the only one. Make sure that at least two solutions appear. Often there is only one solution when the team lead overpowers everyone.
Psychological safety
The team must encourage everyone to have a voice.
The way they can. Many people do not know how to speak, they do not know how to accept arguments. I worked with team leads who became team leads because their salaries needed to be raised. Their main operating technique was “I can’t hear you.” Sometimes very simple things help here, like a ball - who has the ball. that's what he says. I have a ball - I speak, and only after I have given you the ball can you speak.
Psychological safety is built from opportunity, from training, from the understanding that there is no hierarchy in the team.
Many people do not speak out because... They think their opinion is stupid. And it’s just second, third or fourth in order. At the moment of expression, opinions are equivalent. We will criticize them later, just say it first.
At least when a person begins to speak out, it will become clear what he does not know. And great, you can teach him. Seek ignorance so you can help people grow. Raise the bottom level.
Psychological safety at the team level, at the management level, at the enterprise level.
Accept any opinion and respect those who are wrong. Moreover, any improvement will fail in 80% of cases, we know this, but we are ready to experiment.
Dictionary
In extreme programming, the dictionary allows you to name classes, modules, systems unambiguously, maintain the structure of the code so that it is clearly understood, and transfer these terms to the product level.
A very good dictionary uses the same words to explain the functionality for the client and what is written in the code. Plus it's code as documentation.
A dictionary saves time. As soon as a situation with ambiguity arises, you supplement the dictionary.
NO CAPSUMS OR ALERTS111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!! ONE ONE
It's an idiotic thing to think that you can't be heard.
Channels must have a read-reply agreement. You can write as above only when the prod has dropped. As long as all business processes are running, there is no problem. This is what a manager who is in a hurry usually writes. Remember, if a person joins the team and is in a hurry, that’s his problem. The team is in no hurry, everything is fine and the production process is underway. Send me to the forest for such messages. People grow up very quickly. (from the audience) There are still strange people who cannot formulate a whole thought and write 1 word in a message!
I have had cases where a person started writing in chats like this when he had real psychological problems, he was sick. So be respectful. In the case of Scrum, the Scrum Master should talk to this person and find out if everything is ok.
This was the sooooo boring part. Efficiency doesn't work, but it allows for greater transparency in the team to see what's going on in the team.
I’ll give you a metaphor (it’s controversial). When you make soup, how you add ingredients is based on more than just how long the soup cooks. but also on the fact that the soup must not stop boiling for it to cook.
You must have a team brewing. When adding information, people to the team, or when people leave the team, the soup must be cooked. People will come and go. You know, the programmer went on Facebook and received two job offers.
The team must be organized so that it can work calmly, can lose or gain a person, gain or lose knowledge. To do this, we display all communications separately from people and make them visible.
So that diagnostics can be done and understand what’s wrong with the deployments, what’s wrong with the back end, what’s wrong with the front end, what’s wrong with the mobile phone. At any moment, everyone knows where to look for information.
Another good habit is when a person receives a letter directly, he posts it in the channel.
It doesn’t work because the team is held together by an ineffective process. This is not human garbage, these are machines and pieces of hardware.
Why are there problems with remote work? When effective processes are established, the team is very successful in resisting them. People's creativity is off the charts when they want to cheat the system.
People stick together in the corridors, on the way to lunch, organizing other chats. The team is glued together outside of production. Our task is to leave room for emotion so that it can be directed towards improvements, and not into opposing processes. And remote work kills this space for “gluing”.
I read somewhere that the best programmer works (invents) 2 hours a day, he simply doesn’t have enough strength for more. The rest of the time you polish the code, run through all sorts of things. You can’t constantly come up with something new, so in the remaining time you either have to do the routine, and if you’re a smart person, you’ve already figured out how to automate the routine and you’re just sitting there counting. I prefer smart ones.
There is a good question about agile: “I finished all the work of a two-week sprint in a week. What will you do to me? I won't do anything to you. Teach others to do the same.
For this reason, because you no longer have corridors with teas, you will have to organize them
Let everyone express themselves
To develop, a team needs room for creativity. Therefore, it is important to create an environment where employees are not afraid to express their ideas or make mistakes (within reason).
To make taking risks less scary, have team members fill out a simple table before completing a task in which they imagine their worst-case scenario. It consists of three columns: in the first you need to write which result the employee considers the most terrible; in the second - what actions and factors, in his opinion, can lead to such an ending; the third is what the team will need to do to get out of a likely bad situation.
Encourage not only courage, but also the desire of employees to develop. Find or organize educational programs, courses and lectures for them.
Trample positive memories
There is a term “retrospective”; it is carried out in Scrum and Agile, in many places.
For what. To remember what was good. And based on the good, create a positive experience. So praise. I have seen people who believe that no one should relax. So this is not a manager, this is just a dude who is annoying everyone.
When everything is good, you say good things. When everything fails, you also say good things. In retrospect there is no word "bad". There are things that went well and things that we can change.
I often see how they miss this important part and do a retrospective without a set of memories of what happened.
A normal retrospective lasts about 2 hours, and if it’s a large team, 80-100 people, then the whole day. And this is all done in order to collect memories so that the team realizes that they have a lot of positive experiences.
This also helps against burnout. When you only talk about bad things, people will only remember the bad things, even if they have done a lot of good things.
Assign roles
Each team member should have clear tasks and responsibilities. Otherwise, a situation may arise when several people will be doing one thing at the same time, without knowing it, and everyone will forget about some important assignment.
You can make a small reminder for each employee (if we are talking about a small team) or department (for large companies) with the distribution of roles within the team. Then everyone will know who to contact if they need additional information or help.
And for the effective distribution of tasks, it is important for the head of a company or department to know each employee well, his strengths and weaknesses. This will increase the productivity of both the individual employee and the entire team.
A place to cry and laugh
There should be room for bullshit in your communications.
Several channels where people do crap. Officially. Cats are posted, news is discussed. It’s just to see if your people are actually alive. Some people think that people will spend too much time there. Ha! Yes, a team that is sagging morally cannot be driven into such a channel by kicking. Post a meme, attract people, this is also work. Crying and laughing is also about psychological safety. People are afraid to say stupid things at work. Show them an official place where they are not expected to be smart at all. This is fine.
Advantages of the ability to work in a team
A serious task that has several stages of solution is not easy to cope with alone. At best, this will take a long time and will be completely unproductive. There are tasks that simply require combining different opinions. A number of advantages of group work:
- you have the opportunity to participate in an interesting work project. This will give you valuable experience.
- Brainstorm. An interesting form of teamwork. Participants are given a task that they must solve together. Everyone expresses their opinion and offers their options. This develops creative thinking well.
- You will learn to hear others and accept their point of view objectively.
- The manager will gain unique experience that will help him move up the career ladder.
So, a team and a collective have a colossal difference.
I'll give you an example. Office. The working day has just begun. Each employee sits (and there are only 17 of them) at his workplace and is busy with his own business. Everyone works in the same company, with the same goal.
Another example. Middle of a day. The head of the department gathers a group of 10 people and invites them to jointly solve one task.
Where do you think the team is and where is the team? Think carefully and leave your opinion in the comments.
Criticism
It is important to be able to accept criticism, not insult. This is a skill of a mature person that will open up new opportunities. When you have to point out an error, it is better to use the method of indirect criticism. For example, instead of saying: “You wrote it wrong,” it is better: “What is written here is incorrect.” This method will not offend the person, but will help to improve.
Creating an effective team is the key to business success.
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Follow the progress
Regular analysis and evaluation of work are effective tools for team development. You should use obvious indicators for this, such as money earned or the number of clients/subscribers.
Also periodically - once a month or quarter - you need to answer five questions:
- What has the team already achieved?
- What did the team change?
- What did the team learn?
- What does the team do well?
- What needs to be fixed/improved?
Based on the answers, you can revise work processes, discuss details with employees and, if necessary, change strategy.
Several functions allow you to monitor progress in LeaderTask Business. For example, “Calendar” and “Schedule” give an employee the opportunity to see all his tasks, projects and assignments for the day or week, and “History by task” allows him to analyze those already completed. This function also allows managers to evaluate the performance of team members or look at an old failed project and find out what went wrong there. The task manager also has a “God Mode” - thanks to it, the super administrator, that is, the boss, can see all the tasks of all employees.
LeaderTask Business exists on all popular platforms: Windows, MacOS, Web, iOS, Android. This means that a convenient planner will always be with you: on your smartphone, laptop, tablet or desktop computer. You can use the service at any time.
To use all the business functions of the task manager, you need to subscribe. Use promo code Lifehack to get 50% off. Offer valid until March 31, 2021.
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Example
Instead of envying others or complaining, decide and become an example for everyone. Work diligently, give your best. This way, you will demonstrate to the team your most worthy professional qualities. Due to this, colleagues will be motivated, develop professionally and listen to your opinion.
Let's tell you a secret: we all love and respect strong personalities who do not criticize, but motivate by their example. Let's look at an illustrative example: you are annoyed by the illiterate texts of your colleagues. Instead of starting to accuse them of illiteracy, check and improve your performance in this matter.
Keep track of your team size
A large number of employees does not guarantee that a team will work more efficiently or quickly. On the contrary, in a group that is too large, it is more difficult to build trust and monitor performance.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for example, when creating a team, recommends The two-pizza rule and the secret of Amazon's success to use the “two-pizza rule”: there should be enough people in the team so that they can be fed with two pizzas. Not more. This limitation allows you to effectively monitor everyone's activities and increase productivity.
