Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister (November 2017)
Authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister address the modern organization’s most important function – building strong teams – in this thorough yet easily digestible management book. Without strong teams, organizations almost always struggle to achieve any long-term success. Weak teams with high turnover and immediate short-term costs define these organizations. The workload is significant and yet no one expects to be around when the effort finally pays off, creating a cycle that constantly reinforces short-term thinking. By contrast, organizations comprised of strong teams with low turnover naturally adopt the long view because their teams expect to benefit from the eventual gains of their group efforts.
Managers who understand the factors that strengthen a team can meet this challenge. One factor is how a team gels whenever it succeeds together. Since most organizations have a continuous nature – they produced widgets yesterday, will produce widgets today, and will probably produce widgets tomorrow – the skilled manager must know how to create the arbitrary closure needed to help the team achieve regular, shared success. A manager can do this by subdividing work to create easily defined milestones or measuring performance against consistent time references.
Another approach is to focus on high quality. Most markets do not care for quality in the context of the production process but this should not stop a manager from encouraging a focus on process details from the team. A focus on quality can differentiate a team from its peers and help it become accustomed to caring about every detail in the process. A good approach for fostering this mentality is to frame every aspect of the product as a quality measure – lower price is higher quality cost control, better lead time is higher quality fulfillment process, high responsiveness is higher quality customer service, and so on. This way, teams become used to thinking of their work in terms improvement rather than on meeting objectives and learn how to frame their efforts in the context of what a customer values in the product.
A manager must also avoid making the common errors that weaken teams. Peopleware has plenty of insight into what to avoid doing rather than on what to do (perhaps a subtle comment that a manager is more capable of weakening rather than strengthening a team). A surefire way to divide a team is to allow members to take on multiple projects or work groups. A person with too many colleagues to keep track of and too many assignment details to organize will spend all day changing gears rather than working effectively.
Another example of a commonly misused tactic is compensation. If team members are rewarded unequally, competition for rewards will turn individuals against each other. Leadership by objectives is a closely related tactic that encourages a similar selfish competitiveness. Well-structured teams led through strong motivation and supported by regular investment will always work together better than teams constantly reminded by their leaders of individual goals, targets, or objectives.
The final obstacle I’d like to highlight today is the sport analogy. Though useful in the way it helps us all envision a group coming together to achieve a common goal, the analogy is dangerous in how it enables us to think of teams as groups comprised of similar people. Teams require a diversity of backgrounds, skills, and perspectives so that members can complement each other’s strengths and help bolster each other’s weaknesses. When teams lack variety or diversity, the group becomes more like a collection of contractors instead of a gelled unit.
The overall point Peopleware drives home is that teams usually achieve their destiny. A manager can influence this destiny with a combination of foresight and hard work. The key is understanding what results in strong teams, doing everything possible to keep the team on track for that outcome, and making sure to avoid anything that will definitely weaken the team along the way.
Footnotes / the obligatory bad pun reference
0. A final note before I go…
The title of the book is a play on the word software. When I roll my eyes at a pun, reader, we know it isn’t good, but it’ll have to do. For what it’s worth, the book is written in a logical, orderly structure – not all that much different than how software might be programmed.
