At a previous company, I joined a team that had to deliver something a year before I joined. All previous teams assembled to deliver that had failed and had been fired. That the company didn't have that feature was deeply embarrassing, the competition mentioned having it in the first line of their marketing materials. The most influential engineers on the team didn't give a damn about deadlines and thought that being friends with the director would save them, had elaborately set up a plan to blame other engineers they were not friends with, who were on the way to get fired - half the team would never, ever speak to the other half or even be in the same room. I saw a (good) new manager get hired, see the clusterf*ck, and quit because it was hopeless. None of the other managers wanted anything to do with us, we were toxic. Then someone without people management experience got "promoted" to our manager. She told us she didn't care about any of us. Revoked everybody's little privileges, would literally come see if everybody was on their keyboard and typing all the time. Didn't force overtime on anyone but was adamant against people arriving late or leaving early or missing meetings. Started openly taking notes of everybody's failures so she would have ample documentation of who failed what. Told people what to do, didn't want to know the person's opinion about it. A few short months later we shipped.
> She told us she didn't care about any of us. Revoked everybody's little privileges, would literally come see if everybody was on their keyboard and typing all the time. Didn't force overtime on anyone but was adamant against people arriving late or leaving early or missing meetings. Started openly taking notes of everybody's failures so she would have ample documentation of who failed what.
That sounds pretty horrendous to me, I would wish her all the best and leave.
This is the wartime/peacetime leader conundrum. The tactics she used worked well because the situation was dire. They probably wouldn't have worked well in a company with a good culture.
Winston Churchill is the most famous example of this. He was a great leader during wartime but terrible during peacetime.
It's not that Churchill was a different person in wartime than in peacetime, it's just that most people's morals change from wartime to peacetime. So the same atrocity could be viewed as an atrocity or heroic and brave depending on what the public at large feels like their situation was like at the time. That's the point being raised about the manager: every statement the parent made was basically an accusation, but because the team was desperate the success in the end overwrote the other things in everybody's mind.
If the team had failed in the end, all of the qualities that are presently being lauded would be held at fault. True morals may not be relative and situational, but the average person's mental implementation of morals sure can be.
This book A First-Rate Madness by Nassir Ghaemi [0] is about that. He looks at various historical leaders and how one half of them make good wartime leaders, but bad peacetime leaders, and the other half -- the opposite. Some of his case studies are, as far as I can remember (couldn't find a summary online): generals in US civil war (Lee and the scortched-earth-guy), Chamberlaine, Churchill, Hitler, JFK, Lincoln, Napoleon, Nixon, Bush. US centric, but still pertaining to anyone.
Churchill was a complex man, but it was his party that got defeated in the 1945 election not Churchill. (Churchill it should be said, was a Liberal, not a Conservative before the war, and joined the party to prevent conflict in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak - he would later describe it (in his diaries) as a mistake.)
We don´t know if he would have been a good or bad leader during peacetime (by the time the conservatives got back into office he was no longer in his prime shall we say), but what he would most certainly have been is a leader with a lot of experience in dealing with Stalin, and a British Imperialist. Which would have been entertaining at least.
For pretty much all teams I'd agree. But if it comes to the point as described, you pretty much have to revert to treat everybody at children and gradually build it up from there. Privileges is something you work to get.
Not within the existing culture. It seems necessary.
Most of that is "blank slate, let's start again" with expectations made clear. Obviously that was lacking in this place.
When you've got people successfully blaming others for their own failures, this manager, with experience on the front lines, did the most effective thing to remedy that. I'm sure nobody got fired for someone else's failings after that.
Exactly. The deal wasn't static: people got their freedom back when they showed they were worthy of it.
The aftermath was that a few people left the company for better jobs after we shipped (unavoidable, some had set their minds even before she joined and actually stayed longer because of her). For the rest, it was promotions. The engineers on a PIP exited the PIP by being promoted(!), were allowed to move to their favorite projects. Even the scheming engineers who turned us into a toxic team got promoted for the work they did under her management (though personally I think they should have been shown the door for their attitude). Manager moved to a more prestigious peacetime team, where I am sure she runs things differently.
Why? It sounds like she was giving direction to her directs and holding them to account. Every manager who gets stuff done does the same thing in their own style.
There arguably are less blunt ways to do it - but for that team, it seems like it was the right approach. Also, OP is presumably overstating the need to be typing all the time since that's not how programming works.
In context of a toxic enviroment this may be more like a reset. See who has substance and who doesn't. If you do this in a clear and fair way it doesn't seem unreasonable for a non-performing enviroment. The benifits and flexibility can return when earned and the bad eggs are discovered and removed.
To me it seems a lot of people in these teams were more interested in climbing the corporate ladder than working in nice teams. Those kinds of people might perhaps be hesitant to leave the company.
This kind of thing generally works where there is underlying sense of duty, or impetus to win.
The WW2 film 'Twelve O'Clock High' where an Air Force General comes in an sorts out a demoralized and broken unit is used as training in various militaries to depict this kind of leadership on a higher level.
But 'reprimands' etc. tend only to work when there's a higher calling. Like winning a war.
For salaried teams - even if the team is being a little dysfunctional ... just might lead to mutiny, exodus.
From what you described I'm very surprised that the team didn't fall apart, or that the product was shipped.
A few things:
1) If the team was that utterly toxic, and people were openly backstabbing others ... this is not going to be fixed really. Those people are toxic they need to go.
2) Changing culture 'in place' is really hard with regular people. You can't just come in and play hardball with carrots and sticks. An alternative would be basically re-org the whole thing. Even having a different physical presence, maybe different team structure ... even if it's kind of a facade - a new work dynamic might set up people towards thinking of a 'clean start'. So instead of 'penalizing' people for coming in late etc. you have a new team dynamic in a new operating environment where 'everyone agrees' to more specific hours for the betterment of the team. A good idea would be to 'listen' to some of the problems, even if there's no action on it, just the act of listening will help.
I think you're lucky ... your 'no nonsense' manager is very lucky and this approach I think can only really work when there is a specific kind of dysfunction. I think if you have younger developers, all of whom lack self discipline but are otherwise good team members, maybe who need just a little bit of a kick in the pants. But I'm glad you had a good experience.
This is a really great question. The child argues that a good manager adapts to whatever situation is needed. It would be interesting to know if this manager took this "win" and managed all future teams this way as well, even ones that are highly functional or working on more experimental code/projects.
The best manager is the one whose only focus is for each of the team members and the team collectively to be successful. In some companies or teams that may be removing distractions or introducing accountability or getting rid of a bad apple or .... The problem is that we as humans generalize and the first success a new manager has is seen as the best way forever no matter what because it works. That way lays madness.
Part of being a good manager is to adapt to the situation and do what's sensible. This was an example of a good manager. Conscientiousness is always a great trait.
But we got just one sample case. We don't know how she would act in the opposite situation. It could be she is a great manager but it could also be that she was promoted because the situation asked for a tyrant and she was indeed one. When someone gets promoted in the middle of a fire the person to look after to understand the decision is the person that did the promotion. Sometimes the promoted person is promoted to do the dirty work and the person above he/she it's just exploiting their personality traits.
It sounds like she gave the dev team a 'day 1 boot camp' treatment -- if it works for the military, then why not a bunch of petulant developers...
Hopefully she transitioned to a more compassionate and positive management style after whipping the team into shape, instilling discipline and earning their respect as an effective leader.
What little management experience I have (3 years as team lead for 2 different teams) tells me most people are masochists deep down inside and crave a dictator to order them what to do.
When a manager tells someone what to do, that person is personally assuming the responsibility of deciding how the work must be done and, of course, being accountable for failing to deliver.
Prefering to have the manager be held accountable for managerial decisions is not masochism. In fact the opposite, having to decide what and how work should be done and having to answer for your decisions, suits that definition a whole lot better.
Learned that the hard way. :( Unfortunately can't be said enough. Managers have to learn how to deal with bad apples. Tried too hard and long giving benefit of the doubt that the apples were actually good inside in some situations.
It's not just bad apples. Sometimes people just aren't a good fit for a role. It turns out they don't have the right skills mix, need too much direction, etc. I've definitely seen perfectly nice folks who come in but it turns out they can't really do the job and no amount of coaching seems to help. It's better for everyone not to string things out too much.
Being honest, I've had one job I wasn't a good fit for myself. But the dot-com bubble burst took care of that one relatively quickly.
Best manager I ever had.