Teams like this must be stopped. They make you and your mediocre team look bad. Fortunately, if you can take control of the high performance group, you can stop them if you follow these six simple guidelines.1. Devalue Their Work
High performance software teams value their skills, and constantly hone them. Thus anything that attacks and marginalizes their expertise will be effective. Fortunately, devaluing their work is easy. Simply emphasize other activities over their primary job of developing high quality software. This can be done in a number of ways:
- Establish processes that place value on adding more process. Do they want to make a change in the software? Fill out a change request and submit it to the change control board, no matter how small or trivial. But don't do this for code that has been tested or destined for release - do it for everything. The team will hate it.
- Force the team to attend training on things that have no relationship to their job - financial ethics, warehouse safety, and hazmat training are all good examples. Be sure to weight this heavily in their performance reviews, or at least rank it higher than actual technical work.
- Focus not on the end result (software), but on the intermediates such as requirement documents, compatibility matrices, and so on. High performance teams handle these items themselves as a normal part of their job but if you force them to focus on these things - and not the final product - you will implicitly communicate to them that their core expertise doesn't really matter.
2. Micro Manage for Macro Results
High performance teams instinctively break large tasks into manageable chunks and distribute the work amongst themselves. This must be stopped. You must take control over every decision. This will be difficult at first; you will likely need to publicly reprimand and belittle the natural leaders within the group a few times.
3. Keep Them In The Dark
One of the characteristics of high performance teams is that they all work together towards the same goal. Disrupting this is relatively easy - just assign different tasks to different members of the team such that team members are working against each other. This requires that you accomplish step #2 above, first. Any talk of "vision", "mission", or other lofty ideas must be crushed. Constantly changing priorities and strategic requirements will help here as well - so long as you change them well after work has started on the previous list. This also helps to re-enforce item number one.
4. There is No "You" in "Team" (Unless Things Are Going Well)
This is perhaps the trickiest thing to accomplish without business leadership catching on. Be especially subtle; use "I" when things are going well but refer to "the team" when things start to fall apart. Paint a picture for upper management that the team is struggling but that you are there to help lead them to the promised land.
5. Avoid the Team At All Times
This works especially well in conjunction with item two. By not making yourself available when a decision needs to be made yet mandating that all decisions go through you, you'll guarantee that the team starts to stumble. Schedule "private meetings" in another building, at home, or even the golf course. Ignore cell phone calls from the team. Don't set a precedent by answering e-mails. An extra bonus is that some team members, in an effort to make progress, will take the initiative and make a decision themselves, providing you another opportunity for a public lashing. This is what the military terms a "force multiplier" as it multiplies the demoralizing effect of these techniques.
6. Don't Tell Them You Don't Respect Them: Show Them
You can't come right out and tell team members how worthless they are, but you can easily show them by following this simple routine. First, schedule one-on-one meetings with them so that you can "better understand their needs". At the last minute, cancel these meetings. Eventually, they will try to ask you about it but if you've been paying attention, you won't answer that e-mail or take the call. This works better if you schedule meetings at awkward times for them, forcing them to change their schedule.
You can't come right out and tell team members how worthless they are, but you can easily show them by following this simple routine. First, schedule one-on-one meetings with them so that you can "better understand their needs". At the last minute, cancel these meetings. Eventually, they will try to ask you about it but if you've been paying attention, you won't answer that e-mail or take the call. This works better if you schedule meetings at awkward times for them, forcing them to change their schedule.
This is just the start and there are many more possibilities, but if you put these six simple steps into practice, I guarantee you'll be able to kill the morale and productivity of any team. Once you've mastered these skills, no one will be able to say that you don't know how to make yourself look good (at least for a while).
Obviously tongue-in-cheek, but sadly I've witnessed this first-hand several times in different organizations. The emphasis placed on culture and teamwork in my current role is a sure cure for this ailment and is one of the things I value most about it. Have you ever seen a high performance team dismembered? What happened?
