Pawel Brodzinski on Leadership in Technology

Whatever it takes to lead a team, build a product, and run a business

Tag: recruitment

  • Cultural Fit versus Cultural Fit

    There is a remark on hiring I’ve heard quite a few times recently. It’s about sending a rejection message to a candidate. It goes along the lines: “Just don’t tell them that they’re not a good fit for the culture. That’s bullshit. That means nothing.”

    A Bad Fit

    I can’t say that such a remark lands well with me. I do, however, understand where it is coming from. As the industry, we started paying attention to the culture. It’s on our radars. We may have only a vague understanding of what organizational culture is but it is already a part of the discourse. This vagueness of understanding of the concept actually comes handy when there’s no tangible reason to reject a candidate but we still somehow didn’t like them.

    They are a bad cultural fit.

    Whatever that means.

    See, the problem I have with many of these statements is that they’re used as a bludgeon without much thought invested to why “we didn’t like” a candidate. Because of that we often throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    A Good Fit versus Likability

    When hearing about lack of cultural fit I often follow up ask what it means that a candidate wasn’t a good cultural match. The answer, most often, is something like “that’s a person we wouldn’t get on well with”, or “that’s not a person I’d like to hang out with”, or “it’s not my kind of a person”. These boil down to how likable a candidate is for an assessing person.

    The problem is that likability is a terrible way of assessing cultural fit. Not only is it not helpful, but it is also counterproductive.

    If we chose likability as our guiding principle to judge cultural match we would end up with a group of people similar to each other. They’d have similar interests, many shared views and beliefs, etc. We would be building a very homogeneous culture. An echo chamber.

    Sure, there wouldn’t be much conflict in such a group. There wouldn’t be much creative thinking either. There would be premature convergence of the ideas, little scrutiny, few alternative options would be explored.

    If we consider knowledge workers such a team would have appalling performance. Thus my problem with such a shallow understanding of cultural fit.

    Shared Values, Diverse Perspectives

    So what is an alternative? How to define cultural fit in a way that would yield a high performing team? General guidance would be to optimize for representation of different, diverse points of view while creating an environment where people are encouraged to contribute.

    These two ingredients—diversity and enabling environment—balance each other in a way.

    We want diversity to have an option to learn about other, non-obvious ideas. Such ideas won’t come from people similar to ourselves. We thus want to have a range of different people in a team. And when I say “different”, I think of different walks of life, different experiences, different beliefs, different preferences, different characters, etc. This might be translated to maximizing diversity.

    However, diversity for the diversity sake is not the way to go. This is exactly where the second part kicks in. We want to sustain an environment where people share their diverse opinions, and not simply have them. For that to happen we need to have a common base that encourages people to feel comfortable enough to contribute.

    That common base is a set of shared values. I won’t give you a list as I don’t believe there’s the way. There are many ways to build such an enabling environment. There are, of course, usual suspects: respect for people, emotional safety, or autonomy, just to mention few. The important part is that such a set of shared values provides an informal, and typically implicit, contract that makes it safe to contribute.

    Cultural Fit

    With that founding principle, the definition of a cultural fit would be very different. A good match would mean that we share core values but beyond that, a candidate is as different from current team members as possible.

    This means that friction will happen. Conflict too. Not everyone will feel comfortable all the time and not everyone will be getting on well with everyone else.

    This means that when we decide there isn’t a good fit we may come up with a much more tangible explanation why. It is because we don’t share values—e.g. we perceive a candidate as disrespectful—or we don’t sense any aspect in which a candidate would stretch diversity of the team in one of the desired dimensions.

    Note: not all dimensions of diversity are equal. There’s little, if any, value in my experience as a sailor in the context of product development. There’s more value in, say, cognitive studies that someone else went through. That’s why I add a quantifier “in the desired dimension” next to “diversity”.

    Some time ago at Lunar Logic, we rejected a candidate for a software developer role whose focus was purely on their technical skills. There’s nothing wrong in that of course unless this is the only dimension a candidate uses to look at themselves and at others. There was some mismatch in shared values, e.g. little understanding and appreciation for teamwork and collaboration. We didn’t see much diversity that they would add to the mix either—we already have quite a bunch of excellent developers.

    Interestingly, the decision was made despite the fact that we liked the candidate and were getting on well with them. That’s a complete opposite of what a naive approach to cultural fit would suggest us to do.

    We believe that we are better off with that decision. More importantly, we believe that the candidate will be better off too. As long as they find a company where there’s a better overlap in shared values not will they contribute more but will also be appreciated better.

  • Why Collective Intelligence Beats Individual Intelligence

    As long-term readers likely know I am a big fan of the idea of collective intelligence and big proponent of optimizing teams toward high collective intelligence.

    First, what is collective intelligence? The easiest way of explaining that is through the comparison to individual intelligence (IQ). While IQ tests differ in type the pattern is similar: we ask an individual to solve a set of complex problems; the better they perform the higher their IQ is.

    By the same token, we can measure intelligence of teams through measuring how well a group solves a series of complex problems.

    There are a few very interesting findings in the original research on collective intelligence. It all starts with an observation that collective intelligence beats the crap out of individual intelligence. In highly collectively intelligent teams’ solutions provided by a group were systematically significantly better than solutions offered by any individual, including the smartest person in the room. However, even in teams with low collective intelligence the group solutions were on par with the best option provided by an individual.

    It totally makes sense when we think of it. No matter how smart the solution provided by an individual is it most likely can be improved through clues and suggestions provided by others. Either directly or indirectly. And it doesn’t matter whether the others are even smarter. The thing that matters is that they think differently.

    This theme is portrayed well in some pop-cultural productions. In Sherlock series the protagonist surprisingly frequently refers to his sidekick—John Watson—as not too clever or even dumb. On even more occasions Sherlock stresses that he needs Dr. Watson to inspire his superior mind. It’s not that Watson is smarter than Holmes. It’s that together they are smarter than Holmes alone, even given his prodigious mind.

    The same pattern has been exploited in House M.D. series, where the team’s effort was consistently beating individual effort. It was so even if the final solution was facilitated mostly through the brilliance of the main character.

    As a matter of fact, collective intelligence in play is one of those things that you can’t unsee once you’ve seen it. Like the other day, when I was sharing the idea of a workshop with one of my colleagues and I mentioned one feature I’d love to add to the app I was going to use during the workshop. The problem was that we explored an idea to add that feature before and, because of some old architectural decisions, adding the feature was no easy feat. Thus, we gave up. My colleague listened to my complaints and asked why we wouldn’t just add a simple and dirty hack just for the sake of the workshop. I was so immersed with the whole context of how hard it was to do it properly that the idea wouldn’t even cross my mind, no matter how obvious it might sound in retrospect.

    And it wasn’t even a context of a persistent team; merely an ad-hoc discussion in a random group. Think, how much more we contribute in a more permanent setup—in a team which shares the same context on a daily basis.

    The interesting follow-up to the observation that collective intelligence is supreme is that collective intelligence doesn’t depend on individual intelligence. As a matter of fact, there’s no correlation between the two. In other words, hiring all the smartasses doesn’t mean they’d constitute a team of high collective intelligence.

    It is likely better to support a brilliant mind with folks who aren’t nearly as eloquent but provide another, diverse, point of view that to get more of the brilliance. What’s more a team built out of people of average intelligence can be better off than a bunch of smart folks gathered together.

    It is because collective intelligence—the brilliance of a group—isn’t fueled by smarts but by collaboration. Two critical factors for high collective intelligence is social perceptiveness and evenness of communication. The former is awareness of others, empathy, and unselfish willingness to act for the good of others. The latter is creating a space for everyone to speak up and facilitating the discussions so that all are involved roughly equally. Neither of these attributes directly taps into individual intelligence.

    That’s, by the way, where pop-cultural references fall short. Neither Holmes nor House care about the collaborative aspect of work of their teams and both make a virtue out their utter lack of empathy. It means that their teams are of low collective intelligence. I can’t help but thinking how much they could have achieved had they been optimized more toward collective intelligence.

    Most of our industry fall in the very same trap when hiring. Tremendous part of our recruitment processes is optimized toward validating individual skills following a subconscious belief that this is what’s going to make teams successful.

    As Dan Kahneman observes in his classic Thinking Fast and Slow, if our brain can’t easily answer to a difficult question it subconsciously substitutes the question with a similar one which is easy to and treats the answer to the latter as if it was the answer to the former. In this context we may be substituting a difficult question about how a candidate would perform in a team with much simpler one about how they would perform individually. The problem is that the assessment of a candidate may be very different depending on which question we answered.

    If we truly want to optimize our teams for good collaboration we need to focus on the aspects that drive collective intelligence. We need to focus on character traits that are not that easy to observe, and yet they prove to be critical for teams’ long-term success, such as perceptiveness, awareness, empathy, compassion and respect. Ironically, such a team will outsmart one built around smarts and wits.

  • Empathy and Respect: What Makes Teams Great

    I’ve been known to bring up research on collective intelligence in many situations, e.g. here, here, or here. In my personal case, the research findings heavily influenced my perception of how to build teams and design organizations. The crucial lesson was that social perceptiveness and having everyone being heard in discussions were key to achieve high collective intelligence. This, in turn, translates to high effectiveness of a team in pretty much any flavor of knowledge work.

    Since the original work was published, the research has been repeated and findings were confirmed. Nevertheless, in software industry we tend to think we are special (even though we are not) and thus I often hear an argument that trading technical skills for social perceptiveness is not worth it. The reasoning is that technical skills easily translate to better effectiveness in what is our bread and butter—building software. At the same time fuzzy things, like e.g. empathy, do not.

    The research, indeed, was run on people from all walks of life. At the same time every niche has some specific prerequisites that enable any productivity. I don’t deny that there is specific set of technical skills that is required to get someone contributing to work a team tires to accomplish. That’s likely true in an industry and software development is no different.

    As a matter of fact, enough fluency with engineering is something we validate first when we hire at Lunar Logic. The way we define it, though, is “good enough”. We want to make sure that a new team member won’t hamper a team they join. Beyond that, we don’t care too much. It resonates with a simple realization that it is much easier to learn how to code than it is to develop empathy or social perceptiveness in general.

    The whole approach is based on an assumption that findings on collective intelligence hold true in our context. Now, do they?

    Google is known to be on their quest to find what’s the perfect team for years. Some time ago they shared what they learned in a few year-long research that involved 180 Google teams. It seems they confirmed pretty much everything that has been in the original Anita Woolley’s team work.

    It’s not the technical excellence that lands teams in the group of accomplishers. By the way, neither is management style—it was orthogonal to how well teams were doing. The patterns that were vividly seen were caring about other team members and equal access to discussion time.

    What’s more, the teams which did well against one goal seemed to do well against other goals as well. Conversely, teams that were below average seemed to be so in a consistent manner. The secret sauce seemed to work fairly universally against different challenges.

    What a surprise! After all, we are not as special as we tend to think we are.

    I could leave it here, as one of those “You see? I was right all that time!” kind of posts. There is more to learn from the Google story, though. Aspects that are mentioned often in the research are norms, either explicit or implicit. This refers to specific behaviors that are allowed and supported and, as a result, to organizational culture.

    When we are talking about teams, we talk about culture pockets as teams, especially in a big organization, may differ quite a bit one from another.

    It seems that even slight changes, such as attitude in group discussions, can boost collective effectiveness significantly. If we look deeper at what drives such behaviors we’ll find two keywords.

    Empathy and respect.

    Empathy is the enabler of social perceptiveness. It is this magic powder that makes people see and care for others. It pays off because empathic person would likely make everyone around better. Note: I’m using a very broad definition of empathy here, as there is a whole discussion how empathy is defined and decomposed.

    Then, we have respect that results in psychological safety, as people are neither embarrassed nor rejected for sharing their thoughts. This, in turn, means that everyone has equal access to ongoing conversations and they are heard. Simply put, everyone contributes. Interestingly enough, it is often perceived as a nice-to-have trait in organizations but rarely as the core capability, which every team needs to demonstrate.

    Corollary to that is an observation that both respect and care for others are deep down in the iceberg model of organizational culture. It means that we can roughly sense what are capabilities of an organization when it comes to collective intelligence. It’s enough to look at the execs and most senior managers. How much are they caring for others? How respectful are they? Since the organizational culture spreads very much in a top-down manner it is a good organizational climate metric.

    I would risk a bold hypothesis that, statistically speaking, successful organizations have leaders who act in respectful and empathic way. I have no proof to support the claim, and of course there’s anecdotal evidence how disrespectful Steve Jobs or Bill Gates were. That’s why I add “statistically speaking” to this hypothesis. Does anyone have a relevant research on that?

    Finally, there is something that I reluctantly admit since I’m not a believer in “fake it till you make it approach”. It seems that some rules and rituals can actually drive collective intelligence up. There are techniques to take turns in discussions. On one hand it creates equal access to conversation time. On the other if fakes respect in this context. It challenges ego-driven extroverts and, eventually, may trigger emergence of true respect.

    Similarly, we can learn to focus on perception of others so that we see better how they may feel. It fakes empathy but, yet again, it may trigger the right reactions and, eventually, help to develop the actual trait.

    In other words we are not doomed to fail even if so far we paid attention to technical skills only and we ended up with an environment that is far too nerdy.

    However, we’d be so much better off if we built our teams bearing in mind that empathy and respect for others are the most important traits for candidates. Yes, for software developers too.

  • Why We Want Women in Teams

    One of the messages that I frequently share is that we need more women in our teams. By now I’ve faced the whole spectrum of reactions to this message, from calling me a feminist to furious attacks pointing how I discriminate women. If nothing else people are opinionated on that topic and there’s a lot of shallow, and unfair, buzz when it comes to role of women in IT.

    Personally, I am guilty too. I’ve been caught off guard a few times when I simply shared the short message – “we need more women in our teams” – and didn’t properly explained the long story behind.

    Collective Intelligence

    The first part of the story is the one about collective intelligence. We can define the core of our jobs as solving complex problems and accomplishing complex tasks. We do that by writing code, testing it, designing it, deploying it, but the outcome is that we solved a problem for our customer. In fact, I frequently say that often the best solution doesn’t mean building something or writing code.

    If we agree on problem solving frame a perfect proxy for how well we’re dealing with it is collective intelligence. Well, at least as long as we are talking about collaborative work.

    Anita Woolley’s research pointed factors responsible for high collective intelligence: high empathy, evenness of communication in a group and diversity of cognitive styles. These are not things that we, as the industry, pay attention to during hiring. Another conclusion of the research is that women are typically stronger in these aspects and thus the more women in a team the higher collective intelligence.

    Role of Collaboration

    There are two follow up threads to that. One is that the research focused only on one aspect of work, which can be translated to collaboration. That’s not all that counts. We can have a team that collaborates perfectly yet doesn’t have the basic skills to accomplish a goal. Of course all the relevant factors should be balanced.

    This is why at Lunar Logic, during hiring process, we verify technical competences first. This way we know that a candidate won’t be a burden for a team when they join. Once we know that somebody’s technical skills are above the bar, we focus on the more important aspects, but the first filter is: “can you do the job?”

    The decision making factors are those related to the company culture and to collaboration.

    Correlation and Causation

    Another thread is that “more women” message is a follow up to an observation that women tend to do much better in terms of collective intelligence. I occasionally get flak for mentioning that women are more empathetic. It would typically be a story about a very empathetic man or a woman who was a real bitch and ruined the whole collaboration in a team.

    My answer to that is I don’t want to hire women. I want to hire people who excel at collaboration. If I ended up choosing between empathetic man and a cold-blooded female killer it would be a no-brainer to me. I’d go with the former.

    What is important though is that statistically speaking women are better if we take into consideration aforementioned aspects. It’s not like: every woman would be better than any man. It’s like: if we’ve been hiring for these traits we’d be hiring more women than men.

    And that’s where a discussion often gets dense. People would imply that I say that women are genetically better in, say, collaboration. Or pretty much the opposite, they’d say that in our societies we raise women in a way that their role boils down to “good collaborators” and not “achievers.”

    My answer to that is: correlation doesn’t mean causation. I never said that being a women is a cause of being empathetic and generally functioning better in a group. What I say is that there is simply correlation between the two.

    The first Kanban principle says “start with what you have” and I do start with what I have. I’m not an expert in genetics and I just accept the situation we have right now and start from there.

    The Best Candidate

    A valid challenge for “hire more women” argument is that it may end up with positive discrimination. My point in the whole discussion is not really hire women over men. In fact, the ultimate guidance for hiring remains the same: hire the best candidate you can.

    It just so happens that, once you start thinking about different contexts, the definition of “the best candidate” evolves. A set of traits and virtues of a perfect candidate would be different than what we are used to.

    And suddenly we will be hiring more women. Not because they are women. Simply, because they are the best available candidates.

    Such a change is not going to happen overnight. Even now at Lunar I think we are still too much biased toward technical skills. And yet our awareness and sensitivity toward what constitutes a perfect candidate is very different than it was a few years ago. That’s probably why we end up hiring fairly high percentage of women, and yet we’re not slaves to “hire women” attitude.

    Finally, I’d like to thank Janice Linden-Reed for inspiration to write this post. Our chats and her challenges to my messages are exactly the kind of conversations we need to be having in this context. And Janice, being a CEO herself and working extensively with IT industry, is the perfect person to speak up on this topic.

  • (Don’t) Change Your Job

    Few of us have comfort not to worry, or think, of changing a job ever again. If you’re not one of those few, this post is for you.

    I have easily gone through way more than a hundred of exit interviews. No, it doesn’t mean that I changed job that many times. This means that so many people left my teams. Nothing to brag about, I guess. Anyway, if there’s a reason for leaving one’s job I’ve heard it. And I’ve heard it from a person who I knew and worked with for quite a while.

    Obviously, more often than not I tried hard to keep people around and missed those who decided to leave. This wouldn’t make me an objective adviser at a time. However, from a perspective of time, once what had been about to happen already happened, I believe I can go beyond emotions and biases and be pretty objective.

    There’s one thing that I noticed in my attitude when I talk to people about leaving. I feel and act differently when I try to keep on board someone who I believe may be making a good decision than in cases when I’m pretty sure they are making a mistake. While I don’t think any of you would find my feelings even mildly amusing, what is interesting is that my compass seems to be working surprisingly well.

    So how the hell do I sense whether changing a job is a good idea or not?

    It’s pretty much one thing. What’s more it sounds obvious. Surprisingly enough people very rarely follow the hunch.

    It’s all about how values of an organization one is about to join are aligned with their own values.

    Yup, that’s it.

    I mean, seriously. Ask people what they value. It’s an individual thing so they’d come up with all sorts of stuff, like respect, safety, trust, transparency, challenges, health, happiness, authenticity, quality, learning, perspectives and whatnot. Interestingly, very, very few people I know would say “more money” and in such cases they’d likely have pretty good reason for that (which is fair enough too).

    A nice thing is we can get pretty good hints whether these values are respected and embraced at our workplaces-to-be.

    “You can’t know” one would say. Well, you can. It’s enough to realize one thing. Every publicly or semi-publicly known action of a company is emanation of how it operates inside. In other words if you want to know what is valued in any given org just pay attention to how that company acts publicly.

    Are they worth of trust as a business partner? Why should they be as an employer? Do they care about well-being of their clients? Why should they care about yours? Do they respect any partner they work with? If not, why would you assume their respect would be extended to employees?

    I don’t say that without a reason. It’s not a rare occasion when there’s a value match or at least there’s nothing that would indicate the opposite. At the same time I’ve seen way too many bad decisions ignoring the obvious hints. As you may guess it didn’t work very well.

    So here’s my advice: ask yourself what is important for you. If an employer-to-be shares the key values with you then go for it. And yes, I do understand that I actually may be encouraging some of my people to look for alternatives. I don’t mind. After all, if I consider myself a leader I should care about well-being of my team, shouldn’t I?

    At the same time if your employer-to-be doesn’t seem to share your values this is a single most powerful signal to take into consideration. It means that the whole setup would suck eventually.

    And yes, it’s enough to look at, or ask about, relationships with partners or clients.

    It’s all about values and you can’t lie about values. If you are fair to your partners you’re going to be fair to your employees. And vice versa.

    Few people would take consider it when thinking about changing a job. Don’t be one of them.

  • Hiring for Cultural Fit

    I definitely don’t keep the count but I believe that throughout my career I run more than a thousand interviews and hired way more than a hundred people. I have a confession to make: vast majority of these interviews were run poorly and many of those hires, even the right ones, were made on wrong premises.

    I started hiring when I worked in a 150+ big company. Not much later we were absorbed by our big brother – a 3000 big organization. The hiring model I’ve seen there is something that you would have easily guessed. A set of questions aimed to verify technical skills, occasionally augmented by a couple of puzzles to show how the candidate thinks. That’s exactly the pattern I followed when I started running interviews myself.

    I think it took me a couple of completely wrong hiring decisions till I started paying much more attention to non-technical traits. I mean, stuff like communication skills seem obvious. The question is how much weight you attach to the fact that a candidate is a good or a poor communicator. And of course communication is only one of a numerous so called soft skills.

    Experimentation with the interview process made me focusing on tech skills less and less over time. I could still name hires, who eventually didn’t fit.

    It took more than ten years and a bunch of people who I considered good fit in one organization but not in another to realize one crucial thing. There is such a thing as fit between an individual and an organization. The easier part of this equation is the former. We all can be described by our traits. At the same time, which is less intuitive, a company can be described in a similar manner. So what would we get it we written down all the company traits?

    A company culture.

    If there’s a mismatch between individual’s traits and a company culture there will be friction. You can tell that verifying past hiring decisions. You can tell that looking at people already functioning within the company as well.

    OK, so again, what are we typically focusing on when recruiting? Technical skills. Does it help to figure out whether a candidate would cohabit well with the rest of a team / a company? Would “very little if at all” be a good guess?

    It may be easier with a couple of examples. Imagine a small company where people are pretty open in front of others, rather outgoing, ready to help each other on the slightest signal that such help is needed. Imagine that an extremely skilled developer joins such a group. The guy is closed, not very sociable and feels that his contributions are best when he’s left to work alone without interruptions. Is the company well-suited to leverage the guy’s technical skills?

    Imagine a team working on a kind of a death march project. No matter how miserable the future looks like the whole team feels they are in it together. They work after hours to save as much of the project as possible. Well, almost. There’s one guy who isn’t that much into this whole engagement thing and basically just punches his clock every day. He may even be the most skilled person in the team. Would he be valued by other team members? Would his contributions be really worth that much as his skills would suggest?

    If we looked for a root cause of the problems in either case we wouldn’t discuss the guys’ technical skills. It’s the fact they’re misfits. What makes them misfits though? It isn’t a comparison to any single person. It is about how the whole group behaves, what values they share and how they interact with each other. It is about how the guys are perceived on this background.

    These are parts you should focus on if you care about how the whole group performs. In fact there’s more into this. Hiring a misfit cripples performance of both the misfit and the group.

    Unsurprisingly hiring for technical skills and technical skills only is a good way to hire a misfit.

    My challenge for you here is to answer the question how you actually verify traits that go beyond technical skills. Feel free to share them in a comment.

    There’s one thing I hear very frequently when I talk on this subject. It goes along the line: yeah, sure, go hire people who fit your company culture and know nothing about coding whatsoever and good luck with that. Of course I don’t advice hiring lumberjacks as software developers because of a simple fact of a cultural fit. I simply point how much we overestimate value of pure technical skills.

    Most of the time there is some sort of a base technical skill set that makes a candidate acceptable. I also believe that the bar is significantly lower than we think. In other words there is a good enough level beyond which a hiring decision should be made basing on very different premises.

    I don’t try to discredit tech skills here. Actually, I value them highly. I simply believe that it is way easier to develop one’s programming skills that to change their attitude. That’s why the latter is so important during recruitment.

    That’s why I see so much value in hiring for cultural fit.

    An interesting side discussion is how the existing culture influences individual’s behavior and attitude and how the individual affects the culture. This is something company leaders can use to steer (to some point) culture changes or to form (to some point) new hires. It works though only as far as the mismatch isn’t too big. Anyway, it’s a side discussion worth its own post.

  • Hire the Best

    I took a part in a panel discussion at GeeCON about presence of women in IT industry. One of my arguments on why we should hire more women sprung an interesting comment:

    I can’t agree with ‘hire woman even if she is a worse candidate’

    Pawel Wrzeszcz

    In fact, I’d agree with such a statement. I would as I wasn’t proposing hiring worse candidates. What I was pointing out was that I would hire less skilled or less intelligent woman over man. Why? Simply because she would be a better candidate.

    Now, you may be confused so let me point two things. A typical hiring process is about individual traits. How much a candidate knows, what skills or traits he or she possesses, etc. Then, once we hire them, we put them on a team where key things are how one acts as a part of the team and how they help the team to get better. A very different thing.

    If something I need to make my team more effective is more empathy and a different cognitive style I’d do the right thing focusing on these characteristics (which, by the way, promotes women over men). What almost all hiring managers would do instead they’d hire the best possible coder (which typically promotes men over women). Was he the best candidate?

    On some accounts, I guess…

    Let me rephrase: was he the best candidate in that specific context?

    Definitely not.

    He might have been most skilled and most intelligent candidate, which doesn’t make him the best. Not even close.

    If sport teams had the same hiring strategy as we do in IT industry they would be hiring only people for one position, possibly only stars. Can you imagine a football team (proper football, not American one) with 11 world class forwards?

    Yes, this is a dream of many hiring managers in IT.

    We forget that building software in vast majority of cases is a team sport, not an individual effort. And we don’t get points for having the most awesome person on the team but for what the whole team has achieved.

    So my challenge here is to rethink what “the best candidate” really means. We should be thinking more in terms of improving our teams, which is was more than simply hiring the most skilled person at hand.

    Hire the best still stands true, but we should first answer the question: the best for what?

  • What Makes Teams Better

    I’ve heard these experience reports a number of times: when a woman joins a team the whole team dynamic changes. Usually there is sense of improvement in team performance too. Unfortunately, most teams I know couldn’t report measured improvement as they didn’t have reliable measures in place. Anyway, the experience is very consistent.

    It is, unless we talk about a pure-male team that simply rejects any woman who joins. And does that a few time in a row. I know such teams too but I consider them dysfunctional.

    Anyway, let’s put dysfunctional groups aside. My own experience is purely positive too. I mean anytime that a team gained a new female member it was an improvement. At least that’s how I felt.

    Interestingly enough, it’s not about having a woman in a team. It’s about having as many of them as possible. The research done by Anita Woolley shows that the more females in a team the better collective intelligence of this team is.

    At the same time, the same research shows that collective intelligence beats the crap out of individual intelligence. Even more so if our goal is finding solutions of complex problems. And I dare say that software development is exactly that – solving complex issues – so we should be focusing on collective intelligence, and not individual traits.

    Collective intelligence was much more predictive in terms of succeeding in complex tasks than average individual intelligence or maximal individual intelligence

    Anita Woolley

    This changes my perception of recruitment. I was always saying that given two candidates who are on par I’d hire a woman, not a man. Taking only individual perspective into account, that’s just about right. However, when we think about teams the equation is different.

    In this equation women beat men easily.

    The big question is what are you going to do with this?

    Personally, I know what experiment I’m going to run next. And yes, it has a lot to do with hiring. I wouldn’t use the word “parity” but it wouldn’t be improper either. We need (even) more women on bard.

    I do want my teams to kick butts. How about you?

  • On Transparency

    One of things I’ve learned throughout my career is to assume very little and expect to learn very much whenever changing a job. In terms of learning, there always is a great lesson waiting there for you, no matter what kind of an organization you’re joining. If you happen to join a crappy org this is the least you can salvage; If you join a great one, it’s like a cherry on a cake. Either way, you should always aim to learn this lesson.

    But why am I telling you this? Well, I have joined Lunar Logic very recently. From what I could say before, the company was a kick-ass Ruby on Rails development shop with a very open and straightforward culture. I didn’t even try to assume much more.

    One thing hasn’t been a surprise; We really are a kick-ass Rails development shop. The other has been a surprise though. I mean, I expected transparency within Lunar Logic, but its level is just stunning. In a positive way of course.

    An open discussion about monthly financials, which obviously are public? Fair enough. Questioning the value of running a specific project? Perfectly OK. Sharing critical opinions on a leader’s decisions? Encouraged. Regular lean coffees where every employee can come up with any subject, even one that would be considered embarrassing in almost any organization I can think of? You’re welcome. I can hardly come up with an example of a taboo topic. In all this, and let me stress this, everyone gets honest and straightforward answers.

    Does it mean that the company is easier to lead? Um, no. One needs to think about each and every decision because it will be shared with everyone. Each piece of information should be handled as it was public. After all, it is public. So basically your goal, as a leader of such an organization, is to be fair, whatever you do. There’s no place for deception, trickery or lies.

    One could think that, assuming goodwill, it is a default mode of running a company. It’s not. It’s very unusual to hear about, let alone work at, such an org. There are a number of implications of this approach.

    • It is challenging for leaders. You can’t hide behind “that’s not for you to know” answer or meaningless blah blah. People won’t buy it. This is, by the way probably, the number one reason why this approach is so uncommon.
    • It helps to build trust between people. Dramatically. I don’t say you get trust for free, because it never happens, but it is way easier.
    • It eliminates us versus them mentality. Sure, not everyone is equal and not everyone has the same role in the company, but transparency makes everyone understand better everyone else’s contributions, thus eliminates many sources of potential conflicts.
    • It heavily influences relationships with customers. It’s much easier to be open and honest with clients if this is exactly what you do every day internally. I know companies that wouldn’t treat this one as a plus, but being a client, well, ask yourself what kind of a vendor you’d like to work with.

    All in all, transparency is like a health-meter of an organizational culture. I don’t say that it automatically means that the org is successful, too. You can have a great culture and still go out of business. I just say that if you’re looking for a great place to work, transparency should be very, very high on a list of qualities you value. Possibly on the very top of the list, like it is in my case.

    By the way, if you are a manager or a company leader, ask yourself: how many things wouldn’t you reveal to your team?

    This post wouldn’t be complete without giving credits to Paul Klipp, who is the creator of this unusual organizational culture. I can say that during first few weeks I’ve already learned more about building great teams and exceptional organizations from Paul than from any leader I worked with throughout my career. It goes way beyond just a transparency bit but that’s a completely different story. Or rather a few of them. Do expect me to share them soon.

  • What Do You Want To Do In Two Years From Now?

    As a manager of 130-something people I often have these chats on what opportunities people have to grow within the organization. You know, with such crowd you can pretty safely assume that people do want to grow, to change their role, to get promoted. So they eventually land on a sofa in my office to discuss their future.

    On one hand these discussions are always challenging. I mean we’re discussing here one’s future. That’s a serious matter. On the other most of the time I find it easy to share a flurry of ideas on where someone could push their career.

    The context of organization is pretty much set – we know what we do, we roughly know how we do it and we definitely know how, in general, we want to improve it. And yet people often need a lot of guidance to show them what they can do in a couple years from now.

    One thing is people often constrain themselves to just the lowest hanging fruit. I’m a developer so the next step is senior developer. Then a tech lead and then a software development manager. Oh so creative. How about business analysis, project management, product management, quality assurance (yes, this one too) or what have you?

    While we are going beyond mental constraints, why not running a startup, consulting or freelancing?

    Or simply doing the same thing you do and rightshifting at the same time? Do you really need a new title on a business card to feel fulfilled? Maybe you just like what you already do and the fun comes when you shift toward improved effectiveness?

    One could say that having much power it’s easy to come up with different ideas but I do as I preach. I mean I consider myself a leader. My current team has, at the moment, 130ish people. The previous one had 4. Another 35. In each and every of them I was self-developing like crazy. In each role I could imagine myself in a year being in any of others as well as doing a bunch of different things. I didn’t feel constrained either by the current situation or by current organization. These things change very rapidly in IT.

    When you are asked a question what you want to do in two year time (and believe me, I ask this question a lot) it’s not a question about current options in your organization but it’s a challenge to your mental constraints.

    As simple as that. No one is going to offer you a project management position or their biggest software development division unless they’re convinced you will manage. You won’t convince them using your will solely. You need to know what it takes to do the job, understand different approaches and have a vision of your own path.

    My wild-ass guess is that you don’t know all that at the moment. That’s great. Because I’m not going to judge anyone on their current knowledge. I’m going to judge them on their potential and their urge to learn.

    With such attitude you render your mental constraints irrelevant and you don’t need to ask anyone about your options anymore. You know the answer.