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> What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friend

by ehnto 5y ago

> What is your incentive to do that? I see that as the key. In a company, employees needs an incentive to work together and be constructive. They are not friends. Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal. Most of us work in a team of some kind, yet in places like retail sales they often pit employees against eachother with individual budgets instead of store budgets. If you ever go into a clothing store and wonder why the changerooms look like they haven't been cleaned in weeks, that's probably why. If everyone is trying to meet an individual sales budget no one can afford the time to clean the store since it could cost them a sale. If it doesn't matter who gets the sale as there is only a store budget, they can work together to get all the extra tasks done. One person can clean the change rooms while the other takes sales etc. When you start tracking a metric there can be all kinds of second order effects, so it's important to pick your metrics and goals wisely.

thn-gap 5y ago
> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal. This just moves the competitive boundary between teams, rather than individuals. It's not unheard of teams that compete and sabotage each other to make their project the most important and impactful.
- kqr 5y ago
  Sure. The next logical step is to remove team metrics and performance indicators, and make departmental success the important goal. Then switch deparmental for organisation-wide, then that for nation-wide, then that for world-wide.
  - andreilys 5y ago
    The issue with that approach is that incentives are not always aligned. Not everyone is an altruist willing to give up their personal self-interest for the good of the company. For example, you might have a legacy team whose future headcount growth is negatively impacted by a new team. Whether because this new team is automating tasks of the legacy team, or building a product that will cannibalize sales. From the perspective of the company, the legacy team should embrace the future and allow themselves to be creatively destroyed. But in reality, you have some leaders who do not want to give up power and will try to hold on, optimizing for personal incentives.
    - kqr 5y ago
      That's not a problem if the people in the old team understand that their security is tied up with the success of the organisation. I.e. if the new team does well, the organisation does well, and all employees are cared for. If somehow the people in the old team get into their heads the idea that organisation-wide success stands in conflict with their security, then you have a problem. But the problem is with management, not the people on the teams. Edit: in general, it's a common disease in companies to associate people with teams rather than the organisation. People don't become useless because their previous roles are obsoleted. Those are still valuable people and sure, there's a cost to retraining them, but the cost to letting them go (in terms of what it teaches the rest of your employees) is so much greater. (Though unfortunately harder to measure.)
      - wombatpm 5y ago
        We can thank Jack Welch of GE for that attitude. I thought the same thing in the 80’s when GE was shedding thousands of employees. That those employees should be useable for new endeavors. Turns out retraining is a cost the company can externalize with firings
  - undreren 5y ago
    I’d say that the logical conclusion is that KPI’s are the problem here. Let the team measure themselves, bit give them a clear mandate and shared purpose. When teams are incomparable, no such rivalry can make sense.
  - Siira 5y ago
    Each “step” reduces an individual’s power in determining the outcome, and thus their responsibility and commitment. People also know some intuitive game theory; They won’t take an excessive burden for a shared prize, as that will ultimately burn them out in the long run.
- lisper 5y ago
  > make team success the important goal That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.
  - webmaven 5y ago
    > > make team success the important goal > That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive. Teams have lifecycles too, so there are dynamics of team selection and teammate selection that can help with those problems.
MattGaiser 5y ago
Does that encourage effort or mediocrity though? As if my additional efforts are not going to move the needle much and there is nothing individually for me to win, why not just enjoy the ride?
- tovej 5y ago
  Enjoying the ride is miles better than sabotaging your team.
  - buran77 5y ago
    Teams don't work in a vacuum and it's not that hard to eventually find the slacker in a team. But you have team goals and individual goals. Team performance management and individual one. This is where good management comes in, to find a way to engage and motivate even a slacker, to get them to deliver at least the same amount of value you put in them. If the easy things fail (usually the financial or flexibility kind) there are other options. Find them the same position in a different team with different dynamics (a great individual can sink if everyone else on the team is much better, or much worse), find them a different position where they can shine (you can start as a mediocre midfielder and end up a successful goalkeeper), or even have them find a different job entirely.
    - tovej 5y ago
      Recent research shows that financial and other extrinsic motivators actually inhibit performance. After a worker has achieved a base level of income that makes their life comfortable, any extra treats they receive will decrease their interest in the core function of their work, moving their focus to the extrinsic motivator instead. I've also heard interpretations of this effect that explain it as: being rewarded can demean the value of work, because it may feel as though the work itself is a chore that nobody would do unless they got rewarded. In general, I believe that extrinsic motivators lead employees to follow their instincts less and focus on anything that will net them a reward. This means that even if someone has a great idea for improving some aspect of the work a company is doing, it might not get done. They are instead being rewarded for whatever arbitrary KPI that management has decided is important. In fields where there is a single clear KPI, all processes are mature, management has a clear view of the entire value chain, and workers are focused on a single task that is highly tied to the KPI --- e.g. yields in manufacturing tied to a production line worker --- sure, rewarding high KPI is not a terrible idea (or at least as terrible as it would be otherwise). But whenever a workers focus can be co-opted by bonuses I believe bonuses tied to KPIs are a bad idea. RE: your second point, I absolutely agree. How well a person "fits" in a team has a high impact on a person's motivation.
username90 5y ago
> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal. Why would a high performer stay there? The rest of the team drags him down and there is nothing he can do about it, he will just leave for a position where he doesn't have to pick up the slack of the entire team before he gets acknowledged.
- ehnto 5y ago
  It depends on the specific context of course, but I think there's a fallacy in the assumption that the high performer can perform better than a well working team would. A business is also an organism with many moving parts, if you optimize for just one particular metric and hire high performance individuals based on that, you end up neglecting the other parts of the organisation. Either way you can make that decision, perhaps your particular business is better off with high performing individuals. Like a door-to-door sales company probably doesn't benefit that much from team dynamics, and you'd definitely get slackers in that context. But a software team more often than not gets impacted negatively by a rockstar billowing out code rather than organizing with the team.

by ehnto 5y ago

thn-gap 5y ago

> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal. This just moves the competitive boundary between teams, rather than individuals. It's not unheard of teams that compete and sabotage each other to make their project the most important and impactful.

kqr 5y ago
Sure. The next logical step is to remove team metrics and performance indicators, and make departmental success the important goal. Then switch deparmental for organisation-wide, then that for nation-wide, then that for world-wide.
- andreilys 5y ago
  The issue with that approach is that incentives are not always aligned. Not everyone is an altruist willing to give up their personal self-interest for the good of the company. For example, you might have a legacy team whose future headcount growth is negatively impacted by a new team. Whether because this new team is automating tasks of the legacy team, or building a product that will cannibalize sales. From the perspective of the company, the legacy team should embrace the future and allow themselves to be creatively destroyed. But in reality, you have some leaders who do not want to give up power and will try to hold on, optimizing for personal incentives.
  - kqr 5y ago
    That's not a problem if the people in the old team understand that their security is tied up with the success of the organisation. I.e. if the new team does well, the organisation does well, and all employees are cared for. If somehow the people in the old team get into their heads the idea that organisation-wide success stands in conflict with their security, then you have a problem. But the problem is with management, not the people on the teams. Edit: in general, it's a common disease in companies to associate people with teams rather than the organisation. People don't become useless because their previous roles are obsoleted. Those are still valuable people and sure, there's a cost to retraining them, but the cost to letting them go (in terms of what it teaches the rest of your employees) is so much greater. (Though unfortunately harder to measure.)
    - wombatpm 5y ago
      We can thank Jack Welch of GE for that attitude. I thought the same thing in the 80’s when GE was shedding thousands of employees. That those employees should be useable for new endeavors. Turns out retraining is a cost the company can externalize with firings
- undreren 5y ago
  I’d say that the logical conclusion is that KPI’s are the problem here. Let the team measure themselves, bit give them a clear mandate and shared purpose. When teams are incomparable, no such rivalry can make sense.
- Siira 5y ago
  Each “step” reduces an individual’s power in determining the outcome, and thus their responsibility and commitment. People also know some intuitive game theory; They won’t take an excessive burden for a shared prize, as that will ultimately burn them out in the long run.
lisper 5y ago
> make team success the important goal That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive.
- webmaven 5y ago
  > > make team success the important goal > That leads to the prisoner's dilemma and tragedy of the commons. When team success is the goal, slackers thrive. Teams have lifecycles too, so there are dynamics of team selection and teammate selection that can help with those problems.

MattGaiser 5y ago

Does that encourage effort or mediocrity though? As if my additional efforts are not going to move the needle much and there is nothing individually for me to win, why not just enjoy the ride?

tovej 5y ago
Enjoying the ride is miles better than sabotaging your team.
- buran77 5y ago
  Teams don't work in a vacuum and it's not that hard to eventually find the slacker in a team. But you have team goals and individual goals. Team performance management and individual one. This is where good management comes in, to find a way to engage and motivate even a slacker, to get them to deliver at least the same amount of value you put in them. If the easy things fail (usually the financial or flexibility kind) there are other options. Find them the same position in a different team with different dynamics (a great individual can sink if everyone else on the team is much better, or much worse), find them a different position where they can shine (you can start as a mediocre midfielder and end up a successful goalkeeper), or even have them find a different job entirely.
  - tovej 5y ago
    Recent research shows that financial and other extrinsic motivators actually inhibit performance. After a worker has achieved a base level of income that makes their life comfortable, any extra treats they receive will decrease their interest in the core function of their work, moving their focus to the extrinsic motivator instead. I've also heard interpretations of this effect that explain it as: being rewarded can demean the value of work, because it may feel as though the work itself is a chore that nobody would do unless they got rewarded. In general, I believe that extrinsic motivators lead employees to follow their instincts less and focus on anything that will net them a reward. This means that even if someone has a great idea for improving some aspect of the work a company is doing, it might not get done. They are instead being rewarded for whatever arbitrary KPI that management has decided is important. In fields where there is a single clear KPI, all processes are mature, management has a clear view of the entire value chain, and workers are focused on a single task that is highly tied to the KPI --- e.g. yields in manufacturing tied to a production line worker --- sure, rewarding high KPI is not a terrible idea (or at least as terrible as it would be otherwise). But whenever a workers focus can be co-opted by bonuses I believe bonuses tied to KPIs are a bad idea. RE: your second point, I absolutely agree. How well a person "fits" in a team has a high impact on a person's motivation.

username90 5y ago

> Remove individual metrics or performance indicators, make team success the important goal. Why would a high performer stay there? The rest of the team drags him down and there is nothing he can do about it, he will just leave for a position where he doesn't have to pick up the slack of the entire team before he gets acknowledged.

ehnto 5y ago
It depends on the specific context of course, but I think there's a fallacy in the assumption that the high performer can perform better than a well working team would. A business is also an organism with many moving parts, if you optimize for just one particular metric and hire high performance individuals based on that, you end up neglecting the other parts of the organisation. Either way you can make that decision, perhaps your particular business is better off with high performing individuals. Like a door-to-door sales company probably doesn't benefit that much from team dynamics, and you'd definitely get slackers in that context. But a software team more often than not gets impacted negatively by a rockstar billowing out code rather than organizing with the team.