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I feel insane when I read stuff like this. If you work in a team in any capacity then you need to have a strong baseline of trust in order to work effectively.

I feel insane when I read stuff like this. If you work in a team in any capacity then you need to have a strong baseline of trust in order to work effectively. Trust is the building block that all effective team performance stacks on top of (see 5 dysfunctions of a team). You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other.

amag 4y ago
If you for instance work with software developers, true vulnerability shows at a code review not at a occasional game of soccer or similar. Few software developers identify themselves as great soccer players so it's not a threat to their identity to be perceived as bad at it.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
Doing it on purpose is the part that feels sociopathic (because it is). Working together 40 hours a week for years at a time should provide plenty of opportunity to become intimate with your coworkers. We don't need a line item in the department budget that says "fun/friendship".
- guywhocodes 4y ago
  This, working in big tech I've found that the activities are also incredibly infantile and marketed as such. Yes I work with software, no I don't expect everything to be a computer game or "cute".
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    It's doubly infantilizing: First, management assumes that their pet programmers are little babies that need play dates with the other office furniture (to mix several metaphors). Second, they assume that the only way to help us is to let us expense a round of laser tag.
  - spacemadness 4y ago
    That’s because it’s incredibly safe to go into Disney mode. I hate it too as it makes me feel like they’re treating me like a fragile 12 year old.
- pydry 4y ago
  >Working together 40 hours a week for years at a time should provide plenty of opportunity Yeah, but when starting a new project affords almost none. Should it remain like that for years? I hate the "corporate fun" exercises as much as the next guy but without something to build trust most teams flounder. Japananese/South Korean salaryman drinking culture (or any after work drinks culture) works well at this coz alcohol naturally makes people vulnerable. It obviously has its own problems.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - irrational 4y ago
    Work build trust. Trust is built as I see your work output and the effort you are putting in. I’ve never developer trust in anyone through an activity outside of work. I have come away with a worse opinion of some people as I see how they behave outside of work.
    - ElevenLathe 4y ago
      Exactly. Just because it would be convenient for management if $200 worth of Dave & Busters could turn a group of strangers into a well-functioning team does not make it so. Sure, you can try it, but it won't work. What will work? Not doing anything at all beyond paying people fairly, letting people have adequate time off, setting realistic expectations and deadlines, and not constantly shuffling your organization around like it's a fantasy football team. Even if you could somehow sprinkle social fertilizer on your team and make them all besties with a sick ropes course in Provo, it is immoral to expect it. Your employees' relationships are their business, not yours.
- ghaff 4y ago
  I can live without a lot of the forced fun/team building exercises. As you say, a lot of this happens fairly naturally at least in person. (Certainly, less so remotely.) On the other hand, I've heard remote/distributed people very vocally object to being asked to travel to a team meeting once or twice a year on the grounds that they work 9-5 (or whatever) and that's it.
comfypotato 4y ago
It’s a weird balance. Being in a meeting where the manager is basically forcing people to volunteer for the fun committee makes me cringe, but then I enjoy the results of the fun committee. I greatly enjoyed Wolfram’s take on video calls. They’re essential for social aspects like building trust. When it comes time to put your nose to the grindstone and debug something together, the video is a distraction that should be eliminated.
pydry 4y ago
>You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other. This point is so important and so commonly missed in the context of remote (or indeed, any) work.
mkl95 4y ago
> You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other Not every company is an ideal organization where demonstrating vulnerability is going to lead to a positive outcome. Fast growing orgs are often stuck with bad actors because hiring a replacement is difficult, in some cases virtually impossible. You will be stuck in a political game before you are even aware of it and forced to work with people who hate you because you worked for a FAANG or whatever tickles them.
- superpope99 4y ago
  Fair point. I'm someone who's been lucky to work in high-trust low-ego teams at quite a formative stage in my career - and for this reason I try and work for companies that have values oriented around this. My current gig adheres strongly to an "idea meritocracy", and so far I have observed this to hold true. You can tell the founder his ideas suck and that's fine (if you do so in good faith). Perhaps I'm naive and my eyes will be opened to the politics later on, but I don't think so. A lot of my colleagues in other industries often complain about the political nature of their work, and the impossibility of giving feedback to certain people in certain positions. I always assumed this was a tech/non-tech divide - or a small/large company divide. I still think those are good heuristics to be honest, but you're right about the "bad actor" dimension. I think that's why it's so important to have a well-embedded company culture, it functions as an immune system against bad actors and trust/feedback are huge parts of that immune system.
dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
> You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other. This is bullshit. I trust my accountant because he's competent and honest, not because he's been vulnerable in my presence. What you're describing is unprofessional. The last thing I want to know about (or experience from) my co-workers is anything personal or intimate, unless it's relevant to the job. If I want to know my coworker better that's my choice, but otherwise it's somewhere between irrelevant and unwanted.
- JamesBarney 4y ago
  There are two types of trust. 1. Will I trust this person to do their job competently? 2. Would I trust this person not to defect in a prisoners dilemma situation? The second is what you need the personal connection for. There are two ways to work on a project, to make sure it has the highest chance of success, or to make sure when it fails you don't look like your to blame. #2 is needed so that both parties take a chance on each other and don't optimize for throwing the other under the bus.
  - unmole 4y ago
    > Would I trust this person not to defect in a prisoners dilemma situation? Do you work for the mob?
    - Cardinal7167 4y ago
      No, but I work with people, who are strangely tribal at every level and company ive ever worked at
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    Hum... People should not have to face prisoners dilemma situations against their coworkers. And there is an entire profession called "management" in charge of making sure of that. People should be able to trust their coworkers on ways that the GP didn't capture. But those do not include adversarial situations. (And honestly, "Hey, how was your weekend?" can as easily add or remove all kinds of trust. None of this is simple.)
irrational 4y ago
No. Absolutely not. Trust is built up over a significant period of time through… work. When I see your work is good and you are putting in the effort, it builds trust in you. I will never come to trust you over a game of kahoots.
- superpope99 4y ago
  I'm talking about trust in a slightly different sense. I'm talking about trust in a sense of - if I give you some feedback on something e.g. "Hey I noticed that in our Zoom meetings you've had your camera off recently - we have a team working agreement that we try to keep cameras on in meetings to make remote work more tolerable. It makes me worried that you're checked out" If there is a baseline level of trust in the relationship, that means the recipient trusts that I have their best interests at heart, and I am trying to help them through feedback, not attack them. The giver of the feedback trusts that the message will be well received. Having this kind of trust encourages feedback, which leads growth. If you don't have this trust, everyone follows the path of least resistance of not giving feedback. I think that especially in remote work, peer to peer feedback is such an important avenue for professional growth. Especially when a manager has 8 reports and doesn't really know what's going on. Perhaps you disagree on the importance of feedback. But if not, then perhaps you disagree on the importance of trust in giving feedback. If so I'm curious as to whether you always find it easy to give and receive it regardless of who you're talking to?
  - ThalesX 4y ago
    > "Hey I noticed that in our Zoom meetings you've had your camera off recently - we have a team working agreement that we try to keep cameras on in meetings to make remote work more tolerable. It makes me worried that you're checked out" I'm having a horrible period in my home life. My wife and I are getting ready for a divorce, my mother is sick, my child can't stand his own father. The house is always a mess and so am I. I can barely look at myself in the mirror without crying so I can't stand the idea of colleagues looking at me in a webcam. This is hyperbole. But how would you respond in a 'trusting' environment to this?
ohdannyboy 4y ago
Trust can be built by working. Do you meet deadlines, not require me to rewrite your code on review and know your stuff? Great, we'll have a strong working relationship after a month of that. Conversely, you can be the best Among Us player in the company and I'll still hate you if you keep Slacking basic questions and submit non functioning code on review.
- superpope99 4y ago
  I see your point - but rather than hate your colleague for not doing their job well, why not find a way to give them feedback? "Trust" is obviously not a substitute for performance management - but having high psychological safety/trust makes it 10x easier to have a conversation with a colleague to say "Hey I noticed you asked this question in slack - we've actually got this in a wiki over here" or "hey, I noticed you keep submitting non functioning code - why is this?". This sounds like you are describing a junior engineer - perhaps you will learn something along the way - perhaps their local dev environment is broken meaning they can't run the tests without pushing to GitHub actions, and they don't know how to fix it, but they're in a low psychological safety culture that makes them afraid of asking "basic questions" (as you put it) in Slack. What's your philosophy on developing people in teams? I'm sure it's not just to 'hate' people into good performance. If you take a long view on people, you have to create a space where people are comfortable admitting their shortcomings.
  - ohdannyboy 4y ago
    FWIW I don't mind being asked questions. As I have grown I've tended towards being a technical specialist over a manager and part of that is being a resource. I'm also very good with Git, GDB and Linux so I end up as the go-to guy for a lot of things (I've trained several teams on Git with a lot of success). I've never had to build/maintain a team from a management perspective. But from my own experiences the people I've learned the most from were competent themselves, good teachers (IE they explain their reasoning and ask leading questions to help understanding) and approachable. So if I was asking too much or stuff I needed to do myself, instead of dressing my down in front of the team they'd privately say "I know we're throwing a lot at you, but time is becoming an issue on our end. I'd recommend talking to [manager] and asking for a some time to research this subject with a wiki page as a deliverable." (this is a non-hypothetical form when I was a newbie). Semi-compulsory social interactions were never a factor. Also the person I had in mind when writing my post was actually very experienced. Affable, but totally incompetent with no interest in learning. My expectations are relative to experience. - Juniors need a lot of help and won't be independently solving complex problems. Every review they submit will need some guidance and it will probably be about basic things like "this function does 3 things and over uses global variables." If they're learning then they're doing it right. - Mid level developers should be independent contributors for everything except higher level design or very technical work. Mistakes will be present but more rarely and relating to harder subjects. Mistakes I'd expect from a mid level dev would be more along the lines of not knowing that signed integer overflow is undefined in C, passing a pointer in a not quite safe way, ect. - Senior level developers should need little technical guidance and their reviews should be almost all QA. Since they have a deep understanding of their field they can refer to documentation and datasheets more readily and when they need help they usually know what to ask. In general they should be answering a lot more than they're asking.
kcb 4y ago
Sure but that doesn't happen by getting everyone in a Zoom call and going around the room asking "Tell us a about time you felt vulnerable"
- superpope99 4y ago
  Fair point. I have found building deep trust a lot harder remotely. Thinking it through, perhaps its easier to do this 1:1 with everyone in your team, even though it's o(n^2)
david38 4y ago
Have you ever had surgery? Did you go out for drinks first?
- superpope99 4y ago
  My surgeon is not on my team. To take your analogy further - perhaps I would go out for drinks with my family/friends afterwards. Intra-team relationships are different to inter-team relationships.
  - layer8 4y ago
    Team members shouldn’t be required to be friends though. The reason is you can choose your friends, but you can’t usually choose who’s on your team. Socializing with someone needs to be an individual choice and not a prescription.
babyshake 4y ago
My personal take on this is I don't like it when fun team building and important work meetings are mixed together. Usually this takes the form of the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting being used by the same couple people sharing mundane details from their personal life and then the meeting going over the allotted time because it started 10 minutes late. This is just bad meeting etiquette. Create separate times for this type of "fun" chat and make it completely optional to attend.

amag 4y ago

If you for instance work with software developers, true vulnerability shows at a code review not at a occasional game of soccer or similar. Few software developers identify themselves as great soccer players so it's not a threat to their identity to be perceived as bad at it.

ElevenLathe 4y ago

Doing it on purpose is the part that feels sociopathic (because it is). Working together 40 hours a week for years at a time should provide plenty of opportunity to become intimate with your coworkers. We don't need a line item in the department budget that says "fun/friendship".

guywhocodes 4y ago
This, working in big tech I've found that the activities are also incredibly infantile and marketed as such. Yes I work with software, no I don't expect everything to be a computer game or "cute".
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  It's doubly infantilizing: First, management assumes that their pet programmers are little babies that need play dates with the other office furniture (to mix several metaphors). Second, they assume that the only way to help us is to let us expense a round of laser tag.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  That’s because it’s incredibly safe to go into Disney mode. I hate it too as it makes me feel like they’re treating me like a fragile 12 year old.
pydry 4y ago
>Working together 40 hours a week for years at a time should provide plenty of opportunity Yeah, but when starting a new project affords almost none. Should it remain like that for years? I hate the "corporate fun" exercises as much as the next guy but without something to build trust most teams flounder. Japananese/South Korean salaryman drinking culture (or any after work drinks culture) works well at this coz alcohol naturally makes people vulnerable. It obviously has its own problems.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- irrational 4y ago
  Work build trust. Trust is built as I see your work output and the effort you are putting in. I’ve never developer trust in anyone through an activity outside of work. I have come away with a worse opinion of some people as I see how they behave outside of work.
  - ElevenLathe 4y ago
    Exactly. Just because it would be convenient for management if $200 worth of Dave & Busters could turn a group of strangers into a well-functioning team does not make it so. Sure, you can try it, but it won't work. What will work? Not doing anything at all beyond paying people fairly, letting people have adequate time off, setting realistic expectations and deadlines, and not constantly shuffling your organization around like it's a fantasy football team. Even if you could somehow sprinkle social fertilizer on your team and make them all besties with a sick ropes course in Provo, it is immoral to expect it. Your employees' relationships are their business, not yours.
ghaff 4y ago
I can live without a lot of the forced fun/team building exercises. As you say, a lot of this happens fairly naturally at least in person. (Certainly, less so remotely.) On the other hand, I've heard remote/distributed people very vocally object to being asked to travel to a team meeting once or twice a year on the grounds that they work 9-5 (or whatever) and that's it.

comfypotato 4y ago

It’s a weird balance. Being in a meeting where the manager is basically forcing people to volunteer for the fun committee makes me cringe, but then I enjoy the results of the fun committee. I greatly enjoyed Wolfram’s take on video calls. They’re essential for social aspects like building trust. When it comes time to put your nose to the grindstone and debug something together, the video is a distraction that should be eliminated.

pydry 4y ago

>You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other. This point is so important and so commonly missed in the context of remote (or indeed, any) work.

mkl95 4y ago

> You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other Not every company is an ideal organization where demonstrating vulnerability is going to lead to a positive outcome. Fast growing orgs are often stuck with bad actors because hiring a replacement is difficult, in some cases virtually impossible. You will be stuck in a political game before you are even aware of it and forced to work with people who hate you because you worked for a FAANG or whatever tickles them.

superpope99 4y ago
Fair point. I'm someone who's been lucky to work in high-trust low-ego teams at quite a formative stage in my career - and for this reason I try and work for companies that have values oriented around this. My current gig adheres strongly to an "idea meritocracy", and so far I have observed this to hold true. You can tell the founder his ideas suck and that's fine (if you do so in good faith). Perhaps I'm naive and my eyes will be opened to the politics later on, but I don't think so. A lot of my colleagues in other industries often complain about the political nature of their work, and the impossibility of giving feedback to certain people in certain positions. I always assumed this was a tech/non-tech divide - or a small/large company divide. I still think those are good heuristics to be honest, but you're right about the "bad actor" dimension. I think that's why it's so important to have a well-embedded company culture, it functions as an immune system against bad actors and trust/feedback are huge parts of that immune system.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago

> You don't just get trust for free, you have to build it by creating moments like this where people can demonstrate vulnerability around each other. This is bullshit. I trust my accountant because he's competent and honest, not because he's been vulnerable in my presence. What you're describing is unprofessional. The last thing I want to know about (or experience from) my co-workers is anything personal or intimate, unless it's relevant to the job. If I want to know my coworker better that's my choice, but otherwise it's somewhere between irrelevant and unwanted.

JamesBarney 4y ago
There are two types of trust. 1. Will I trust this person to do their job competently? 2. Would I trust this person not to defect in a prisoners dilemma situation? The second is what you need the personal connection for. There are two ways to work on a project, to make sure it has the highest chance of success, or to make sure when it fails you don't look like your to blame. #2 is needed so that both parties take a chance on each other and don't optimize for throwing the other under the bus.
- unmole 4y ago
  > Would I trust this person not to defect in a prisoners dilemma situation? Do you work for the mob?
  - Cardinal7167 4y ago
    No, but I work with people, who are strangely tribal at every level and company ive ever worked at
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  Hum... People should not have to face prisoners dilemma situations against their coworkers. And there is an entire profession called "management" in charge of making sure of that. People should be able to trust their coworkers on ways that the GP didn't capture. But those do not include adversarial situations. (And honestly, "Hey, how was your weekend?" can as easily add or remove all kinds of trust. None of this is simple.)

irrational 4y ago

No. Absolutely not. Trust is built up over a significant period of time through… work. When I see your work is good and you are putting in the effort, it builds trust in you. I will never come to trust you over a game of kahoots.

superpope99 4y ago
I'm talking about trust in a slightly different sense. I'm talking about trust in a sense of - if I give you some feedback on something e.g. "Hey I noticed that in our Zoom meetings you've had your camera off recently - we have a team working agreement that we try to keep cameras on in meetings to make remote work more tolerable. It makes me worried that you're checked out" If there is a baseline level of trust in the relationship, that means the recipient trusts that I have their best interests at heart, and I am trying to help them through feedback, not attack them. The giver of the feedback trusts that the message will be well received. Having this kind of trust encourages feedback, which leads growth. If you don't have this trust, everyone follows the path of least resistance of not giving feedback. I think that especially in remote work, peer to peer feedback is such an important avenue for professional growth. Especially when a manager has 8 reports and doesn't really know what's going on. Perhaps you disagree on the importance of feedback. But if not, then perhaps you disagree on the importance of trust in giving feedback. If so I'm curious as to whether you always find it easy to give and receive it regardless of who you're talking to?
- ThalesX 4y ago
  > "Hey I noticed that in our Zoom meetings you've had your camera off recently - we have a team working agreement that we try to keep cameras on in meetings to make remote work more tolerable. It makes me worried that you're checked out" I'm having a horrible period in my home life. My wife and I are getting ready for a divorce, my mother is sick, my child can't stand his own father. The house is always a mess and so am I. I can barely look at myself in the mirror without crying so I can't stand the idea of colleagues looking at me in a webcam. This is hyperbole. But how would you respond in a 'trusting' environment to this?

ohdannyboy 4y ago

Trust can be built by working. Do you meet deadlines, not require me to rewrite your code on review and know your stuff? Great, we'll have a strong working relationship after a month of that. Conversely, you can be the best Among Us player in the company and I'll still hate you if you keep Slacking basic questions and submit non functioning code on review.

superpope99 4y ago
I see your point - but rather than hate your colleague for not doing their job well, why not find a way to give them feedback? "Trust" is obviously not a substitute for performance management - but having high psychological safety/trust makes it 10x easier to have a conversation with a colleague to say "Hey I noticed you asked this question in slack - we've actually got this in a wiki over here" or "hey, I noticed you keep submitting non functioning code - why is this?". This sounds like you are describing a junior engineer - perhaps you will learn something along the way - perhaps their local dev environment is broken meaning they can't run the tests without pushing to GitHub actions, and they don't know how to fix it, but they're in a low psychological safety culture that makes them afraid of asking "basic questions" (as you put it) in Slack. What's your philosophy on developing people in teams? I'm sure it's not just to 'hate' people into good performance. If you take a long view on people, you have to create a space where people are comfortable admitting their shortcomings.
- ohdannyboy 4y ago
  FWIW I don't mind being asked questions. As I have grown I've tended towards being a technical specialist over a manager and part of that is being a resource. I'm also very good with Git, GDB and Linux so I end up as the go-to guy for a lot of things (I've trained several teams on Git with a lot of success). I've never had to build/maintain a team from a management perspective. But from my own experiences the people I've learned the most from were competent themselves, good teachers (IE they explain their reasoning and ask leading questions to help understanding) and approachable. So if I was asking too much or stuff I needed to do myself, instead of dressing my down in front of the team they'd privately say "I know we're throwing a lot at you, but time is becoming an issue on our end. I'd recommend talking to [manager] and asking for a some time to research this subject with a wiki page as a deliverable." (this is a non-hypothetical form when I was a newbie). Semi-compulsory social interactions were never a factor. Also the person I had in mind when writing my post was actually very experienced. Affable, but totally incompetent with no interest in learning. My expectations are relative to experience. - Juniors need a lot of help and won't be independently solving complex problems. Every review they submit will need some guidance and it will probably be about basic things like "this function does 3 things and over uses global variables." If they're learning then they're doing it right. - Mid level developers should be independent contributors for everything except higher level design or very technical work. Mistakes will be present but more rarely and relating to harder subjects. Mistakes I'd expect from a mid level dev would be more along the lines of not knowing that signed integer overflow is undefined in C, passing a pointer in a not quite safe way, ect. - Senior level developers should need little technical guidance and their reviews should be almost all QA. Since they have a deep understanding of their field they can refer to documentation and datasheets more readily and when they need help they usually know what to ask. In general they should be answering a lot more than they're asking.

kcb 4y ago

Sure but that doesn't happen by getting everyone in a Zoom call and going around the room asking "Tell us a about time you felt vulnerable"

superpope99 4y ago
Fair point. I have found building deep trust a lot harder remotely. Thinking it through, perhaps its easier to do this 1:1 with everyone in your team, even though it's o(n^2)

david38 4y ago

Have you ever had surgery? Did you go out for drinks first?

superpope99 4y ago
My surgeon is not on my team. To take your analogy further - perhaps I would go out for drinks with my family/friends afterwards. Intra-team relationships are different to inter-team relationships.
- layer8 4y ago
  Team members shouldn’t be required to be friends though. The reason is you can choose your friends, but you can’t usually choose who’s on your team. Socializing with someone needs to be an individual choice and not a prescription.

babyshake 4y ago

My personal take on this is I don't like it when fun team building and important work meetings are mixed together. Usually this takes the form of the first 5-10 minutes of a meeting being used by the same couple people sharing mundane details from their personal life and then the meeting going over the allotted time because it started 10 minutes late. This is just bad meeting etiquette. Create separate times for this type of "fun" chat and make it completely optional to attend.