This is all pure bullshit. I’m sorry to be blunt, but this bullshit is harmful and somewhat compelling, so needs to be called out. > …to challenge the team to

This is all pure bullshit. I’m sorry to be blunt, but this bullshit is harmful and somewhat compelling, so needs to be called out. > …to challenge the team to scale new summits in the coming week > … If their chart is on an upward trend, I would congratulate them on a job well done. Let’s use some basic logic here. If an engineer was working hard and smart last week and the week before, you’d want their chart to be flat, not going up. Or to put it another way, if you have team members whose chart keeps going up, what does that mean? Have they been sandbagging all along, and are gradually ramping up effort? Are they learning to game your system? These are not positive things. In one part we have: > if their chart is on a downward trend or significantly lagging behind their teammates And in another we have: > you should explicitly avoid comparing them against one another. So don’t say you’re comparing them against each other, but definitely compare them against each other. Guess what? Sooner or later people realize how you’re BS’ing them, and how they just think you’re duplicitous. The real way to manage teams is to (1) ask them for what you want; (2) listen to what they say in response and take it seriously (BTW, if something they say doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably you who isn’t getting it — keep working at figuring it out). You don’t need, and shouldn’t use, any numbers at the team level inside the team. As companies get larger numbers are necessary, but above the team level. (As a manager in a multi-team environment, you are going to need to play the numbers game — that’s going to be part of your job.)