[michaelborromeo]

High functioning teams start with high functioning individuals.

After that it’s up to the group to not waste effort, not go in the wrong direction too long, avoid toxic behavior, and otherwise stay healthy.

But teams start with individual talent.

[BeetleB]

> High functioning teams start with high functioning individuals.

There's a spectrum between a team with no high functioning individuals and one with all high functioning.

In my experience, only 1-3 people in the team need to be "high functioning". Also in my experience, if the whole team is high functioning, then the chances of dysfunction go up significantly.

In my career, I've been in a bunch of teams that were full of high functioning folks. And not one of those teams acted as a team. The management almost always graded you based on your individual achievements and not on how you helped the team. As a result, every one of those teams had instances of individuals doing brilliant things that hurt the team effort, but would get rewarded for it. Everyone of those teams had the majority of team members working against each other to get their idea to the fore, due to the reward structures.

In every one of those teams, when something went wrong, the focus was on finding out which individual(s) were responsible.

I don't believe that what I saw will always be the case, but the correlation is high and I think it is the natural state unless actively guarded against. In other teams where not everyone is high functioning, the focus on working as a team was much greater, and much more successful. It wasn't "Who is responsible for snafu X?", but "How did we allow snafu X to occur?"

But of course, a team with no high functioning individuals will be mediocre.

[zbentley]

I'm not sure "high functioning" is the right term when discussing individuals rather than teams. I suggest using "leaders" or "mentors", since "high functioning" as in personal contribution productivity is, as you pointed out, often a toxic thing to optimize for.

Consider this: a team with one insanely productive contributor and three new/less-than-productive folks is tasked with a bunch of projects. As expected, the productive person does most of the work. The others might learn a bit by example, or not. Productive person moves on/gets bored/gets significant non-work commitments/burns out/gets hit by a bus. The team is no longer productive or functional.

Then consider this: a team with one person with a talent for teaching and leadership, and three new/less-than-productive folks is tasked with a bunch of projects. At first, they aren't that high-functioning as a team. The teacher/leader spends a lot of their time mentoring, going over the basics, reviewing, and planning. Over time, they get more productive. If the mentor/leader leaves the mentorship/leadership role, at worst they leave a high-performing team behind. At best they leave a high-performing team of people who are additionally prepared to assume a mentorship/leadership role in the future.

Depending on how "10x" (ugh) the developer in the first scenario is, the team in the second example might never reach their productivity. But I think it's pretty obvious that organizations are benefited more by second-example-type teams.

[iateanapple]

> Then consider this: a team with one person with a talent for teaching and leadership, and three new/less-than-productive folks

In practice it is more complex - people with a talent for teaching and leadership and are experts are incredibly rare.

What we often end up with is a mediocre dev taking on the teaching role and helping build a mediocre team.

[zbentley]

Well, there are teachers and there are teachers.

More specifically, some folks like to teach because it makes them feel like an expert when they're not. That's bad.

Some folks like to teach because it helps them learn-by-teaching and helps their pupils learn-by-questioning (and learn by questioning and receiving an honest "no idea/I might be wrong!").

The quantity that's in short supply is not expertise. It's humility.

[BeetleB]

> In practice it is more complex - people with a talent for teaching and leadership and are experts are incredibly rare.

Not in my experience. While there are obviously fewer people who have both traits, they're not at all rare. In practice, what I see is that such people shift away from teaching/mentoring as it takes time/effort that their manager does not reward.

If you want talented people who mentor well, make sure such mentoring is rewarded.

[iateanapple]

> what I see is that such people shift away from teaching/mentoring as it takes time/effort that their manager does not reward

I don’t think it’s that simple. I work with tons of talented engineers who put a huge amount of effort into tasks that management doesn’t care about - like refactoring our codebase.

In contrast everywhere I have worked management has cared about being able to level up new developers and under performers (assuming it’s a skill deficit).

[iateanapple]

To add to this one of the most soul crushing tasks I’ve had to do is to manage out good people who are under performing.

If I could say “BeetleB, I’m pairing you with Joe for the next 6 months - I don’t care if your output halves but I need you to bring him up to speed or we have to let him go” and you could train him up - well you would be worth your weight in gold.

[michaelborromeo]

Mythical man hour describes it this way too right?

But yeah I think the incentive structure helps determine outcomes like the one you describe.

Maybe a good way to handle having a team FULL of high functioning individuals is to break it up and have them each lead their own team eventually?

[BeetleB]

> But yeah I think the incentive structure helps determine outcomes like the one you describe.

Yes - most of the behavior likely is due to the incentive structure. My point was that such incentive structures seem strongly correlated to teams/orgs with very talented people. At least in my discipline, I attribute it to the incentives in academics/universities, which is where most of such folks come from.

[zbentley]

That depends on how you define talent.

Is "talent" some immutable, innate, static thing? If so, no: teams that do well don't have to start with individual talent.

Does "talent" encompass the ability to learn and grow and change what you're best at/what you enjoy? If so, then sure, having members with the ability to do those things is important to a team's success. But that's not what most people think of when you say "talent".

In a good environment, a team of novices can grow and learn to produce great things--even without the presence of talented/experienced/whatever mentors/leaders. In an unhealthy environment, not only are the novices doomed to failure/making things worse, but so are experienced folks. Determining what constitutes a good environment (and how to foster one) is important--that's what I think the article is saying.

[iateanapple]

> In an unhealthy environment, not only are the novices doomed to failure/making things worse, but so are experienced folks.

Is that true though? I can think of plenty of counter examples where lots of quality work has been done in very toxic environments.

[zbentley]

So can I. But I don't think I'd call those environments/teams high-functioning.

This is roughly the same reason that LoC or features delivered/day are bullshit metrics. They can be skewed by a tiny minority of people doing most of the work. When that is the case, you don't have a high-functioning team or organization; you have a few massive liabilities tipping the scales.

Edit: what I mean is that experienced folks in those environments are "doomed" in a different way than novices. Novices won't gain new skills. Experienced folks will instead feel unappreciated and burn out, or feel over-appreciated and succumb to narcissism. Both outcomes happen at the expense of the team.

[watwut]

High functioning team can have juniors in them, can have inexperienced people in them and can have people with range of knowledge and skills.