| I wouldn't say that there's unambiguously healthy conflict, but there's definitely such a thing as unhealthy conflict avoidance. One generalized example I've seen. Jimmy proposes to make a change that assumes all Foos in production have been replaced with Bars, and will cause an outage if that's not so. Reviewer A says "hey, this seems risky - are you sure the Foos are gone?" "Yes, I'm sure, there's no way that there could be any Foos left". When it turns out that he didn't really check and there were some Foos left, your options are: * Frank and conflict-laden conversation with Jimmy. By all means say it nicely, but the bottom line is that you can't maintain a collaborative culture if reviewers can't trust the things Jimmy certifies to be true. The underlying unhealthiness might be that it's too hard to verify production state, or that Jimmy isn't competent enough to do it, or that Jimmy is just lazy. You'll have to engage in some conflict to find out. * Put Jimmy in a penalty box, where everyone knows they can't give him the normal level of trust and need to double check his work. (Won't Jimmy notice, and won't you then have to give him the same conflict-laden conversation? Probably.) * Let Jimmy run around wrecking things until his relationship with the team is so compromised he's forced to transfer or quit. Having seen managers pick all three options, the first seems clearly best to me. |
We don't expect people to be perfect. Everyone will occasionally make mistakes. I would not frame it as a loss of trust.
If the answer is no then I agree there's a problem that needs to be root caused. Maybe the root cause is Jimmy had a fight with his spouse, or didn't get enough sleep. Maybe Jimmy just can't do the job we're asking him to do.
Beyond that there are process questions to be asked. Don't you have some sort of staged deployments? dev/stage/prod? The reviewer that was concerned about whether Foos are gone - why was he concerned? Is there an easy way to check that?
I wouldn't say there's never a situation for difficult conversations. But usually those are not the right tool for the job. Jimmy is completely aware (presumably) that he said no Foos are left, and that when his code merged the remaining Foos caused an outage, and that his change had to be rolled back to recover. He is a responsible and trusted member of the team. How does he own up to that? What is your culture? If he is not responsible nor trusted than eventually he'll not be there and that's something to be reinforced positively and understood by a high performance team. It's just my experience that if you're at a point where you're playing those games then it usually isn't going to result in a positive outcome. Those tools are not appropriate for high performance teams in high performance organizations. Maybe they are in different organizations.
EDIT: In the military for example it is common to reinforce what people need to do via some sort of punishment. The difference is that you got people who possibly don't want to be there in the first place and in general you don't fire soldiers. That method sort of works but it doesn't really produce the kind of environment a lot of us would like to be in and there's always conflict between fear of punishment and taking initiative.
I would also say there are other things that can be done in this scenario, including a culture of postmortems, where you review the incident as a team and brainstorm ways of avoiding it in the future. This can be tricky to be done in a truly blameless way but if done right can act as a positive reinforcement. In general it's better that peer pressure and culture are the mechanisms that drive people vs. managerial action simply because the manager can't be everywhere all the time. The manager drives that culture.