dangletech

We’ve all had our “Aha! Moments” - sudden and unexpected moments of clarity.
 
Flashback to me as a newly minted senior leader - brave, keen, and naïve. Part of what drove me up the management ranks was my people skills; I liked the human side of the business as much as the technology side. And I was good with people, I liked to communicate and I tried to be a good listener. I liked harmony in my teams and spent a lot of time and energy as “armchair psychologist” mediating between individuals, between teams and between managers.
 
At about that time, I attended a leadership conference where the keynote speaker started his talk saying that managing teams of high performers was like “managing dinosaurs”.
 
What????? This was definitely an analogy I had not heard before so he had my attention! I see many puzzled faces around the room.
 
He goes on to explain himself - he thinks of high performing engineers like the Velociraptors in the movie “Jurassic Park”. They were one of the smaller dinosaurs, but devastating when hunting in a pack. He says if the raptors knew their prey and could see their prey, they would work in harmony together to get the kill. When there was no prey, they would bite each other!
 
Aha! From this moment on I would deal with in-fighting in a completely different way.
Before pulling out my psychology book I step back from the situation and ask myself a few questions.
 
1.  Have I made our goals and objectives clear enough? When people are not heading in the same direction, sooner or later there will be disagreements.
 
2.  Do they know their competition? Engineers like competition, it drives them to excel. Help them understand that their real competition comes from outside the company’s walls and not from person working next to them or another team.
 
3.  Are they busy enough? Or too busy? Busy engineers are happy engineers. If they don’t have enough work they will have time to pick on each other. If they are burnt out, they’ll lash out so that more people share their misery.
 
Sometimes, after a tough day at the office, I think I really should go back to school to get that psychology degree to complement my one in engineering.
 
But then, usually I reflect and decide what I really need to do is watch more movies!