The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.

Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions.

Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.

💡 Encourage people to make some errors.

Ask your team occasionally what dead-end roads they’ve been down, and make sure they understand that “none” is not the best answer. When people make mistakes they should be congratulated; it is part of what they are being paid to do.

The natural people manager realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It is something to be cultivated.

💡 Programmers are more productive when they can do the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager does it without even consulting them.

The systems analyst tends to be a better estimator than either the programmer or the supervisor.

💡 Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever has the highest productivity of all.

The amazing thing is not that it is so often impossible to work in the workplace; the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody does anything about it.

💡 The top performers’ space is quieter, more private, and better protected from interruption.

For anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These are high-momentum tasks. It’s only when you’re in flow that work goes well.

People have to be assured that it is not their fault if they can only manage one or two uninterrupted hours a week; rather it is the organization’s fault for not providing a flow-conducive environment.

A task accounting scheme that records flow hours instead of body-present hours can give you two huge benefits:

First, it focuses your people’s attention on the importance of flow time. If they learn that each work day is expected to afford them at least two or three hours free from interruption, they will take steps to protect those hours. The resultant interrupt consciousness helps to protect them from casual interruptions by peers.

Second, it creates a record of how meaningful time is applied to the work. If a product is projected to require three thousand flow hours to complete, then you’ve got a valid reason to believe you’re two-thirds done when two thousand flow hours have been logged against it. That kind of analysis would be foolish and dangerous with body-present hours.

Whenever the number of uninterrupted hours is a reasonably high proportion of total hours, up to approximately forty percent, then the environment is allowing people to get into flow when they need to. Much lower numbers imply frustration and reduced effectiveness. This metric is called the Environmental Factor, or E-Factor.

A little emphasis on the E-factor helps to change the corporate culture and make it acceptable to be uninterruptable.

💡 Your people bring their brains with them every morning. They could put them to work for you at no additional cost if only there were a small measure of peace and quiet in the workplace.

People charged with getting work done must have some peace and quiet to do it in. That means periods of total freedom from interruption.

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible workspace.

People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed.

💡 You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall behind you. There should be no blank wall closer than eight feet in front of you.

You should not be able to hear noises very different from the kind you make, at your workplace. Your workplace should be sufficiently enclosed to cut out noises that are different kinds from the ones you make.

Workspaces should allow you to face in different directions.

Fashion space explicitly around the working groups.

Each time needs identifiable public and semi-private space.

Each individual needs protected private space.

“intimacy gradient” as you move toward the interior.

At the extremity is space where outsiders(messengers and tradesmen and salesmen) may penetrate.

Then you move into space that is reserved for insiders and finally to space that is only for the individual.

This pattern applies to your home as you move from the foyer to the living room to the kitchen to the bedroom to the bathroom.

And it should be true as well of a healthy workplace.

At the entrance to the workplace should be some area that belongs to the whole group. It constitutes a kind of hearth for the group. Further along, the intimacy gradient should be space for the tightly knit work groups to interact and socialize. Finally, there is a protected quiet thinking space for one person to work alone.

💡 Make the common meal a regular. In particular, start a common lunch in every workplace so that a genuine meal is around a common table.

It almost always makes sense to move a project or work group out of corporate space. Work conducted in ad hoc space has got more energy and a higher success rate. People suffer less from noise and interruption and frustration. The quirky nature of their space helps them form a group identity. If you are part of the lofty reaches of upper management, then decide which projects matter most. Move the key ones out. It’s a sad comment that an important piece of work is likely to fare better off-site. It’s sad but true. Make it work for you.

The people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they’re not right for the job from the start, they never will be.

Good work experiences have always got a fair measure of challenge about them.

💡 The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity.

A list of teamicide:

• defensive management
• bureaucracy
• physical separation
• fragmentation of people’s time
• quality reduction of the product
• phony deadlines
• clique control

Of course, if the people are badly suited to the job, you should get new people. But once you’ve decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them.

Let your people make some mistakes.

People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

The best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they’ve been “managed”.

You give your best shot to put the right person in the position, but once she is there, you don’t second-guess.

💡 A person you can’t trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.

The boss has put part of his reputation into the subordinates’ hands. It brings out the best in everyone. The team has something meaningful to form around. They’re not just getting a job done. They’re making sure that the trust that’s been placed in them is rewarded.

If you’ve got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

You may succeed someday in building a productive office environment, a workplace where it’s at least possible to get something done between 9 and 5. But you can only do this in the long run.

In the short run, use any excuse to get your people out. In addition to making them more efficient, the getaway and the periods of total autonomy give them an improved chance to jell into a high-momentum team.

Allow your team to choose the projects they work on and the people they work with.

Employment audition: The project members who listen to the audition are not just an audience; they have a say in whether the person gets the offer.

Chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization:

• Make a cult of quality.
• Provide lots of satisfying closure.
• Build a sense of eliteness.
• Allow and encourage heterogeneity.
• Preserve and protect successful teams.
• Provide strategic but not tactical direction.

The cult of quality is the “dirt in the oyster.” It is the focal point for the team to bind around.

Team members get warmed up as the moment approaches, they sprint near the very end. They get a high from success. It suffuses them with renewed energy for the next step. It makes them feel closer together.

People require a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with themselves, and they need to be at peace with themselves to let the jelling process begin.

Whatever the elite characteristic is, it forms the basis of the team’s identity, and identity is an essential ingredient of a jelled team.

If a team does knit, don’t break it up. At least give people the option to undertake another project together. They may choose to go their separate ways, but they ought to have the choice. When teams stay together from one project to the next, they start out each new endeavor with enormous momentum.

Constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder:

• pilot projects
• war games
• brainstorming
• provocative training experiences
• trips
• conferences
• celebrations
• retreats
• seminars

Sociology matters more than technology or even money.

All team members understand that the quality of the work is important to the organization, but the team adopts a still higher standard to distinguish itself. Without this distinguishing factor, the group is just a group, never a real team.

Competition is fostered when the children are emotionally undernourished by the parents when there just isn’t enough time, respect, attention, and affection to go around.

It is possible that internal competition in work teams is fostered by a manager’s lack of time, respect, attention, and affection for his team.

Coaching is an important favor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend to look back on significant coaching we’ve revived as a near-religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by coaching others.

Anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal.

Some managerial actions that produce teamicide:

• annual salary, merit reviews
• management by objectives(MBO)
• praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
• awards, prizes, and bonuses tied to performance
• performance measurement in almost any form

Remove barriers that rob people in management and in the engineering of their right to pride in workmanship. This means abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives.

Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.

Without a catalyst, there is no recognition of the desirability of change. The foreign element can be an outside force or it can be the recognition that your world has somehow changed.

An interesting characteristic of human emotion is that the more painful the Chaos, the greater the perceived value of the New Status Quo if you can get there.

Change won’t even get started unless people feel safe.

💡 Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their investment in human capital that matter most. The good ones already do.

There has to be a small but active learning center that conceives of, designs and directs the change.

The most natural learning center for most organizations is at the level of that much-maligned institution, middle management.

Successful learning organizations are always characterized by strong middle management.

In order for a vital learning center to form, middle managers must communicate with each other and learn to work together in effective harmony. This is an extremely rare phenomenon.

The most likely learning center for any sizable organization is the white space that lies between and among middle managers. If this white space becomes a vital channel of communication, if middle managers can act together in the redesign of the organization, sharing a common stake in the result, then the benefits of learning are likely to be realized. If, on the other hand, the white space is empty of communication and common purpose, learning comes to a standstill.

💡 A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together.

A community just doesn’t happen on the job. It has to be made.