Getting the Most From Your Teams, Part 4

This is the fourth in a series of articles on how to structure and elicit the highest performance from your teams without resorting to heroics. I recommend reading Part 3 before this one to understand the context.

Here’s a brief recap of our story so far: My quest was to understand how to structure a development team to be supercharged, consistently delivering the highest possible performance, without relying solely on 10x programmers. Equally important was that I needed the solution to scale across several projects, and never result in the burn-out of any one performer from heroism, improper expectations, or boredom. 

At the end of Part 3 I shared the Matrix I had created in pursuit of this quest: 

With this Matrix I recognized that I had the components I sought, and I understood the value of the contributors in each quadrant. As a reminder, it wasn’t about innate intelligence. The truth is, all four types can be highly intelligent, but their attention spans, commitment to completion, drive to be helpful, or their raw enjoyment of difficult challenges set them apart from each other. This meant that personality behavioral patterns were the real differentiators. Failures seemed likely to be aligned with using people incorrectly. But I needed proof. Therefore, the final puzzle piece was to prove the best configuration of these contributors on real projects. But first, we had to have….

Cool Names

Q4: There might be cooler names for a savant coder than 10x, but who wouldn’t want to be referred to as a 10x? 10x

Q3: As personified in previous articles by my observations of Samir, I noted that this contributor could keep wildly complicated systems straight in his/her mind, master even the tiniest detail, and become the ultimate authority for a system’s quality and performance. Ask this person the most obscure question about a complicated system and the correct answer was delivered instantly. This put me in mind of a Chess Master, who could play entire chess games without the need for pieces. Chess Master

Q2: As personified by Maria, this person exhibited a wild capacity to burn through many tasks, taking gleeful pleasure in checking off the “done” box. When keeping Maria focused on less complicated but still challenging tasks, she never got bored or frustrated so long as she could consistently complete them. I decided to call this contributor the Terminator. 

Q1: As personified by Bob, this person found a hundred ways to add value to the course of the project, handling details that might easily have been neglected or forgotten by those high speed contributors. He is a force multiplier through his work ethic and commitment. This reminded me of Luke as a young lad, so… Padawan (the force is strong with this one).

The amazing thing I learned about each quadrant as I experimented was that when a resource was assigned quadrant-appropriate tasks, contributors in other quadrants performed exceptionally well. For example: 

• 10x worked through deep problems much faster, and therefore took on more of them, while admitting to never before being so happy at work.
• Chess Master focused on the hardest problems, got everything closer to correct and scalable with each moment, came up with imaginative solutions to unsolvable issues, and became a patient and thoughtful mentor of Terminators and Padawans. 
• Terminator, unleashed to move as rapidly as she desired, reveled in the value of taking work off the shoulders of the others, relished being depended upon, and flourished.
• Padawan, whose primary goal was to be useful, kept imagining more and more ways to improve the team’s efficiency, accuracy, quality, and speed. 

Said more succinctly, they were all free to unleash their imaginations and instincts in the directions most likely to result in team success. After exhaustive experimentation I found a solution that met my requirements and settled on this project analogy to make it repeatable. 

Tip of the arrow: I thought of 10x’s as the sharp point, piercing through the toughest problems that the team confronted.

Shaft: Chess Masters were the backbone or spine of the team, establishing integrity to power strong lift and distance, and enabling the strength, velocity, and smoothness that would result in the best chance at a bull’s eye.

Feathers: Terminators kept the team well adjusted, prevented spinning and wobbling, and made sure the flight employed the most direct path to the target.

Notch: Padawans maintained equilibrium through the upheaval of release, and ensured a correct grip for maximum performance, and a quick, confident flight. 

Product Manager: For what it’s worth, I often included the PM in this analogy as the bow, measuring and applying force and direction (requirements) to the project.

Conclusion

Over the years, leading engineering and the project management office for successful consulting companies, I applied the arrow configuration dozens of times with the same result – those teams outperformed everyone, even our customers’ own teams who had the advantage of incumbent knowledge. More importantly, I could hire specifically for certain quadrants, repeat the configuration as many times as available staff allowed, and the contributors on those teams had a higher job satisfaction rating than any other.