TL; DR: 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies — outsourcing, for example, software development as a non-essential business area — has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. And yet, they still do not understand what it takes to build a decent product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and are signs that the organization has a toxic team culture. 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture The Toxic Team Culture: Internals vs. Externals 20 years ago, many large companies tagged along with Jack Welch’s philosophy of outsourcing non-core business areas — such as software development — to third parties. Today, they find it hard to compete in the war for product and engineering talent with the GAFAs and other agile and technology-focused organizations. Software is finally eating the world. The lack of a product/engineering culture in those legacy organizations usually results in hiring numerous contractors and freelancers to get at least some projects going. Which in return often leads to some typical anti-patterns as the internals find it hard to team up with the externals: There is a pecking order among team members. This order is not based on an individual’s contribution or capability but whether that person is on pay-role or not. No equality: Externals are expected to deliver the work items. Accepting accountability and developing a sense of product ownership is regarded impeding this purpose. Externals to the shop floor: Internals focus on advancing their careers by other means than building an outstanding product, for example, by getting involved in the organization’s politics game. Career issues: Internals claim the final say who to hire and tend to use it to select submissive minions. (As the saying goes: B people hire C people.) Hiring minions: Internals consider themselves responsible for the product and hence insist on making all decisions themselves — often single-handedly without involving the team or by overriding the team’s decision. Lonesome decisions: Internals dispatch work items to either externals or juniors. (It is even worse when externals accept the situation and ask internals what is the next work item for them is.) Assigning tasks: Externals are excluded from the use of ‘internal’ infrastructure, for example, WiFi and calendar applications. No WiFi for you: The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide This ebook covers over 160 Scrum anti-patterns, and it is available right here. for free Download the “The Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide” now! Please click the “clapping hands” 👏, if you found this post useful–it would mean a lot to me! If you prefer a notification by email, please sign-up for my weekly newsletter and join 14,178 peers. The Toxic Team Culture: Equality and Diversity And then there are other issues beyond the internal vs. external question that might prevent a group of people that happen to be in the same place at the same time from becoming a team: Merges need to be requested and are utilized as code quality stage-gates beyond a reasonable level. Not all developers are created equal: The senior team members consider writing tests, fixing bugs or documentation as a minor task below their pay-grade. Hence, it is outsourced to the junior team members. Outsourcing to juniors: Remote team members are not fully included, for example, they never meet the co-located team members in person. Remote minions: Team members are deliberately ignoring communication only to point at a later stage at a perceived lack of communication. The silent treatment: The team members basically look the same, probably white dudes in their twenties and thirties. No diversity: The team suffers from a high fluctuation among its members. Voting with their feet: Conclusion: What is difficult to understand is that legacy organizations complain that they cannot hire top engineering talent. On the other side, they do not invest in making the company a great place to work for in the first place. And by “great” I am not referring to sushi chefs on the premise or sparkling water from eight different countries in the fridge. Creating balanced, diverse teams where rank does not have privileges — that are ready and willing to accept accountability — is essential for organizations striving to build a product/engineering culture or even become agile. Their return on investment will largely depend on achieving this goal as early as possible in the transition. What signs of a toxic team culture have you observed? Please, share with us in the comments. ✋ Do you want to read more like this? Well, then: 📰 Join 14,178 peers and sign-up for my weekly newsletter 🐦 Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog Age of Product 💬 Alternatively, join 2,400-plus peers of the Slack team “Hands-on Agile” for free . was first published on Age-of-Product. 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture
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