Why Your 'Harmonious' Team Is Failing

One counter to this over 20 years in this game is there are plenty of people who confuse &quot;having heated discussions&quot; with being high functioning.<p>That is - I&#x27;ve been on lots of low functioning teams riven with conflict. Prima donna developers who publicly call managers&#x2F;teammates stupid in meetings. Managers giving negative feedback in public instead of in private. Stubborn veteran team members telling newer team members to get a new job if they don&#x27;t like how things are done.<p>One pattern I&#x27;ve seen in lower functioning teams with lots of conflict is some members being very well spoken, typically more classically trained like a philosophy background, probably a past debate club type kid. &quot;Strong opinions, loosely held&quot; type behavior where bad ideas were passionately argued by the more eloquent &amp; aggressive team member until everyone else was exhausted and just let it run.<p>The kind of guys that would steamroll the rest of the team as a bunch of idiots for not agreeing with him, but flip to a charismatic &quot;ah good point&quot; when incontrovertible proof of their idea not being correct was presented. The problem is you can&#x27;t provide incontrovertible proof in real time in most cases, and lots of managers confuse their passion&#x2F;certitude for correctness.<p>So high functioning teams can have heated arguments &amp; difficult people, but heated arguments do not in themselves lead to high functioning teams.

I ran a pretty high-functioning team of experienced C++ image processing pipeline programmers, for 25 years. We were part of a much larger, international (and interdisciplinary) team. We worked for one of the most renowned imaging companies in the world.<p>Some of the folks we dealt with, were the top people in their field, and not everyone was especially good at getting along with others.<p>Everyone thought they had The Answer, and everyone was totally passionate about doing their best work.<p>Needless to say, we often had heated discussions.<p>For the most part, we did excellent work (not always, but team infighting was not the reason for issues).<p>My personal experience, is that creative, passionate, high-talent teams can be pretty messy, and managing them, is tricky.

I think this article confuses an absence of &quot;heated arguments&quot; with a lack of constructive, critical discussions. I&#x27;ve found that in mature teams with high trust, people don&#x27;t have heated arguments precisely because they are not afraid that their voices will be ignored. There is no need to become heated because you trust that the other people on the team will hear you out and consider your viewpoint.<p><i>&gt;code that nobody questions usually crashes in production</i><p>I don&#x27;t understand what that means.

Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read.<p>This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe.<p>Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict.<p>Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.

&gt; Ideas get challenged based on what they are, not who said them<p>Is anyone here deeply moved by how this argument is insightful and bring an angle to team building that wouldn&#x27;t have been obvious otherwise ?<p>It&#x27;s not just that single quote, the whole article felt like a Don Quixote battling the windmills that keep silencing the wise engineers bearing their valid criticism as a spear. Or perhaps it was aimed at dictator types of figures who reign fear on their troups ? But then, will they even listen to this author ?<p>&gt; My best engineering teams were never the quiet ones—they were the ones where technical debates got spirited, where different perspectives were welcomed, and where we could disagree while still respecting each other.<p>Who&#x27;s raising their fist shouting that respectful disagreement with different perspectives has no place in their team ?<p>--<p>The previous piece discussed here [1] was definitely more interesting and bringing more to the table as a thought piece.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43652024">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=43652024</a>

One learns more from friendly critics than from uncritical friends.

This is true in any relationship. The goal is not “winning”, but making sure everyone’s needs are met.

How do people cope in teams where some or even most members are vocal but actually always completely wrong and you’re the only one seeing it?

Once I was in a team that had built for themselves a bubble of happiness, because the CTO &#x2F; second founder of the company was a toxic scumbag. At the time I thought it was the best team ever but the bubble was cracked in a very ugly way, revealing the horrific situation.

The truth on this is even simpler: the absence of a clear decision making hierarchy in big A &quot;Agile&quot; processes dooms every non operational task to at best mediocre outcomes. *<p>One of the key benefits of hierarchical decision making is that people have the opportunity to privately challenge opinions, which can lead to radical levelling up of everyone involved. Since the introduction of infantile nonsense like &quot;sprint planning poker&quot; everything descends to being an argument, facepalming defeatism, or fake niceness while everyone hopes everyone else does the bare minimum to keep things going while we all smile about it.<p>* My more managerial friends and colleagues claim this is a feature, not a bug, in that they prefer predictable mediocrity over unpredictable success.

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&quot;Psychological safety&quot; sounds awfully creepy.