The risk of Silos within Tech Teams
The lack of empathy, badly managed egos, and limited communication can destroy the trust and performance of your team.
Teamwork is not a new concept. By nature, humans beings are designed to collaborate and solve problems together:
Cooperation is part of human nature. Arthur Dobrin, Psychology Today
Cooperation allows humans to solve problems that individuals, acting alone, could not solve. Psychology Today
Some studies have explored the impact of teamwork (especially on diverse teams), on companies’ revenue. So, the importance of working together towards a common goal seems to be clear:
Economics researchers at MIT and George Washington University analyzed eight years of revenue data and survey results (1995 to 2002) from a professional-services firm with more than 60 offices in the United States and abroad. They found that shifting from an all-male or all-female office teams to ones split evenly along gender lines increased revenue by roughly 41 percent. Denise Cummins, Psychology Today
Like many others, the tech industry has embraced the idea of working together, and since the early days of software development, many organizational structures have appeared.
Tech Team structure
I’ve been working in different companies, from consultancy to product, and common patterns or roles usually appear in any tech team. Different positions are involved, and that seems to be something beneficial:
Cohesive teams are formed to enable strong collaboration between business, developers, testers and operations for smooth release of small and frequent changes. Reshma Shinde, Accenture
Let’s explore the structure of a usual tech team:
Quality and Support (green)
This group is in charge of identifying and communicating inconsistencies or issues in the system.
- App Support: collect users’ requests
- QA: through manuals and automatic tests, identify potential problems
Product (yellow)
The product group is in contact with users to understand what they want. They can perform interviews, try prototypes, collect information through analytics tools, etc.
- Designers: from UI design to UX expertise, trying to deliver the best experience
- Product Owner: identify and prioritize the features to work on
Engineering (purple)
- Frontend: creating the part of the app that users interact with
- Backend: focus on server capabilities, business logic, and data storage
- DevOps: orchestration of the infrastructure and a backbone for the Engineering team
The complexity of systems and the rise of different technologies pushed every group and position to be more and more specialized. And this is good because having an expert leads to better decisions and solutions but, at the same time, could create some kind of isolation from the other parties due to the particular knowledge and vocabulary.
Web applications became more complex with bigger requirements. New technologies, frameworks, and paradigms bounce into the development and pushed developers to specialize in some areas arising new roles from this specialization. Sergio Carracedo, DZone
Also, by exploring the relationships between those teams, we can see how interconnected those roles are. And it’s easy to imagine how important it could be to maintain good communication and understanding between the different parties.
Silos within a team
GPT4
What is a silo?
In a business or organizational context, 'silo' is used metaphorically to describe a system, process, department, etc., that operates in isolation from others. It's often used as a term of criticism because it can lead to inefficiency and a lack of communication or cooperation.
The silo concept applied to business is a recurring problem. Unfortunately, situations like marketing promoting an unexisting feature without verifying the feasibility with engineering or how product and engineering make significant changes on the platform without notifying customer support are common in many companies.
But can those silos appear within a tech team? Can the previously described groups sometimes fight or confront other team members? In some circumstances, it can happen:
Such groups tend to think in the category “us vs. them” and take ownership of resources competitively, rather than sharing and collaborating. Alexander Goida, Medium
And this could be even worse in the case of promoting tech initiatives that involve deep collaboration between different engineering roles:
Gartner estimates that 75% of DevOps initiatives fail to meet expectations in part due to difficulties working across functional teams, while a separate report from Mulesoft found 89% of IT teams were struggling with data silos. Brian McHugh, ActiveBatch
I’ve even experienced situations during my career where the Frontend team fought or made alliances against designers. Or the Backend team complained about how bad quality and inconsistent the APIs are because the Frontend team has weird requests.
Before exploring some solutions, it is crucial to understand how this situation can appear and why:
Empathy
- Affinity: this is one part of human nature. We will get along with some people and hang out or talk with them more frequently and openly
- Language and vocabulary: working in a narrow environment with complex concepts and specific terminology is easy, and we feel more comfortable sharing ideas with people who better understand us
- Background and interests: hobbies or interests can play an important role here. For example, front-end developers can have a common interest in trendy frameworks or tools they only understand
Ego
- Fear of failure: the school and universities measure our performance in a numeric system and push us to be close to perfection. For some professionals, this is crucial. If a surgeon fails, a person can die. That’s not cool. But failing and failing fast in a more creative and innovative position is valid and even necessary
- Fear of being fired: sometimes, the pressure for perfectionism and competitiveness between team members can lead you to a position where you feel you can lose your job
- Trying to find right/wrong answers to problems: between black and white, you have a very long grayscale, and between right and wrong, you have many possible solutions that could suit your needs
Communication
- Not understanding users' needs: not understanding that our users might have certain disabilities, that their language or way of expressing themselves is more or less direct, the impact of their political preferences, religion, and so on. That information is crucial to know why we are taking one approach or the other
- No clear goals: sometimes, the chief layer of the company doesn’t provide clear goals, and that confusion spreads through the hierarchy/pyramid, and people don’t know which action will move the needle in the expected direction (because you don’t have one)
- Lack of prioritization: having goals is only one of the necessary things. Priorities are essential, and notifying them. It’s common to find designers working on new designs while the front end is blocked for missing specifications. (The same situation happens between the front end and the backend)
What can we do?
I believe there are three pillars we can rely on for building the grounds of a stable and safe environment. Let’s explore them and their relationship with the previously described problems.
Empathy
GPT4
What is empathy?
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. It involves being able to put oneself in another's position, experiencing their emotions, perspectives, and mental states. It's a fundamental part of human interaction and is crucial for building relationships, improving communication, and fostering understanding between individuals.
There are two main types of empathy:
- Affective empathy, also known as emotional empathy, involves the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states. You not only understand what the person is feeling, but you also feel it along with them.
- Cognitive empathy, on the other hand, refers to the ability to understand another's feelings and thoughts, often referred to as perspective-taking. It doesn't necessarily involve sharing the emotional experience.
Empathy is an essential skill in many professions and situations, including therapy, healthcare, social work, teaching, and leadership. It's also fundamental in personal relationships, aiding in conflict resolution, and promoting understanding and closeness.
I believe that both types of empathy are important for the working environment, but I’d like to focus on the cognitive one. Let’s analyze another definition:
Cognitive empathy, also known as empathic accuracy, involves “having more complete and accurate knowledge about the contents of another person’s mind, including how the person feels”. Lesley University
So, based on that definition, statements like this one make sense:
Specialization is a good thing. After all, you want each member of your team to be the best at what they do. At the same time, team members need to understand how their peers fit into the bigger picture. Laura McPherson, Zapier
Peers must have a basic knowledge and vocabulary of each other. I’m talking about understanding other roles within the team, their process, how they name things, their timings, and their responsibilities.
Of course, if you have a team that includes different ethnicities and it can be distributed in other countries and time zones. Empathy is crucial; this kind of team could help you grow as an individual and deliver better products with more innovative solutions.
Having a diverse workforce can help your team solve problems more quickly. Multiple cultures solve challenges differently and having an open mind can produce creative solutions and collaborative innovation. Michael Henman, Business
Ego
GPT4
What is ego?
In psychology, "ego" refers to the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, playing a critical role in our perceptions, thoughts, and reality testing. It's essentially the sense of self.
In everyday language, "ego" often refers to a person's sense of self-esteem or self-importance. A "big ego" implies an inflated sense of self-worth, while a "small ego" might suggest humility.
Before continuing, I’m going to add another concept here:
GPT4
What is a narcissist?
A narcissist is a person who has an excessive interest in or admiration of themselves, often lacking empathy for others and having a need for excessive attention or admiration. This term is often associated with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a mental condition characterized by these traits.
I’m not saying that in every team, we will find a narcissist, but all of us can have some narcissistic traits at some point. The ego itself is hard to deal with, but combining it with narcissism gives us a nice Molotov cocktail.
That’s only a starting point because listening without being in a defensive position won't open a door for creativity:
The most creative solutions can only come up when there’s a level of trust that lets team members ask ‘stupid’ questions, propose out-there ideas, and receive constructive criticism. Tracy Middleton, Atlassian
A few years ago, I read Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration and soon I was fascinated about how open they’re on given feedback.
Every once in a while, magic happens, and by magic, what I mean is there is a loss of the ego in the room. And what you see is ideas going out. It doesn’t matter if they’re bad or good. Nobody is clinging to them. They’re just focused on the problem. Ed Catmull, Fortune Magazine
So, now the question is can you build something like that?
Communication
Another essential part of a team is communication; by this, I’m talking about enabling ways to communicate in multiple directions. People have to feel that they are part of something, and giving them more context of what is going on is important.
Individuals and teams must understand how they contribute to the big picture. Laura McPherson, Zapier
Sometimes we tend to focus more on procedures and standard solutions. For example, setting up regular 1-1 could enable this kind of communication and openness, but you could have on-demand meetings with the team without waiting for the 1-1.
So, are the Silos the real problem?
Maybe we don't need to break the silos. What we need is to communicate and work together. This means we put less effort into breaking those silos, slowly making teams share the same goals, and understanding that they are all part of a more prominent organisation. Yair Etziony, Polar Squad
Conclusions
We have built society by sharing spaces, living together, and working toward common goals. And I know collaborating can be challenging, but at the same time, it’s part of our DNA.
We can become invincible once we start working together, sharing ideas, giving constructive feedback, learning, and growing. It’s way more powerful to embrace the idea of being extremely open-minded than trying to collect all the knowledge in the world.
I don’t forget that we are all humans, dealing with many things in our lives. Our past can sometimes haunt us, but finding a balance between been compressive with ourselves and being willing to grow and learn from others is a powerful combination.