Smells like Team spirit

Developers around the world, all managers, coders, designers and people with brains, please tell me your experience, I’m hungry for it!

Why is my generation how it is?

Hi, I’m young, inexperienced and dumb. But it feels that people of my age are bit unsustainable as I am.

Issues with other people I got in to were about concertation, motivation, good intents, consistency and so on… and so on. The usual package.

How to prevent that, how to work with people correctly … that’s too generic, ehm… How to stop people from driving away and being narcissistic. Why is there that big difference anyway? I got few friends, that are able to really do something with great team spirit. Then... there are a few other friends what are stealing other’s work, lying, saying big thinks and not delivering them... It’s ok if they end up with some perspective after some time, but I never saw any change in their behavior. But nothing in between? It seems to me, that there are only two stereotypes. Why?

So many wonders for me. I like people and by that, I mean the good one, the nice one.

How to build or maintain your team?

Alright, so for an instance, we have a house full of amazing people, that are well behaved, so they are perfect (dreamy situation). How to make the right management, to get things moving?

And what about the motivation, let’s say there’s a guy named Paul. He’s smart, good team member, everything is awesome about Paul. But he does only apps for Android, you would need (as a team) app for iOS, you know he would learn it, but you also see, that there is no motivation for it.

How to trick him into doing it?

I don’t mean it in an evil way. You, as a manager, need to motivate people to do things, that they didn’t even think of. Usually, it’s the thing you currently need.

How do you correctly maintain the team and establish a good mood with great workflow? The only part I know of is people. Without the more adult approach to the “craft”, there is no way of good team culture nor team spirit.

Comments

[JeffD]

When I read the word "team" I think first about sport and firefighters (and restaurant cooks). The best advice we can get comes from theses domains (safety, military, ...) I'm sorry but I don't have any english book reference.

Let's assume your team should make a video game.

Correctly maintain the team:

• A common goal: everyone SHOULD have the same goal: "develop the game", they must believe in this game and love this game. To success you should make sure the game bring every thing the team want (nice technology, fun, ...). So print some sticker and developp the pride to be on this team.
• "A team, not people": when a problem happens it should be the problem of everyone, not only the guy who writted code. This could be developped using code review and pair programming.
• A challenge: every release should be seen as a challenge, turning work into game is a good way to reduce stress.
• Resolve problems early: listen the team and detect when people start clashing. Let them go for a walk and then listen each of them and try to prove "one needs the other".
• Award: for every big step (like a release of your game) you have to celebrate it, buy a cake, bring beer or do something else but celebrate.

Establish a good mood:

• Trust: don't hide something with your team, be transparent, avoid private mail and slack messages.
• For every scrum sprint (for example) take time to say "Nice work my team you're the best" and say for each person what you appreciated during the period.
• Get some time out of the work: a basketball match, pool or just restaurant, take some time to speak about something else, make some joke, have good time.
• (Penalty): have a fun way to punish you team, the most common is a moneybox where you drop 1$ for every mistake. This money could buy some food/drinks.

Motivate an iOS developper to build Android App:

• No idea sorry :$

[Christopher Toman]

Wow, lovely read. Thank you very much for your reply, it was more then helpful.

Poor Paul tho, he's stuck with Android apps for good.

I guess Paul is just low self-esteem, so by talking to him, it would sort of work. I had many times my temperament hidden until someone openly spoke about the technology or the issue.