The retro was polite.
Everybody said
it had been a team effort.
Afterwards,
over coffee,
three people told you,
separately,
the same thing.
Honestly,
I carried that one.
Each of them meant it.
You did too.
You had been there
for the late evenings,
the migration nobody else
wanted to touch,
the weekend
when the import broke.
You remembered
every hour of it.
That is the problem.
In 1979
Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly
asked married couples
a simple question,
each partner on their own.
For a list of jobs around the house,
how much of each one
did you do?
Cleaning.
Shopping.
Planning what to do
at the weekend.
Then they added the two answers.
For most of the jobs
the total came to more
than the whole job.
Nobody was lying.
Each partner
remembered their own work
in rich detail.
Where they were,
how long it took,
how tired they were after.
The other person's work
mostly happened
when they were not looking.
It arrived as a result,
a clean kitchen,
a booked table,
not as an evening.
What you remember easily
feels like more.
A team is the same,
only with more people
and longer memories.
Your own work is a diary.
Everyone else's
is a list of merges.
You saw the bug you fixed.
You did not see
the hour someone spent
talking a customer
out of leaving.
Or the review
that stopped a bad design
before you ever read it.
Or the on call night
that ended quietly
because somebody
had already fixed the alarm.
Later studies found
one thing that helps.
Before people judged
their own share,
they were asked to think
about each colleague's part,
one by one.
Their claims came down.
So do that,
on purpose,
before the retro,
before the promotion case,
before the coffee.
Write one line
for every person on the project.
What did they do
that you never saw?
If you cannot write the line,
you do not know enough
to judge the split.
Keep a shared record
while the work happens,
including the quiet parts.
And when you feel
you carried it,
assume the people beside you
feel exactly the same.
Most of the time,
all of you are right
about your own effort.
You are just wrong
about the total.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Top comments (0)