Team Composition Tetris
People leadership is an inventory management survival horror game
My first management responsibility in my first management role was to tell a direct report that their performance dropped severely over the past few months.
I did not do this.
Instead, I sat down with my p̶e̶e̶r̶/ r̶e̶p̶o̶r̶t̶/ colleague, and I asked them what they like and what they dislike about the work they’re doing. They hated their current work. Management 101: If people aren’t motivated by the work they’re doing, they’re unlikely to be (sustainably) productive at it. In contrast: If people are motivated, they generally do better work more sustainably.
I got lucky: This report wanted to do exactly the projects that everyone else found tedious and hated. By assigning all of those projects to the one person who enjoyed them, I made every person on that team more productive.
Most situations are not so simple. This is not a complicated lesson, but an important one.
Inventory Management: Learn skills & motivations
T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶r̶o̶b̶l̶e̶m̶ One of the problems is that we can’t fulfill all needs at all times.
✨ not every opportunity exists ✨
✨ at every company ✨
✨ at every time.✨
- “Things to know about engineering levels”,
by Charity Majors
Assuming you’re working in the real world, humans on your team are a finite resource, their time is finite, and their skills are finite. In an abstract sense, these are resources that you manage. Uh, human resources. Gosh, that got awkward fast.
(In the theoretically 100% off-chance that you’re working in some infinite space, you have bigger problems to deal with unless you accept the axiom of choice. I assure you this sentence is incredibly funny to about 6 readers.)
So you have this collection of people who want to do things, and a collection of things that you want to be done, and these are usually different things. Ideally, you’d match these up—but how?
Learn the skills, motivations, and core needs of your reports. Learn about what they want to be doing. And build trust with them. You can’t play Tetris without knowing the shape of the pieces!
Tetris
There are two common patterns that end Tetris games. One is a densely packed set of incomplete rows. Another common end state is having an imbalanced pillar that you can’t navigate around to complete a critical foundational layer.
Suppose that one of your reports doesn’t want to do their current responsibility Y — but Y isn’t in the skills, interests, or role responsibilities of anyone else on your team. You have an unbalanced pillar.
Sam was hired to take primary responsibility for an area that everyone else disliked. This was a fantastic growth opportunity for Sam, who grew to take on additional responsibilities. And then they grew to dislike the responsibility they were hired to do. “I can’t promise anything, but we might be able to change that in a few months.” Six months later, Sam found another opportunity at another company that enabled them to pursue their career goals.
Is this a “bad” outcome? Not necessarily. In my personal opinion, situations like this are bad when the options and timelines are not transparently explored and discussed.
What should happen in these situatons:
- Acknowledge their desire for change
- Discuss what timeline they would like for that change
- Discuss each of the options (and tradeoffs) that could address their needs
- Identify alternatives if their desired option doesn’t work out in the timeline they want
Ask the hard questions
As Catherine Miller described in “Asking the Hard Questions”:
We might talk about how at some point they’d like to be working on thing [X], probably on team [Y]. Or how things were rough right now, but once [Z] happened, they would get better. I would listen, ask some follow-up questions, strategize about possible solutions.
Sounds kind of reasonable right? Not a total failure of Management 101. But I never asked the harder follow-up questions: How long are you willing to keep working on thing [X]? What if team [Y] doesn’t have any openings? What if [Z] doesn’t happen soon?
With one person, I had in my mind that a directional transition to focus on platform goals we had been talking about would happen within six months. That person had two months in their head.
…
“Three months ago we talked about you moving towards plan [X]. We haven’t made as much progress as we had hoped. What do you want to do now?”
Catherine shares additional examples in that article, which I’d encourage you to read, and I imagine you can think of a few yourself.
Tetris
When you know the shape of the interests and needs and motivations of each person on your team, you can sketch out an idea of how they fit together to form a coherent team whose skills and goals each complement each other. Building this picture requires having regular conversations about what is satisfying or frustrating about their work, and having growth and development discussions.
These things shift over time, but if you check in regularly and keep an eye on the Gantt chart, you can match upcoming projects as opportunities across the team. I visualize this forecasting of skills, project trajectories, and growth opportunities as a multi-dimensional game of Tetris.
Imagine that only one particular Tetris piece could be placed on the very left hand column. No other pieces could go there. Sometimes, that works out great: a stack of squares or straight lines, or even a neat stack of S- or Z-blocks. But in most Tetris games, you’ll struggle to fill that column, which will fall behind and probably get blocked.
Uniqueness is a bane of software engineering teams.
A unique skill on your team means that your “vacation number” for that skill is 1: if 1 person goes on vacation, and you need that skill, you have a problem.
A unique skill on your team means you have a problem if that person doesn’t like that skill, or if they leave, or a thousand other scenarios.
As someone who has often been the carrier of unique skills — I get it, this is extremely uncomfortable because we want to value the unique skill carriers on our teams. We don’t want to hire a “backup” with the same skill. And it’s validating to be the person who has a unique skill that the team needs.
People on your team can bring a unique combination of skills — maybe even a uniquely powerful combination of skills. But the skills you need for your team should never be in only a single person on your team, unless that skill is easily developed or easily replaced. If you keep the team’s skills balanced, the team can adjust to cover someone’s leave of absence, or unexpected challenges, or take on new opportunities.
This is not about making humans replaceable. Redundancy enables our colleagues to pursue their dreams, grow, change, try something different, or take a vacation. Redundancy means your team is adaptable to whatever challenges or changes arise—because the only consistent pattern is change.
Conclusion
As in all management things: build trust, learn about the humans you work with, and do your best to be transparent and genuine about how you can and can’t support their needs.
At this point, you might ask, “Sarai, how is people leadership a survival horror game?”
Because poorly regulated labor rights make capitalism a horrific survival challenge.
