Why The Status Quo Is So Hard To Change In Engineering Teams

This resource first appeared in issue #99 on 05 Nov 2021 and has tags Strategy: Change Management

Why The Status Quo Is So Hard To Change In Engineering Teams - Antoine Boulanger

Boulanger here points out a situation that is especially common in academia, with slow-growing teams where individual team members have long tenure. The issue is that a team gets so used to the way things are they don’t even see it any more, and forget that things don’t have to be this way. There can be a sort of learned helplessness to the procedural, technical, and complexity problems within an organization.

Having new people come in regularly - even short term team members like interns - can be very helpful for this, as long as they are comfortable making comments like “why is X? Isn’t that bad?” and the team takes the points they raise seriously.

Boulanger has recommendations for us managers or leads:

Regularly get into your team’s shoes
Notice when people stop complaining about an issue - this can be a negative, not a problem
Create some metrics around known issues so you can see if they’re getting better or if the team is just getting more inured to them

There are a lot of strengths that can come from a long-lived stable team, if you’re careful, but the default outcome is stagnation. The manager, and the team, has to be constantly and actively looking for things to improve and areas in which to grow to prevent the default.