The Thirty Minute Rule - Daniel Roy Greenfield

This resource first appeared in issue #113 on 12 Mar 2022 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Managing Individuals, Hiring: Onboarding

We’ve talked a lot about having explicit expectations in your team, especially around communications. It’s been on my mind having changed teams very recently.

Your team does have expectations about how people work together. (You’ll find this out very quickly if a new team member starts behaving very differently from team norms!) The only question: do you have those expectations written down somewhere? Having expectations explicit makes it easier for new team members to spin up, and for experienced members to mentor juniors and trainees.

If you don’t have such expectations explicit, one good target to start with is: how long should someone wrestle with something on their own before bringing other team members (or stakeholders) in?

You do have expectations about this. If someone was spinning their wheels for two weeks making no progress because they were stuck on something someone else could have told them, you’d be annoyed. You’d also be annoyed if someone constantly asked on the #general channel on slack the second something came up they didn’t know.

Greenfield suggests a 30 minute rule; don’t let people get stuck because of something they don’t know for longer than 30 minutes. Maybe in your team, with the kind of work you do, it’s an hour, or a workday, or 15 minutes. It almost doesn’t matter. Pick something that feels right, and bring it up with your team at your next team meeting and see if they agree. Make changes as necessary. Then write it down somewhere and put it in your onboarding documents; from there you can build up to other shared team expectations.