Some Assembly Required
Remembering Neil Fenton
I recently found at that Neil Fenton had passed away, and I have been thinking about a suitable memorial. Given every great manager is first and foremost a teacher, I am going to share some of the things I learned when I worked for him, because he had a rare management style and way of thinking about how you put together teams.
Far too often the things that drive how you assemble a team have very little to do with creating a great team. The choices might be based on who’s available, or the specific technical or domain knowledge the project requires, training considerations, or organizational politics. Neil’s preferred starting point, though, was the personalities. He favored a particular framework (Belbin) but I think that matters less than the choice to start first with which people would work well together — what the team needs in terms of character and working style — before looking at function. In my working experience probably only Liz Flanagan at HBO was this intentional about team composition.
Dysfunctional teams — riven with conflict, directionless, inefficient and ineffective — are a huge tax on complex projects. But too often we start with the functional needs in the team and then try as managers to resolve the conflicts. We put in place processes for communication and tracking. We clarify boundaries to cool off conflicts. We talk it out in our 1:1’s and try to puzzle out and fix the problems that arise. Neil flipped this around: he said you should start by looking at the mix of people, and while he never made this explicit, I suspect in his time as manager he made sub-optimal choices about the skills of those people — the functional considerations — just in order to get a better mix of personalities. To the degree he was a gifted director, it was as a casting director, not the director behind the camera.
One character he’d talk about was the team role “the Plant” in Belbin. The Plant is the radical and the dreamer; the bomb-thrower; the creative. A team made up entirely of this character no matter how good each individual is functionally is going to be an utter disaster. Disorganized; unfocused; impractical; unwilling to compromise. But equally a team without one such person — particularly a team tasked to drive significant change or a novel product, like the team Neil had led in the early days of SwapsWire — lacks an essential ingredient. The waking dream of creation can only be enacted in the presence of someone who dreams all the time. Teams lacking such an element are fated to never be better than good. At HBO, I remember one UI developer who would wander out to Bryant Park in the middle of the afternoon to play chess … but probably came up on his own with some of the fundamentals of UX design a decade before anyone was writing about it, and our users adored the interfaces he built.
Why do we do this? Why do we create functionally diverse but otherwise homogenous teams, or slapdash assemblies fated to tear themselves apart? Ironically, I suspect it’s due to our aversion to conflict. The flipside of interpersonal diversity is the high productivity doesn’t come for free. Homogeneity washes away a lot of potential causes of tension; avoiding hard choices to break up or rearrange people to a more optimal setup bypasses awkward conversations and the shock and conflict of change. This is where the second thing I learned from Neil comes into play, I think, and I am sure his thinking on this came out of the radical choice to focus on creating teams with very different but complementary personalities. The manager does a lot more emotional labor in such an arrangement, and not everyone wants to take that on or has the tools to do it.
Around the time of the 2008 financial crisis Neil said something that stuck with me. “The manager’s job is to clip the highs and the lows. When the team was really excited about some great success, I would moderate their enthusiasm. When they were upset or stressed or panicked, I would be calm. They will look to you for how to feel about what’s happening.” The diverse set of personalities is going to have in-built tension, and that tension sits on top of the ups and downs of the environment the team is operating in. But a high performing team must always be in tension to a degree: not just from the pressure to deliver, but the necessary tension that comes from working out their different ways of looking at problems. This puts the manager in less of a coordination and communication role, and more in the role of emotional regulation. To the degree the team lead overreacts in either direction, it is going to rip through this high-tension structure and hurt performance.
You will get this wrong. You will find yourself in situations where all sorts of constraints make it damn near impossible to create a well-formed team. But this comes to the very last thing I learned from Neil in that time. He’d insist on making some room to make things marginally better even if it drew down resources needed elsewhere, even if we were under pressure, because it was motivating to see that a broken window got fixed today. Great teams want to excel. The ideal they have in mind of where they will be individually and together and the things they will make will never be realized. We are only human, and doomed to fail; but to want it to be otherwise and to do it together is also human, and Neil knew that.
