Tag: career

I worked in a large company at one point in a team of 20 people. My boss made it a point every month to take a long lunch with the team and engage in some teambuilding. Usually one of us would have to remain at the office, but we rotated the duty so that most of use could participate. We would go to movies, go bowling, have a team lunch, watch a baseball game, or something similar.

At Redgate, the various groups schedule days out, and last month the company had a large “day out”, bringing many of the Americans over from the US to participate. It was a good time, and the chance to get to know some of people in the company I rarely interact with.

Team building has been hit or miss, but I’m curious how many of you engage in the activity. I know I’ve worked in plenty of companies where there was no effort made to build a team. This week I wanted to ask you:

Do you engage in team building at work and what events have you enjoyed?

Maybe I should ask what worked well to help build a team, but sometimes the enjoyment and bonding go and in hand.

I thought of this recently as my daughter wanted to ride zip lines for her birthday. We packed up the family to go, and while it wasn’t everyone’s first choice, we enjoyed it and had a few hours to laugh and joke with each other. It turned out to be a much better family bonding time than a few people expected. If you’ve never tried it, I might recommend it as a way to have fun with a small group of people.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

I’m not a very comfortable flyer. I do it regularly, and I’ve gotten used to it, but I’m a bit scared when the plane appears to be anything other than a slow elevator to me. I’m not quite sure how I’d react if I were on a small plane and experienced what this author did above Washington State.

The piece is really about being professional, and the way the pilot reacted in that story certainly wasn’t the professional image most of us want from their pilots. A few might like that, just as a few might accept most behaviors, but the majority expect something else.

In the article, there are seventeen habits that can make you look more professional in the piece I linked, and for the most part I really think these are the types of traits and images that a professional wants to project. Whether you’re a CEO or a developer, having confidence and candor are as important as realism and caring. We all expect professionals to follow through on commitments and be diligent in their work.

The only item I might disagree with is fitness. Perhaps that’s more important in some areas than others, but I have found many people that are highly professional, competent, dependable, and worth every penny that I pay them, but not very healthy. Some might be unhealthy to the point I’d be concerned for their long term prospects, but that wouldn’t mean they aren’t good professionals in the short term.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.

I’ve written in the past that I think that it’s important the hire people that get along with your group first, and with technical skills second. It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but I think that fitting in with a team is more important. We can teach someone to be a better developer. We can’t easily teach them to be a person that others like to work alongside. Certainly, however, the person needs to have the technical skills needed for the job.

When I was interviewed in college, the hiring manager told me there were two important tests to pass: Would he drive cross country with me and would he go out for a drink with me after work? That doesn’t imply that those are the most important (soft) skills for a candidate. It’s that all the other, more quantifiable skills were similar in all the candidates. The ability to get along socially was a differentiating factor.

I was reminded of this reading a blog post that hiring for culture can hurt your culture. It’s a look at a developer’s opinion about the ways in which some startups operate. However I think the author confuses social situations or behaviors with culture. The culture includes much more than our schedule of activities outside of work. It includes our attitude towards work, towards building software, towards each other. Certainly this is mentioned in the piece, but there seems to be an emphasis on the social interactions with new hires.

Certainly a person coming to work at a company that refuses to engage with others in any way outside of work can be a problem. We need to get along with each other as social creatures, and be able to hold a conversation with each other that might not involve work. However I’m not sure that anyone expects every other employee to have, discuss, and participate in the same interests as the manager or even a group of people.

Finding a cultural fit is a difficult task. I do think plenty of people hire the best programmer they find (whatever that means), regardless of their ability to get along with others. I also think plenty of managers hire someone that gets along great, but isn’t a good employee. As with many things in hiring, finding a balance of talent, attitude, work ethic, and social compatibility is important and worth striving for, but difficult to actually achieve in practice.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.