Generally I believe that engineering management folks look to hire the strongest candidate in terms of relevant technical knowledge, basic intelligence and work ethic. Another factor usually considered is personality or style, as in communications style. Years ago, during a philosophical (aka “over drinks” ) chat with another colleague who also headed up an engineering team I learned that he considered it essential to make sure new members of his team “fit in”, personality wise. I view this as “nice-to-have” rather than a requirement when hiring an engineer.
I want individuals to be solid contributors on their own but sometimes the best or most expeditious way to make a technical decision is to interactively discuss the issue. The best teams I’ve managed involved smart people who challenged each other so that group brainstorming about a technical approach or even root cause analysis was productive. I DO think it’s important to establish basic ground rules so that anyone with a relevant idea can get their voice heard, whether he/she be very outgoing or somewhat shy in nature. Some of the best technical discussions involve heated differences of opinion but it’s usually possible to analyze the various approaches being championed and determine together which makes the most sense given the existing constraints and unfortunately, there are always constraints :) .
We often hear of company culture; individual groups within the company have a sub-culture that may be different from the overall corporate philosophy. For example, I joined one small software company as interim VPE and was really surprised at the communication style within Engineering. There was nothing unusual about the cross functional communications between groups. Within Engineering, however, there was a pervasive need for all discussions and emails to be measured and thorough and extremely polite in tone. This itself is not an issue but I noticed that ever since the company had relocated to the Bay area (bringing the core engineering team with it) there seemed to be an issue in adding people to the team. Three engineering hires in a row “did not work out.”
Once I realized that the core team of this small engineering group had joined the company together when the professor for whom they all worked as graduate students founded the company I better understood the dynamics. It became clear that part of the problem was that the new people didn’t understand the “rules of engagement.” During the several months I was part of this team I worked to change the focus of the group discussions so that the emphasis was on the quality of the technical opinions expressed rather than on how politely the ideas were communicated.
I believe that it is healthy AND often extremely productive to foster unstructured brainstorming even if it involves disagreement. Ideally the members of the team will feed off each other’s energy and creativity; sometimes the best result comes from iteratively slicing and dicing one proposed approach rather than just completely accepting or rejecting each proposal in its entirety.
How much importance do YOU give to building an engineering team whose personalities mesh as opposed to establishing an environment of constructive disagreement?
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Jane Divinski - Principal, JAD Consulting (Software Engineering Management Consulting since 1994) www.jadski.com
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