What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. While they try to become more appealing to product and software developers, they still have difficulties understanding what it takes to build an attractive product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and signs that an organization is causing a toxic team culture, impeding its efforts to become agile.
Update 2020-08-10: I clarified and extended some of the previous issues and added new ones.
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20 years ago, many large companies tagged along with Jack Welch’s philosophy of outsourcing non-core business areas—such as software development—to third parties. Today, they find it hard to compete in the war for product and engineering talent with the GAFAs and other agile and technology-focused organizations. Software is finally eating the world.
The inherent lack of a product/engineering culture in those legacy organizations usually results in hiring numerous contractors and freelancers—software engineers, UX designers, Product Owners, agile coaches, Scrum Masters, etc.—to start at least some projects. Which, in return, often leads to some typical anti-patterns as the internal team members find it challenging to accept the external team members fully:
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And then there are other issues beyond the internal vs. external question that might prevent a group of people that happen to be in the same place at the same time with the intent to create an excellent product for the customers from becoming a team:
What is often difficult to understand is that legacy organizations complain that they cannot hire top engineering or product talent when the problems are home-made creating a toxic team culture. On the other side, they do not invest in making the company a great place to work for in the first place. And by “great” I am not referring to sushi chefs on the premise or sparkling water from eight different countries in the fridge.
Creating balanced, diverse teams where rank does not have privileges that are ready and willing to accept responsibility is essential for organizations—without them, striving to build a product/engineering culture that supports their ambition to become agile is futile. The return on investment on any agile transformation will largely depend on achieving this goal as early as possible.
What signs of a toxic team culture have you observed? Please, share with us in the comments.
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