Let Your Employees Grow
Software development is a creative craft. Most of the people involved in software development rightfully consider themselves creative and thinking workers. Designing, implementing, and testing are all tasks which are both technical and creative. They require knowledge, skills, and discipline, but also innovation. If you are happy with how people on your team are doing their job, they must be talented people, and not just people who follow your instructions.
Most creative people feel a need to grow. They have to feel they are facing new challenges and that they potential is being acknowledged and being used. When creative people feel they are standing in one place and doing tasks which are below their real potential, they become frustrated. You can still count on them to do their job, but they will do it without passion.
Providing your employees with the chance to grow requires managerial vision and long-term thinking. The problem lies in the temptation of short-term convenience. Sometimes, managers seems to prefer to see their talented employees stay at the same place, and continue doing the tasks they do so well. They already know the code, they know the internals of the product, they knows were to find subtle bugs. Replacing them with new people will take valuable time. The easiest decision to make is to nail them to their current position. Nothing, of course, can be further than the truth.
The best thing you can do with your talented employee is to let her thrive and meet her potential. This can be done by assigning her in a new position, let her work on a new and innovative project, promoting her, or even let her work on her own ideas. True, it won’t be easy to let one of your assets go. In the short run, your team will have to work harder, taking over her responsibilities. But you have to look at the bigger picture. The organization you work in will benefit twice from this move. First, a talented person will now have the chance to have an impact on some new domain, or on a wider scope. Keeping such talents in one place doing the same thing over and over again is a loss to the organization. At the same time, the organization gains a more satisfied worker. If that person would be forced to keep doing what she thinks to be an unchallenging task, she will not do it as well as she can.
But the most important benefit to the organization when doing such a move is that other people throughout the organization will get the message that if they excel, they will be appreciated for that: the organization will look for new challenging ways to use their skills. This is a great message for any creative person.
What does this have to do with quality? Well, just about everything! Satisfied workers (especially creative ones) work better. They feel ownership on what they do, and want it to be good. This is the essence of quality. Preventing such people from using their potential is not only a waste of resources, but also a sure recipe for poor quality work. It is the manager’s job to identify these people before they are burnt-out and help them grow.
Many of the dilemmas regading software quality involve a conflict between short-term and long-term considerations. Being a good manager is realizing that in most cases following the long-term vision is the best option you have, and the only way to gain a competitive edge. Preferring the short-term considerations over the long-term vision on a regular basis is a mistake which you will find hard to fix as time passes.
