Attitudes Forces And Harmony

Attitudes, Forces and Harmony. Just how important to a working and successful team are these three factors?

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The terms are not well defined, but if the basic question is How important is it for team members to "get along" with one another?, the answer is that it is vital. When team members are comfortable working closely together, learning from one another, respectfully criticizing one another's work, and are sharing a common vision, things go a lot better than when the team members are constantly staying away from one another, bickering, shifting blame, and working at cross purposes. Having good team chemistry is generally more valuable than having the "best" individuals working on the project.

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I've noticed that differences in priority or focus is often where harmony is disrupted. In my current job, I am one of three senior software people who tend to dominate the design and code reviews, and we repeatedly skirmish on a variety of issues, such as depth of class hierarchies, naming conventions, etc. After a while I realized that each of the three of us was motivated by a different fundamental principle:

• being "right" -- applying pure concepts consistently across the architecture
• being "consistent" with past practices -- keep doing it the way we've always done it
• doing what the rest of the (software) "industry" is doing

We get along reasonably well, and I think we respect each other, but we still keep getting crossways with each other over these fundamental differences. I don't know what the solution is; I don't know that there can be a solution. I think even well-meaning, intelligent people will always have "honest" differences of opinion. Obviously, each of us has to give ground some of the time to keep the overall harmony in balance, so that leads to PickYourBattles. Perhaps it would help to try to arrange an informal "meeting" sometime to discuss our fundamental differences (preferably over drinks), so that we at least understand where each of us is coming from. I suspect that we'd learn that we aren't as far apart as we thought...