Beautiful Teams

Losing a Week at a Time

By Friday, it was clear that Fred was struggling with the performance enhancement. He hadn't made any progress yet. Tim had just finished his feature work, and was ready to work with Fred. I sent my status report to the team and the higher-level status report to Nancy and Big Cheese. I was reviewing everyone's tasks to see whether we could rearrange anything to help Fred. I was pretty sure he needed Dan's help, too, to see other options.

Big Cheese arrived at my office, and said, "I need to talk to you now, Johanna." Big Cheese strode in and stood over my shoulder.

I glanced up at him, and said, "OK, let me just save what I'm doing."

"No. Stop doing that and listen to me."

I turned around, and asked, "What's the problem?" I motioned to my visitor chair. He shook his head.

"I have no problem. You, however, have a big problem. Stop those code reviews. They're slowing down the project." Big Cheese shook his finger in my face.

"But then we won't know where the bugs are. We need the code reviews."

Big Cheese stood yet closer to me. He shouted, "Stop them or I'll fire you." By now his face was red.

I stood up. "You'll fire me for doing the right thing?" Big Cheese wasn't a tall man, but I'm not tall either. I came up to his shoulder. But that was better than sitting down, at gut-height. Big Cheese took one step back.

"In this case, the right thing is to finish the project as fast as possible. Stop those code reviews. I expect to see more progress next week."

Big Cheese left ...