Dynamics of Software Development, Second Edition

Giving Good People Someplace to Go

If you’ve hired smart, you want to benefit from your perspicacity for a good long time to come. You won’t profit much from your discernment of potential if you don’t help individual team members and the team as a whole to realize their gifts. At any given moment, your team will probably be made up of what I call racehorses and overreachers. The same team member might fall into each of these categories at different times and several times. As their manager, your obligation is to figure out what’s going on in your team’s careers and in your team’s career and to reconcile the two.

Racehorses Have to Run

A team member can be so successful, grow so significantly, that he or she obviously needs greater range to ...