Leading Effective Engineering Teams

Chapter 5. Common Effectiveness Antipatterns

In the previous chapters, I discussed the importance of enabling effectiveness in engineering teams and detailed how factors such as psychological safety, dependability, and others foster effectiveness. I have also listed the steps managers, leaders, and engineers can take to become effective individually and as a team.

Some of you may have found this guidance intuitive. It’s not as if one sets out to be ineffective! However, despite all your efforts, ineffectiveness will likely creep in when you least expect it to. You can blame the circumstances or Murphy’s law, but there will be complications you couldn’t have planned for, which can impact the project’s outcome. Specific patterns in behavior and decision making enhance effectiveness, while others hinder your team’s ability to achieve its goals. How can you enable the right patterns and protect your effective team from these pitfalls?

In software development, we have design patterns that are considered highly reliable and effective. In contrast, there are also antipatterns that are the exact opposite. Antipatterns are common responses to recurring problems that, although they may seem like solutions, are actually superficial, unproductive, and ineffective.

Rather than wait for the ball to drop, it’s essential to study the typical antipatterns to effectiveness and identify them early when they occur. Having reviewed many pitfalls that tend to occur in software engineering teams, in ...