alt Hacker NewsI feel like there could be a lot of value in understanding the psychology of teams and using it to build an environment where they can thrive.
However, every person I've worked with who was into these workplace-psychology books started thinking of themselves as expert diagnosticians of other people's psychology. Every personality or problem got mapped back to a scenario from a book they read, even when it wasn't a good fit. They started believing they understood other people better than those people understood themselves.
You couldn't talk to them about problems unless you could figure out which book(s) they were using, read them yourself, and then played a game where you explained things to them in a way that would get them to match the stereotyped situations in their books.
So instead of saying that the requirements are changing too haphazardly and too often (which would get you labelled as being too rigid or a complainer or something) you would have to explain that the requirements changing process is harmful to the team's psychological safety or other buzzwords. They've read enough books saying that a manager's job is to provide psychological safety, they see themselves as the hero manager, and therefore they need to fix this problem to provide psychological safety for the team.
I loathed it all so very much. It's refreshing to go back to managers who just talk to other people like people. I'm sure my good managers also read some of these books, but they didn't put any one book on a pedestal or take it all too literally.
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I'd say it's a reflection of an earlier stage of interpersonal maturity to try and put people into categories. More socially attuned people realize the complexity of other people and situations and synthesize all the available information to make a decision that is truly reflective of reality.
This seems to be common in large corporations. Your example (requirements changing haphazardly) is a very common occurrence, it's a class of problem where the inevitable failure can't be isolated to one or two things with certainly.
Failure could be team burnout and attrition, it could be a major bug due to fast tracking validation (or not checking AI output), or a fundamental architectural issue with future repercussions that with a clearer mindset would have been considered .. or myriad other things in combination.
The person calling out the risk knows that it will 100% cause a failure somewhere. Exactly where and how the failure will occur cannot be predicted beforehand and it actually doesn't matter as the end result will be a missed delivery or incident.
Unfortunately the executive decision maker needs a concrete failure in order to implement a concrete solution.
Doesn't that happen with any first-year psychology or med-student, too? You have some basic knowledge of what could happen, which therefore means that it does happen, right now, here. It normally goes away with more experience and exposure, and yeah, some personal growth.
People learn and relearn the core concepts from different paths. A recent trend due to coding agent is that people are learning software engineering is not about syntax and frameworks. It is just the way it is. People build up concepts with things they already understand. The same happens when someone doesn't use a book. It just went implicit and way harder for you to find the magic combo.
Working with someone who thinks Team Topologies is an instruction manual is not fun.
I am very curious: did you figure some of the books they were using?
My most recent manager was exactly like this.
I suspect people who act this way would do so with or without the books. Cargo cult mentality says more about the person than the source material.
It’s good to read others’ perspectives and expand your own. It’s even good when you disagree with the author. But you need to read multiple perspectives and adopt a habit of learning.
co-worker started reading "Extreme Ownership" and it improved his mindset and approach to problems. at the same time became extremely unbearable towards own team. if someone was complaining it was hard to get follow-up on a task from someone external he'd jump in and say "you're not owning it".
the tipping point for me was when he started preaching "Never Split the Difference". he'd gotten so cocky to the point he'd start meetings with "I already know how this is gonna end".
i don't mind these books as long as they come from a place of need, but it seems the main crowd are wannabe master manipulators. also, they can often be distilled to a couple chapters, not sure why they're so long.