Problem Creep: Team Culture

Previously, I wrote about muscling through when solving the local development on-boarding is a problem.

This is a problem that has crept into the team for local development on-boarding.

It happened slowly:

• When the project was small, there was no problem.
• Everyone on the team is fine, because they have kept up the whole time.
• When someone new joins or a team member has a problem, the expectation is they can keep up.

A problem creeping in slowly also has hard solutions. There is a direct relation. the longer the problem persists, the longer the solution will take to implement.

The hard part is not the solution itself, there are probably great solutions out there, ones where other teams have also faced the same issue and solved it.

The hard part in this scenario is fixing the team culture this problem creep created.

• The team putting up with this much pain.
• Expecting team members with a problem to keep up.
• Results over good team experience.
• Not empowering team to fix it.

I am guilty of all of these both as an individual contributor and as a manager.

Next, I share what to do to solve this problem creep.