Your peer relationships may need some TLC

Or at least mine did. Reflections on corporate trainings from yester-decade.

When I was an AVP at Big Bank my manager nominated me to participate in an internal leadership training program. This thing was immense. It covered all of Operations and Technology which, at Big Bank, included dozens upon dozens of seemingly unrelated functions. They squeezed us all into a couple buses dressed in our business formal best and shipped us off to a sort of corporate compound in New Jersey.

Over the course of the next few days we stumbled through lectures, large group exercises, and networking opportunities (gah) before being sorted into smaller groups where we learned the results of the “leadership personality” tests we had taken before getting on the bus.

Some of the things they had us do were distinctly unhelpful. The networking bits fell into this bucket; the program was so broad that the chances of meeting someone you might actually work with some day were roughly zero.

Some of it was good, though. A few lessons have stuck with me over the years including these two:

1. Peer relationships are way more important than I’d believed prior to that point and I needed to treat them that way.

2. It is extremely difficult to rebuild trust once it has been lost but that is too bad because it is likely to happen at some point and you will need to work through it.

In this post I will dive into those two lessons and then outline the steps we can take at work, as leaders and as teammates, to strengthen peer relationships.

Lesson #1: Peer relationships are really important

I remember sitting at an eight-person round table, among a sea of many other eight-person round tables, as two presenters posed a question which I paraphrase below:

“Which bucket of relationships is most important to your career? Your relationship with your manager, your relationships with your peers, or your relationships with your (future) direct reports?”

I was grouchy from all the forced socializing so I might have made an actual snorting noise. Manager, of course.

“Wrong!” they firmly informed us. They then argued that peer relationships are actually the most important of the three and that this is because:

• You need your peers in order to get stuff done and

• Out of the X years you work during your life, you will spend the largest portion of that time overlapping with your peers (the folks who are at a similar point in their careers to you) vs your manager or future direct reports.

Now I don’t think I actually buy the argument that peer relationships should outweigh the other two buckets. The first point, peers help you GSD, is a no-brainer to me. The second feels off, though. For starters, just because I overlap more with a peer doesn’t mean that the impact they have on me is greater than that of my manager. I guess one could argue that the net effect of my relationships across a fast growing number of peers may outweigh that of the ten or so managers I’ve reported to but that doesn’t sit right either. I feel like my professional existence is very much a product of one manager’s guidance in particular and I am immensely grateful.

I can also feel just how strongly I’ve been shaped by past direct and skip level reports. This is not just a net effect. I can recall several specific individuals from my past teams and orgs who left an enduring mark on me and how I approach various engineering challenges among other things.

And then of course everyone doesn’t proceed along their career paths in lock step with each other. Today’s peer may become tomorrow’s manager. A year from now you may be so fortunate as to watch your former direct report take on their own team. If you work within organizations where advancement is driven by merit vs tenure then you will hopefully see a fair bit of this vertical swirl.

So I’m not sold on the argument that peer relationships are the most important work relationships that you can have. I am, however, convinced that peer relationships are way more important than I originally thought as an AVP sitting there in my wrinkled business pants. My reasons boil down to the original two points from that corporate training:

• GSD (Get Stuff Done). You need your peers in order to do this.

• Length of exposure to each other. You probably will have a fair bit of career overlap with these folks.

Plus another two:

• Friends. We spend a lot of time with our coworkers. Life is just so much better when we genuinely enjoy each other’s company.

• They get it. Or, at least, peers who hold similar roles to yours are in a better position to get it. This became more evident to me as I moved up the leadership chain and my role became more open ended. I had to rely less on my manager to tell me what I should be doing and more on the other leaders around me for coaching as I navigated the growing ambiguity of my role.

Lesson #2: Trust is hard to rebuild once lost. Tough toenails.

Back to the training. After the “peer relationships are your most important relationships” talk we went and did something else. There was probably lunch and more socializing. We then limped back in and sat down to a much larger interactive exercise: a game! Each 8-person table was now a team. I don’t like games¹ so I forget the actual rules. I do remember that each team was paired with one other team. You could then pursue one of two strategies which were something like:

1. Bet below a certain number every single round. If both teams did this collaboratively then you would each get a big prize at the end.

2. Try to out bet the other team. Whoever consistently out bet the other would get a small prize. The loser would get nothing.

There were multiple rounds and the results were the same for all team pairings - every single team with the exception of one (suckers) sought to out bet their opponent. Some took this approach right from the get-go whereas others came to it mid-game but all of the matches ended the same way. Inevitably one team would switch tactics during some round and seek to trick the other into continuing to pursue strategy #1 while they furtively pursued strategy #2. Once this happened of course the other team wised up (fool me twice and all that) and switched to strategy #2 themselves. No pairing succeeded in working with each other to get the full prize.

The lesson, we were told at the end of all this, was that it is very difficult to rebuild trust once it is lost. “So!” they concluded “It’s hard to maintain trust but even harder to rebuild it! So don’t break it!”

This is where the lesson ended which was low-grade infuriating. Trust is going to get broken at some point despite your best efforts. You might not even be the person responsible for that loss of trust. It may very well be broken before you join the company because of that time your new team screwed their team over last year. You will still need to work with these folks.

So trust will be broken. Regardless of whoever broke that trust it is now in your best interest to rebuild it by demonstrating best intent again and again and again. It may never be as strong as it was before but you can still make it less broken.

How can we promote strong peer relationships?

Hopefully you are now convinced that peer relationships are worth investing in. Maybe you already knew this; maybe you spent the past several paragraphs wondering why any of this came as a surprise to me in which case you could have skipped all that.

I am now going to break things down into strategies we can take as leaders vs teammates and it will all revolve around the themes of:

1. Problem solving together

2. Synchronous vs asynchronous collaboration and

3. Trust

Things we can do as leaders

Why did Big Bank choose to emphasize peer relationships so strongly during this training? Sometimes employers choose to emphasize particular values because they are missing from the current culture. Maybe that was the case here. I can’t speak to the culture of the broader bank but my corner of it needed this message just as it needed courage. A siloed, competitive environment results in poor peer relationships just as a fearful environment results in a dearth of productive risk taking. You need to emphasize courage when people are afraid. Likewise, you need to emphasize peer relationships when people don’t trust each other and are only looking out for their own interests.

So how do we set the stage for stronger positive relationships within your team or org? How do you get them to bond with and trust each other?

It’s tempting to think that you can achieve all this with batch-style events like parties and weeknight outings. This was certainly the norm during my time at Big Bank but, as you might have deduced from my framing, it was far from enough to get the job done. I believe that this is because strong relationships between coworkers are primarily built by our day-to-day interactions on the job.

My corner of Big Bank would have been far better off if its leadership had structured itself to favor collaboration over competition, broken down work silos, and given each of us meaningful access to that most precious of resources: each other.

With that in mind, please consider how you might apply the following to your own org or team:

• Scrutinize your processes and organizational structures for zero-sum games. These are all sneaky real life manifestations of the actual game they had us play during training. Eliminate them. I talked about this in my courage post, too, but they include:

  • Siloing. If I am evaluated against the success of my project and that project will fail if I help someone else with their project because I’m the solo engineer assigned then what would you expect me to do? Avoid this scenario at planning time. Make sure you have at least 2 engineers per project on a given team.

  • Assigning teammates to different budgets by business line. If I spend a lot of time helping you with your stuff and our salaries are paid by different business lines then I am technically stealing from my business line. This was the actual setup for my part of Big Bank and my manager had to perform all kinds of budgeting gymnastics to make my time make sense when I helped out a teammate. Don’t play time card Tetris; members of the same team and ideally the same org should roll up to the same budget.

  • Forced stack rankings. A forced distribution of ratings can turn performance calibration committees into bloodbaths. Managers duke it out to retain their engineers either by keeping them out of the bottom two buckets (the layoff zone) or by promoting them so they won’t leave.

• Reward team wins over individual wins (though always recognize both). If an engineer sets down their lower priority project to swarm with the team on a higher priority project, call it out explicitly in their performance review. Better yet: tie this desired behavior directly into your ladder.

• Pairing. You don’t have to be an XP (Extreme Programming) wonk to enjoy the fruits of pair programming. Even if you don’t believe that it makes for better code (though I do), the act of problem solving with each other, live, does wonders for teammates. It also takes a lot of the potential for passive aggressive feedback, gatekeeping and general misunderstanding out of the code review stage and replaces it with earnest collaboration during live development. You don’t have to actually mandate anything - just regularly nudge your folks to pair, especially when that ticket has been sitting for a while. They will naturally begin to do more of this on their own if they find it to be beneficial and enjoyable.

• Peer mentorship and teaching. If you are a manager then gently encourage your folks to come to each other for help before pinging you. If someone flags a blocker during standup, select a teammate for them to pair with instead of unblocking them yourself.

• Intentional use of synchronous collaboration. It can be tempting to move collaboration outside of synchronous settings (eg meetings) and into asynchronous ones (Slack, email and google docs.). On the one hand you may want to optimize for quiet heads-down time; few things kill engineering velocity faster than the non-stop context switching and time suck of frequent meetings. On the other hand, though, a lack of live collaboration can not only slow some types of development down, it also deprives your folks of meaningful access to each other. One nice setup I saw on a past team limited meetings to specific days and times while leaving large contiguous blocks of time empty. Engineers were encouraged during these long blocks to huddle together on problems as they arose. This was an effective way to maximize live problem solving together without filling up everyone’s calendars with pre-scheduled meetings.

Things we can do as teammates

I primarily see the problem of poor peer relationships as a culture thing and I think that, for the most part, leaders are best positioned to address it. There are tactical things we should do as individuals, though, to improve matters and strengthen our peer relationships:

1. If someone asks for help in the team chat and is met with crickets, jump in. Make it visible so that you can model the behavior for others and so that your manager understands how you are spending your time.

2. Say “yes” to small requests from your peers while keeping an eye on your capacity. You can make it a smaller “yes” than what they asked for; a 10 minute brainstorming session is great.

3. Hold informal 1:1’s with the folks from outside your team with whom you frequently collaborate. Use that time for problem solving but also give yourselves space to simply connect and be humans at each other.

4. “Pick up the horn!” One of my favorite managers said this to me after learning that I’d spent multiple days locked in fierce email combat with a coworker. Of course now we have Slack/Teams in addition to email and we have high quality video web conferencing (Zoom etc) instead of my Cisco desk phone but the concept remains the same: favor synchronous communication over asynchronous communication when you feel things getting stuck or drawn out. Same thing goes for code reviews - if you’ve sent up a hefty diff or it’s taking a long time for your reviewers to click the approve/reject button then get them on a call and do the review live.

5. Embrace opportunities to pair, teach and learn. It’s great for all sorts of things, not just your relationships.

6. Help your teammates and peers even (perhaps especially) when you haven’t gotten along in the past. Trust is hard to rebuild but it has to be done; put one foot in front of the other and just keep going.

Recap

There’s a lot that we can do as teammates and as leaders to strengthen peer relationships among ourselves and within our organizations. Create dynamics that promote trust and collaboration over zero-sum thinking. Spend those 10 minutes to help your teammate get unstuck. Walk over to your coworker’s desk or pick up the phone.

Are your peers the most important relationships you can build during your career? I don’t know. Are they a potentially underutilized source of growth, productivity, and companionship? Yes! Is it easy to damage peer relationships by breaking trust? Yes. Should you do your best to rebuild them anyway?

Also yes.

1. I am really fun in person. Invite me to your party.