Debugging Teams: Better Productivity through Collaboration

by Brian W. Fitzpatrick

So what it boils down to is this: working alone is inherently riskier than working with others. While you may be afraid of someone stealing your idea or thinking you’re dumb, you should be much more scared of wasting huge swaths of your time toiling away on the wrong thing.

Traditional managers worry about how to get things done, while leaders worry about what things get done…(and trust their team to figure out how to do it).

People Are Like Plants Fitz’s wife is the youngest of six children, and her mother was faced with the difficult task of figuring out how to raise six very different children, each of whom needed different things. Fitz asked his mother-in-law how she managed this (see what we did there?), and she responded that kids are like plants: some are like cactuses and need little water but lots of sunshine, others are like African violets and need diffuse light and moist soil, and still others are like tomatoes and will truly excel if you give them a little fertilizer. If you have six kids and give each one the same amount of water, light, and fertilizer, they’ll all get equal treatment, but the odds are good that none of them will get what they actually need.