Pacers and how they impact team performance
Discover the importance of team pacers and how they can make or break your team's productivity.
No team is the same. Some teams are more productive than others. Some are happier than others. More frequently than not, those are the same teams.
Things that work in one team may not work in another because it all depends on the people. People are diverse, and they play a huge role in shaping team culture - because they ARE the team culture.
But not all people have the same impact. Sometimes a new team member comes in and suddenly everyone on the team is working harder and smarter. Other times, a new person's productivity might dip after a few weeks. And in some cases, a new hire can actually make the team worse off.
These individuals who can speed up or slow down the team's performance are what I call "Pacers" or "Pacemakers". They have a huge impact on team dynamics, and it's important to identify them to ensure positive impact.
Let’s jump straight to the point and start with a short Q&A:
It starts with running
Meet Eddy, my imaginary friend, who is about to run his first marathon
As pretty much any work, it’s about:
knowing what you’re capable of
preparing a plan
following this plan until job is done.
It looks like Eddy can do all of it, can’t he? Let me ask him again short after the race:
Following the plan can be challenging when the environment doesn’t support you.
It’s hard to maintain your own pace when yet another grandma outruns you with no visible effort.You know that you have to follow your pace, but it's easier said than done.
Luckily, Eddy has one more chance in several weeks — would he learn anything from the recent failure?
That’s quite an improvement — instead of chasing people whose abilities and strategies are unknown, he will run together with his friends. They will play the role of his pacers — people whose job is to be a benchmark for others.
Let’s find out if it was better this time.
Eddy managed to slow down and had enough energy to finish the race, but the pacers weren’t running fast enough for him to show the best performance.
What’s about your best performance?
Why pacers are important.
There are two types of issues that commonly happen around us:
People pick up a pace they cannot maintain because their colleagues appear as more productive. With time, it leads to
overtraining and injuriesstress and burnout.People do less than they’re capable of because that’s the bar their colleagues demonstrate. Eventually, the whole team either slows down to the point of being completely unproductive or stalls at a "good enough" level of performance without realising their true potential.
Do you find yourself in one of those situations or think that someone from your team may experience it?
Good news – you can improve it.
Pacing issues may sound too hard to address, especially when you’re an engineer and who seem to have no power over the situation. But it all becomes manageable when you focus on yourself first.
Your pacers
Who has the most significant impact on your working pace? Does it help you to grow or slows you down?
I'll list several types of people we may unknowingly use as pacers to adjust own behaviour. If you know them, you can control this effect and even change how you affect others.
Category 1: pacers within your team
Your teammates have many opportunities to impact your pace, but the level of this impact varies from person to person.
Most likely, colleagues with whom you interact more frequently will have more influence on your attitude and productivity than others.
If it doesn't surprise you that students living together often achieve similar results, it should also sound normal when something like this happens in the office. People, who have adjacent desks, frequently synchronise schedules, including lunches, coffee-breaks and how much of productive time they have.
People with similar backgrounds is a similar story. Graduated from one university? Hired in the same year? Same age as you? The more traits people have in common, the more likely they would influence each others pace:
Jane has the same years of experience but she already leads big projects – should I be doing the same?
Bob is a junior too, and he's constantly missing deadlines. I guess it's what's expected from juniors.
If you have any grading system at work, colleagues with adjacent ranks can impact you a lot:
What are people in the next grade suppose to do? May I be up for a promotion?
Do you I bring more value than people on a preceding level?
The last two types of teammates who can influence your pace are the most and least productive people. One shows the team what is possible, while another — what is acceptable.
There is one caveat, though — since it's difficult to measure actual productivity, you will have to deal with a perceived one. Make sure you see the entire iceberg, not the tip of it, before your perception impacts the pace.
The last type definitely needs more attention, and I'll come back to it in one of the next articles. For now, let's move on to the next category.
Category 2: pacers outside of your team
Not anybody can find a pacer within the team — what if you're already a most prolific worker and now you need somebody to push you harder? Luckily, the world is larger than your team, so there are several options.
Company-wide stars is the option available for middle-size and large companies:
Joined Google because one famous developer works there? Now you can have a chance to have more insights on how they work and pick their pace if you like to.
Family and friends is probably the most obvious example of pacers you can have outside the team. A hard-working and extremely productive best-friend can be better than all motivational programs in revealing what you re capable of.
There is a popular (but unproven) belief that a person is an average of the five people they spend time with. But even though it sounds too simple to be true, it’s never a bad idea to surround yourself with those who inspire you and make you a better person.
Category 3: imaginary pacers
Who said pacers have to be real? Some of them may exist only in your head, but it doesn't always mean that you're getting crazy.
Memories of yourself from the past can be a genuine imaginary pacer:
Last year I achieved X therefore my target for the next year is 1.5 * X
One caveat though — memories fade in time. We don't have complete control over what we remember, so our perception of how much we did and how hard it was can be very different from reality. In other words, you may remember successes but not sleepless nights and all the nerves spent on achieving that success.
Now I want to return for a second to the most and least productive people because they're able to form long-lived imaginary pacers for the whole team.
Have you met someone who was considered extremely productive because they were like that in the past? Even if they no longer produce the same results, others may still try to keep up with the pace that the original pacer could not maintain.
The last type of pacers I want to mention here is famous people — actors, athletes, entrepreneurs, writers and even prominent open-source contributors. Not all of them show the shortcomings and failures of the public, which makes it easy to build overly idealised and hard to follow role models.
Putting all together.
This is the whole list of most common types of people who may affect your goals, routines and expectations:
In your team
Close colleagues
People with similar backgrounds
Adjacent ranks
The most and least productive people
Outside your team
Company-wide stars
Family and friends
Imaginary pacers
Memories of yourself
Memories high and low performers
Famous people (or rather their public images)
What is next?
Will this information, try to identify your pacers and think about the implications:
Who has the biggest impact on your pace at work?
Is this impact positive or negative for you?
Is it possible for you to keep up with this pace in the long run?
Does it allow you to reach your full potential or you can achieve more?
Give it a little time to check how your behaviour may affect others:
Who may pick you as their pacer based on those categories?
Do those people see a transparent picture of your work or only one side of it?
Would following your pace make them speed up or slow down?
If you're not already doing these things, start now:
Help out your teammates who need a hand to increase the pace of the whole team.
Be conscious of your own behavior and set a good example for others.
Be open about any challenges you're facing, so people see all sides of your work and not only the final result.
Never hesitate to ask for help and encourage others to do the same.