6   Invest in Your Team

“Don’t share what you know—keep it to yourself. It’s to your advantage to be the Smart One on the team. As long as you’re smart, you can forget about those other losers.”

Your team has developers with different capabilities, experience, and skills. Each person has different strengths and expertise. That mix of diverse talents and backgrounds makes it an ideal environment for learning.

On a team, it’s not enough if you personally know a lot. If other members of your team are not as knowledgeable, the team isn’t as effective as it could be: a well-educated team is a better team.

While working on projects, you need to use terms and metaphors to clearly communicate your design concepts and intent. If most members of your team are not familiar with these ideas, it will be hard for you to be effective. Also, suppose you’ve taken a course or gone to a symposium. You generally lose what you don’t use. You need to bring what you have learned into your team. Share it with the rest of the team when you get back.

Find areas where you, or someone in your team who is knowledgeable, can help the rest of the team come up to speed (this has the added advantage that you can discuss how topics apply specifically to your applications or projects).

A “brown-bag session” is a great way to share knowledge in a team. Pick a day of the week, for instance Wednesday (generally any day other than Monday and Friday works well). Plan to get together over lunch so you don’t have to worry about running into other meetings or getting special permission. Keep the cost low by having folks bring their own lunch (in a brown bag, of course).

Each week, ask one member of your team to lead the discussion. He or she will present some concepts, demo a tool, or do just about anything that’s of interest to the team. You can pick a book and go through some specific sections, items, or practices from it.^[7] Do whatever works.

Plan to start with the person leading the session that week speaking for fifteen minutes or so. Then you can open the topic for discussion so everyone can present their ideas and discuss how the topic might be relevant to your projects. Discuss benefits, provide examples from your own applications, and plan to get follow-up information.

These brown-bag sessions can be very valuable. It raises the industry awareness of the whole team, and you can personally learn a lot from them as well. Wise managers tend to value team members who raise the value of other members, so presenting can directly help your career, as well.

Raise the bar for you and your team. Use brown-bag sessions to increase everyone’s knowledge and skills and help bring people together. Get the team excited about technologies or techniques that will benefit your project.

What It Feels Like

It feels like everyone is getting smarter. The whole team is aware of new technology and starts pointing out how to apply it or points out pitfalls to watch for.

Keeping Your Balance

• Reading groups that go through a book chapter by chapter are very helpful, but pick good books. Learning XYZ in 7 Days with Patterns and UML is probably not a good book.

• Not all the topics will be winners or even seem appropriate at the moment. Pay attention anyway; it wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.

• Try to keep it in the team. A catered lunch in the auditorium with PowerPoint slides loses some of the intimacy and discussion opportunities.

• Stick to a regular schedule. Constant, small exposure is agile. Infrequent, long, and drawn-out sessions are not.

• If some team members balk at coming to the lunch, bribe them with pizza.

• Stretch beyond purely technical books and topics; pertinent nontechnical topics (project estimation, communication skills, etc.) will help the team as well.

• Brown-bag sessions aren’t design meetings. Overall, you want to focus on discussing general topics that are relevant to your application. Solving specific issues is usually better left to a design meeting.