Management Myth 15: I Need People to Work Overtime

[tailfins]

This lady is REALLY impressive! She "gets it"!

But don’t tell me to have people work overtime. That’s crazy. I won’t do it.”

Management Work is Different From Technical Work
When managers ask people to work overtime, they are not thinking about what a technical day is like. Especially if you work on an agile team, they are not thinking of what an agile day is like. A manager’s day is fraught with interruption and context switching every ten minutes. Many managers feel as if they need to wait until 5 p.m. to get anything done.

But if you are a technical person who has arranged your day so you have a good two-hour chunk in the morning, and a couple of more two-hour chunks in the afternoon, you have accomplished your work for the day. Your brain is tired and you need to leave. If you have paired or swarmed or worked with a cross-functional team, you are tired. You need to leave, to refresh your brain for the next day.
If you are not lucky enough to have a day like that, you have even less time to concentrate. If you have been context switching all day, from project support to new development, to testing a new feature to understanding a regression, you are exhausted. You need to leave at the end of the day and understand how to organize your day so you accomplish more the next day.

Now, we all know that people don’t primarily work for money. As Dan Pink explained in Drive, as long as you are paid enough money, you work for mastery, autonomy and purpose.

They start doing useful work, and they start collaborating. But, only if you stop interfering.

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