From Hero to Zero: practical guide to destroy your best employees

Slides of my satirical talk about bad management at NDC Porto 2024

1. From Hero to Zero:
practical guide to destroy
your best employees
Antonio Cobo Cuenca
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4. Things that make me grumpy!
●“From Zero to Hero” in talk titles
●Mention to any of the following in talks or job offers:
○Unicorn
○Ninja
○Rock Star
●Cauliflower
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5. WHY?
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6. The Myth of the Hero Employee
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8. Why heroes are bad?
●Usually praised after solving a
critical situation and not to
prevent it to happen
●Binary lens of management: you
are a perfect hero or you are
considered a loss for the
company
●The Hero concept undervalues
the importance of teamwork
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7 techniques to destroy your hero employees
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10. ●Constantly survey them.
●Install spy performance tools.
●“Somebody's watching me” ringtone.
●Stifles creativity and initiative
○DevOps pipelines refactoring PR story
●You can do this to individuals…
●… and to whole teams!
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1. Micromanagement Mayhem

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11. ●Dictate every aspect of tasks.
●Enforce inflexible (or stupid) rules
○Never remove code, only comment it
●Leave no room to innovation.
●Impose your ways of doing things
○Migrate from Azure DevOps pipelines to
Jenkins (old version) or even Bamboo
○Migrate our tech stack from Java to Python
●Reward compliance.
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2. Undermining Autonomy
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3. Communication Catastrophes
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13. ●Use of “Art” when coding
○boolean zero = true;
○Int one = 0;
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●Spread confusion
○ Naming convention joker ca

●Cripple team progress
○Add a 15 files refactoring in a small task

14. ●Change decisions regularly.
○Optimize the pipeline ASAP
○Team decided to increase test coverage
○Accelerate deployment timelines
○Demand a more cautious approach
●Sabotage teamwork
○How about we implement SAFe?
●Switch team focus often
●Switch communication internal tools
○Slack to Teams

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15. ●Ignore achievements.
●Neglect contributions.
●Withhold praise.
●Steal credit
○Team success is due to YOUR
amazing work
○Team failures are due to THEIR
incompetence

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4. Recognition Avoidance
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16. ●Heap on tasks endlessly.
○Say YES always to business
○Add things to the Expedite swimlane
●Ignore team WIP limits.
●Promote multi-tasking.
●Divide estimates by 2...
●...take them as commitments.
●Demand perfection 100%
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5. Overloading with Unrealistic Expectations

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17. ●Promote “healthy” competition
○Performance metrics and benchmark
○Make teams to compete against each other
●Foster gossip & backstabbing.
●Metrics as a destruction tool
○The Myth of continuously improving cycle
time and velocity
●Undermine trust and transparency.
○They can’t compare our team with others if
they can’t access our metrics
●Encourage blame and scapegoating.
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6. Creating a toxic environment
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7. The Final Blow: Burnout Bonanza

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19. ●Burnout is an invention of the unions
●Focus on results
●Maximise productivity at all costs
●Team members are just resources
●Increase workload relentlessly.
○In the past people worked 60 hours per
week and they didn’t ( couldn’t) complain
●Create a stressful atmosphere.
○A bit of a (BIG) challenge is good for the
team to make them grow
●Prioritize short-term gains…
●…over long-term well-being.
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The journey from Hero…

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…to Zero!

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22. 1.Micromanagement Mayhem
2.Undermining Authority
3.Communication Catastrophes
4.Recognition Avoidance
5.Overloading with Unrealistic Expectations
6.Creating a Toxic Environment
7.The Final Blow: Burnout Bonanza

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7 techniques to destroy your hero employees
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Any suggestions?

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