To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist its half empty. And to the engineer, the glass is twice the size it needs to be.
As an engineer, I love that joke. It gets right at the heart of why we as enginerds often have such a hard time communicating with real people.
However, it also reminds me just how demoralizing it can be to work with the pessimist.
Attitudes in software development
To Mr./Ms. Pessimism new ideas and new thinking are “yet another thing I have to learn”, rather than a chance to improve one’s self and challenge one’s own assumptions. If left unchecked, such negative attitudes can result in the team member sticking their head in the sand in hopes they can avoid learning anything at all.
The introduction of new or improved tooling is often met by the pessimist with the same resistance as new ideas and thinking. They “just don’t have time to learn another tool.” So, rather than capitalizing on the potential value that can be realized by reducing friction, automating repetitive/error prone tasks, etc… the tooling is dismissed as being too complex and having too high a learning curve.
The most costly effects of a negative attitude are realized in the pessimist’s reaction to change. For these folks change is all about perceived risk and the failure of the business to decide what they want, rather than being about an opportunity to provide value to the business. Missed opportunity costs, indeed!
Negativity devastates teams
But even with all of those missed opportunities, an individual’s negative outlook has the biggest and most devastating impact on the rest of the team.
Teams feed off of the energy and emotions of the rest of the team. As a result, even a single negative attitude will eventually spill over and impact others members of the team.
And though the attitudes of other team members may not spoil entirely, the negativity has begun to spread – and left alone it will continue to do so, eventually infecting the team as a whole. Negativity is a self-fulfilling prophecy and a team with a negative outlook is condemned to failure.
Team members with a negative attitude are thieves, robbing the team of its potential, its moral, and often its success.
Address negative attitudes early
I am by no means an expert in dealing with team dynamics nor questions of personal mental health, but in my experience its best to address negative attitudes as early as possible. Don’t let things fester and don’t stick your head in the sand hoping they’ll work them selves out.
The team as a whole needs to take ownership of itself. It needs to work as a unit to provide a positive environment that's open and adaptable to change. That encourages and fosters education. And most importantly, the team needs to continually seek to improve itself and the practice of software development.
