REST

No, not the architecture

One thing everyone can agree on is that we want elite, high-performing teams. We want people to be engaged, taking ownership of problems and being proactive and creative in solving them. We want our teams to continually learn and innovate, develop new skills, and master their practices. We want them to collaborate, lift each other up, and form something greater than the sum of its parts.

Like top athletes, achieving this requires hard work, dedication, and passion.

Like top athletes, it requires rest.

Rest for an individual is vital to repair the body, building back muscles stronger from the micro-tears created when doing intensive exercise.  It’s essential for the mind, to absorb and integrate new experiences and learnings into our consciousness. 

For teams, it allows time to repair the stresses put on the systems and the relationships upon which they are built. These are inevitably strained in the process of creating anything worthwhile. 

This isn’t so much about individuals. We’re all responsible for looking after our own wellbeing. While a good manager can and should look out for signs of individual burnout, and suggest taking some time off or moving onto a different project, ultimately it’s up to ourselves to take the rest we need when we need it.

But teams are different. They are composed of individual people, but they operate and are best thought of as an entity in and of themselves. 

So what does rest look like for a team? It’s not sitting around doing nothing. Not only is this anathema to business interests, but it’s also boring and unengaging for the team, despite what they might think. 

Rest is for repair, and strengthening. In tech teams, this makes it the perfect time to increase the optionality of the software (also known as paying down technical debt), reflecting as a team on what went well and what could be better for next time, and strengthening bonds by celebrating successes together. 

How consciously are you thinking about rest for your teams?