Turning sweat into gold: what I reread when I started leading leaders

Why I reread this book now

In the middle of the year, I took on a new role. I already led leaders: I was a leader of coordinators. Now I lead technology managers, who in turn lead coordinators. Between me and the team, there is one more layer.

During this transition, I went back to a book that had already stayed with me: Transformando suor em ouro ("Turning sweat into gold"), by Bernardinho, the Brazilian volleyball coach. I have written about it before, when I talked about culture and ambition, based on the Wheel of Excellence and the will to prepare. This time, I read it with another question in mind: what changes when my influence on the team becomes even more indirect?

Four ideas came out of it that I am taking into my day to day. The quotes below are my translations from the Portuguese.

1. Excellence is made of ordinary days

I strongly believe in a culture of excellence built on discipline. And Bernardinho is, above all, a coach of discipline: practice, repetition and accountability, every day. One line of his sums it up:

"Remember that every day you skip practice, or skip dedicating yourself to practice, is one more day away from achieving your dreams."

On a technology team, practice has no court and no whistle, but it exists. It is the code review done carefully even when the deadline is tight. It is the retrospective that is not skipped because the sprint was calm. It is the post-mortem written after a small incident, not only after the big ones. It is the test someone writes without being asked.

None of these things looks decisive on a single day. That is exactly why they are easy to skip. And every skipped day pulls the team away from the standard it says it wants. Technical debt, at its core, is just that: the sum of the days the team stopped practicing.

With one more layer, I have been learning that discipline cannot depend on me being there. It has to live in the system: in the rituals the managers keep, in the criteria the coordinators hold people to, in what the team does when nobody is watching. My role becomes protecting those habits, not carrying them out.

2. Never thinking it is enough

One of the passages I marked in this reading:

The second part is the one that struck me most. A good leader is not the one with all the answers. It is the one who gets people to question themselves.

The closer you are to the team, the more tempting it is to solve things: point out the problem, suggest the solution. With one more layer, that temptation becomes a risk. If I give the answer, the managers take my answer to the coordinators, who take it to the team, and nobody along the way develops their own questioning.

I have been reflecting a lot on this, and trying to practice it: swapping statements for questions. What would make this result excellent, not just good? What did the team learn from it? What would you change if you started over? It is an exercise I have been doing on purpose.

Healthy restlessness is not permanent dissatisfaction. It is looking at a good delivery, celebrating it, and still asking what could be better next time.

3. Getting the form wrong, never the intention

This one is personal. I make an effort to influence the team through the way I communicate, and the message doesn't always come out the best way. But I always care about the intention. One line in the book gave me direction:

"I believe getting the form wrong is acceptable, as long as the intention is never in doubt."

In the new role, this became even more important. A message of mine goes through the managers, then the coordinators, until it reaches the team. At each layer, the form changes: someone summarizes it, someone adapts it to their context, someone tells it their own way. I have no control over the form that arrives at the end. What I can make sure of is that the intention is clear enough to survive the trip.

It is something I have been reflecting on and starting to practice, still a work in progress:

• Saying the intention before the instruction. First the why, then the what. "I want to reduce incidents because they are wearing the team out" comes before "let's change the deploy process".
• Asking people to tell me what they understood. If what comes back is different from what I meant, the mistake in form was mine, and it can be fixed right there.
• Going back when I get it wrong. If a conversation came out too harsh, going back to it. Owning the mistake in form is what keeps trust in the intention.

The line has an important condition: "as long as the intention is never in doubt". That trust doesn't come from one conversation; it comes from a track record. If people know I want what is best for the team, they tolerate a poorly phrased message. If they don't, even a well-phrased message turns into distrust.

4. The ego of the collective

I strongly believe in the ego of the collective: being a team, where each one would go all in for the other. No individual ego can override the team's.

In the book, Bernardinho shares a story from Taffarel, the goalkeeper, about the penalty shootout that gave Brazil its fourth World Cup. Baggio stepped up for Italy's last kick, and Taffarel, who had already saved one of the two penalties the Italians missed, was hoping he would kick it wide. If he saved one more, he might be remembered as the only hero. With the ball going over the bar, in his words, "the heroism belonged to everyone".

On a technology team, the temptation of the individual hero is strong. It is the person who fixes the incident in the middle of the night, who saves the delivery on the last day, who alone knows how that system works. Sometimes that person is needed. But a culture that depends on heroes is fragile: it concentrates knowledge, wears down whoever carries the weight and teaches everyone else that recognition comes from standing out alone.

I want recognition to go to the team. I want the resolved incident to belong to whoever set up the alert, wrote the runbook and was on call, not only to whoever pressed the last button. I want the code of whoever saved the delivery to be reviewed and documented, so that next time nobody needs to save anything.

This connects with the quote about the good professional above: "individual sacrifices for a collective goal". Day to day, the sacrifice is rarely heroic. It is giving up your favorite solution because a colleague's serves the team better. It is letting the credit go. It is helping someone instead of finishing your own task first.

Where I adapt the court to technology

High performance in sports has cycles with a beginning and an end: the season, the championship, the Olympics. On a product team, there is no final whistle. That is why I read "sacrifice" with care. It is not about overtime or working at the limit. A team living in a permanent sprint has no energy left for day-to-day discipline, which is exactly what the book argues for.

The discipline I want is the sustainable kind: practicing a little every day, not burning out once a quarter.

For Monday

1. Protect one practice. Pick a habit the team has been skipping, like the retrospective, the post-mortem for a small incident or the careful review, and keep it for a month.
2. Intention first. In your next important message, state the intention before the instruction and ask someone to tell you what they understood.
3. Recognize the team. In your next public recognition, name what each part did, not only who showed up at the end.

Closing

Rereading Transformando suor em ouro in a new role reminded me that gold is a consequence. What gets built every day is the sweat: the discipline to practice when nobody is watching, the intention that survives a poorly phrased message and the ego that dissolves into the team.

With one more layer, that became my job: getting these things through the layers until they reach whoever is on the court.

Sources

• Transformando suor em ouro, Bernardinho, Editora Sextante, 2006 (in Portuguese)