--- title: "Spread your workload" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/spread-your-workload.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/spread-your-workload.html" published: "2011-08-27T10:47:31.187000+00:00" updated: "2011-08-27T10:47:31.187000+00:00" tags: ["Anti Patterns", "Guest Post"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Guest post by John Hill on why team leads who give boring tasks to their reliable people burn them out, and why rotating such work keeps things fair." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Spread your workload > The following is a guest post by [John Hill](http://www.foxhound.com.au/). You can submit your own guest posts here. > > John is a .NET Team Leader / Senior Developer for a small Australian CMS software development company. During my many years of experience as a team lead (albeit only very recently in software development) I have seen other team leads "flog their workhorses". In many team environments, there will be members who are less likely to willingly accept tasks that they don't enjoy - the "complainers" (i.e. they kick up a stink) and those who just get their heads down and complete any task that you give them - the "reliables". I have seen many team leaders, including myself in my early years, naturally give the less fun jobs to the "reliables" as there is less chance of resistance and less chance of conflict with the person they're assigning the task to. In the very short term, this strategy may work in your favour, however there are some repercussions: 1\. The team as a whole may begin to pass work off to the "reliables". 2\. The "reliables" will eventually burn out. 3\. The "reliables" will become frustrated and you will more than likely lose their respect. 4\. Internal conflict will arise as the "reliables" will separate themselves from the "complainers". The solution involves sharing the load equally. If you gave a "boring" task to Member A today, give the "boring" task to Member B tomorrow - regardless of whether they complain. This will build up a culture of every team member being equal. ## Read next - [12 Behavior Anti Patterns You Will Face As a Software Team Leader](https://www.5whys.com/articles/12-behavior-anti-patterns-you-will-face-as-a-software-team-l.html): Twelve team member behavior anti-patterns and three outside disruptions a software team leader faces in survival mode, with how to respond to each one. - [The Five Dysfunctions of a Team](https://www.5whys.com/articles/the-five-dysfunctions-of-a-team.html): A summary of Lencioni's five dysfunctions of a team, from absence of trust and fear of conflict to inattention to results, a must-read for team leaders. - [A Realistic HackerRank Developer Interview Question List](https://www.5whys.com/articles/a-realistic-hackerrank-developer-interview-question-list.html): A parody HackerRank-style quiz with realistic questions for tech leads on cross training, code quality, aggressive developers, priorities and creativity. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/