Scenario 5—You expect everyone to be the same

An engineering manager takes on the leadership of an engineering team. The team seems to be really cohesive and working well together, consistently performing at or above expectations. The manager begins to assess their engineers’ strengths and weaknesses. The manager wants to get an idea of the engineers’ individual performance to mentor them and help them become even stronger as a team. The manager notices that a couple of the engineers are making the most code contributions and are really knowledgeable in key areas of the technology the team is working with—they are clearly the top performers. The manager is highly impressed with these top performers and believes their team can get even better if they can mentor the rest of the team to reach the level of these top performers. The manager starts taking action to get the whole team operating more like their top performers, talking to the rest of the team in...