IT Lesson

After a recent presentation where I talked briefly about self organizing teams, someone came up to me afterward and said (Im paraphrasing) "That team stuff is great and all, but some people are just lazy and need to be told exactly what to do and when." Argh.

But before you judge that person, let me tell you a story. In this true story youll have the opportunity to judge me for having the same thoughts before trying a different approach. This is the story of my self organizing daughter.

My kids go to a great school - the kind of school that fosters engaged teachers who go the extra mile to create engaged students. Throughout the school year the teachers run numerous clubs before school, at lunch, or after school including run club, football club, circus club (complete with unicycles!), reading club, wrestling club, girls club, gymnastics club, etc. My kids love attending these clubs and my oldest (aged 10 during this story) was determined to be in every one of those clubs.

This is great, except there were a few problems. Many of the clubs started before the school day so she had to be ready and out the door pretty early. Since most of the clubs had a strict attendance policy (if you miss two days, you are out of the club), being on time was important. Further, because of our cold winter weather, she received a ride on many of the mornings with one of her friends. If she was late getting out the door, her friend also risked being late and missing out on the clubs.

So, being the responsible parents that we are, we nagged her out the door each the morning. "Time to get out of bed", "Have you brushed your teeth yet?" "Go comb your hair",  "Its time to make your lunch now!" "Hurray up, youre going to be late!" It made for some pretty frustrating mornings for all of us. We treated her exactly as the statement above: "some people are just lazy and need to be told exactly what to do and when." She would do the task we asked her to do and then wait to be told what to do next. Looking at it now, she was disengaged and dis-empowered. I cringe at the memory.

While this was happening, I was reading the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by the late Dr. Stephen R. Covey. I had my "Oh crap" moment when he said this:

"You cannot hold people responsible for results if you supervise their methods. You then become responsible for results and rules replace human judgement, creativity, responsibility...  Effective leaders set up the conditions of empowerment and then... get out of people’s way, clear their path and become a source of help as requested.“

After talking it over with my wife, we approached our daughter and apologized. We then discussed a new plan with her. Since she clearly was capable of getting out the door on time on her own, she would take over that responsibility. We would make ourselves available to be a source of help if requested but otherwise stay out of it. She jumped at the chance to take ownership of her morning routine. On the first day of this new arrangement she was ready fifteen minutes early and there hasnt been a day since then that she wasnt ready on time. Not so lazy after all I guess - just the victim of well intentioned managers.

After getting over my embarrassment, I pondered how this is a great parallel to self organized teams:

1. Status is known daily. We had daily status of her progress - if she was late she would miss her ride or be kicked out of a club. Our agile teams have daily standups, visual boards, frequent deliveries and demos so that everyone understands that status of the project at all times.

2. Agreed upon goals. She understood the goal (get out the door on time so that she can keep going to clubs) and desired to reach it. Self organized teams need to understand the goals of the project, not just the tasks to complete the project.

3. Freedom over methods. She started out being assigned tasks and moved to taking ownership of her own methods. Self organizing teams are given freedom to achieve the project goals and pull their own tasks rather than being assigned tasks.

4. Ask for help. She wasnt abandoned if she ran into trouble (oh no! I cant find the shirt that matches these pants!) - we stepped into help when asked. An effective scrum master, agile project manager, IT director, etc helps the team in a similar manner.

5. Empowerment brings results. This change turned a painful morning routine into a simple one because she was given the trust and responsibility to achieve the goal. When a team is given the trust and empowerment to accomplish the goal using their own methods, great things occur.

(Note :You can ready a similar story about Dr. Covey and his son entitled "Green and Clean")

Recently Ive been pondering collective vs. individual ownership and commitment, the theories behind it, and how to respond to someone who many not have considered why collective ownership and commitment is important. If you are involved on a team that is assigning responsibility to individuals, you could respond in several ways. My own impulse may be to respond either with frustration or to smile, nod and wink to my more agile-aligned team members. However, I have never found these types of responses to be very productive ;). You could also respond by informing the team that the agile community is full of luminaries who tell us that individual responsibility is not compatible with good results over the long term. However, as you can imagine, it also wont be an effective strategy just to tell your team that Johanna, Brian, Bob, Esther, James, Jeff, Mary, (etc) and you dont think this is an effective way to manage the work. Instead, I suggest that you a attempt a face to face discussion on the pros and cons of assigning the work to the team vs. the individual. Here are a few things you might use in your discussion.

Team ownership reduces the risk of having or creating one smart person in the room (i.e. bottleneck) who does all the work. Even though Jim may be the best person to complete the job, if Tim and Jane work on it together with Jim it will take a little longer initially to complete the task, but those gains will be realized over the long term as the whole team becomes better at accomplishing each task and filling each role. While a cross functional team isnt always easily or immediately created, eventually that team can function effectively to complete any task even if one or more team members are missing.

Collective ownership should result in less items that are in progress. Work in progress tasks have zero realized value to the organizations goals. If we commit to and own items as a team, we should work hard to get them done one at a time so that we can realize the value of those items sooner. Rather than 5 people completing 5 tasks individually that are finished together at the end of the month, task 1 is finished and creating value at the end of week 1, task 2 at the end of week 2, etc.

Quality has a better chance of being built in from the beginning when a team owns and takes responsibility of a task together. As the team works together on a backlog item, we will collectively discover our quality blind spots earlier in the process and adjust accordingly. When I work on an item myself and then present it to the team for review after Im finished, there will be more re-work required to incorporate the ideas of my team members in order to mark the item as done. It is critical to get feedback early and often in order to fail fast and improve quality. Teamwork is an effective way to accomplish this.

Finally, collective team ownership promotes... teamwork. Individual accountability and responsibility tend to generate selfish behaviour (Im working on my task that Ill be measured on so I cant help you with yours). Team accountability and responsibility builds a stronger team because if any one task is sub par it reflects on the whole team and not on an individual.

Of course, this doesnt work very well if we dont sit together - which is why we do.