I love the concept of self-managing teams. Everyone figures out what needs to be done, and does their best to make the greater organization successful. Beautiful. Reminds me of the Shaker Village, the Russian Artel, or the Israeli Kibbutz. All of which are (largely) extinct today.
There are three structural problems that, like termites behind the wallpaper in a French Quarter house, cause these “worker’s paradises” to fail. Our job, as managers of the Innovation Engine, are to sniff ‘em out, expose them, and exterminate them.
Problem #1: “No, you can’t have a BB gun until you’re older.”
Scrum was the solution to product and project managers trying to both predict the future and over-control senior development talent. Take away the control freak, and we can all let our hair down. We can do what we always knew was right.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to keep a team like that together forever. The world is a fast changing place, people leave, new people are hired, some are inexperienced, and some good people become more interested in keeping their teenager off drugs than in completing user stories in your ERP system.
Can’t say I blame them, but this isn’t a welfare agency here, and we’ve got to get work done.
Teams, like individuals, have different levels of motivation and different levels of competence.
Let’s imagine that you’d never been on a sailboat before, but decided to try a cruise in the Caribbean aboard a 63’ Sloop (whatever that is). I’ll bet you’re expecting the captain to train you to do some pretty straightforward tasks, and make sure they’re done correctly.
How’d you feel if the captain shook your hand and walked off onto the pier?
Some years ago, before the One Minute Manager had made him too rich to worry about such things, Ken Blanchard realized that there were different management styles appropriate for different situations. He (and Hersey) created the Situational Leadership model to map effective leadership styles to different situations. The most effective leadership style for a group of people who are Capable + Motivated to complete a task is delegatory: set up the process and let them turn the crank. Sounds like Scrum!
Now not every team gets to work on Avatar. Somebody’s got to fix that potato peeler code running on the mainframe, and that somebody just might be you. If you’ve got a team of people who feel like they only get the projects no one else will take, who don’t have a lot of experience with the code and think it’s pretty badly written, and maybe haven’t been out of college long enough to have the wonderful motivation of monthly mortgage payments, that “hands off” style won’t get a lot of productivity.
This comes under the general heading of “coaching”, and some of us are better at it than others. If you couldn’t figure out why your kids couldn’t learn to ride a bike while you were holding it, if you describe design ideas as “brain dead”, or if you think emailing a link to the manual is a substitute for training, then coaching might not be for you.
And coaching applies to team dynamics, too. Sometimes the reason senior people didn’t go into management is because they have their own social challenges. These senior types might not play well with others, and might need a little counseling, if not metal detectors, to keep the atmosphere professional.
Some philosophers think people are inherently good, and bad behaviour comes from social organization. Some philosophers think people are inherently selfish and bad, and good behaviour comes from compliance with social organization. My wife hasn’t told me what I think yet, but as managers we are responsible for making sure team members have the coaching and motivation to be successful.
