From dragon slayer to team player
One of the challenges people have when moving from a traditional way of working to cross-functional / product teams is the de-emphasis on…
One of the challenges people have when moving from a traditional way of working to cross-functional / product teams is the de-emphasis on individuals and the focus on the team as the atomic unit of value.
People are a product of the system they find themselves in, so blaming someone rarely solves anything. All it does is alienate others, stuck inside of the system without a way out of their problems. I was once told that if you want to see an individual or teams' true colors, wait until they are in crisis to see how they behave.
This is true for everyone, me included. A dear colleague and mentor once told me that I was not a nice person to be around, when I was stressed. That has stayed with me ever since. It is something I try to focus on if I find myself getting stressed. Taking stress out on others isn’t good for anyone, and all it does is erode psychological safety with the individuals and teams you work with. Trust can be lost far quicker than it can be gained.
Traditional managers often build teams by selecting individuals based on talent, rather than how well individuals work together. Project managers are going to select the best possible people they can, they are often responsible for delivering a complex piece of work. Most often, the preferred people are the ones observed willing to work late or weekends. Expecting people to go to such lengths as a default expectation can be quite dangerous and even worse, it can set unrealistic expectations on others trying to live a balanced life.
What happens when things go wrong
In the past, when things went wrong, we often resorted to hiring expensive contractors to get things back on track. One of the common causes for things not going well in a project is a poorly aligned set of expectations between stakeholders and the teams doing their work.
Teams had their budgets and were focused on spending the money on time, but very rarely were able to trade off scope. Sponsors and stakeholders often opt for spending more money or bringing more people into the project, to get it over the line. This is often as opposed to hiring talent from day one. It is interesting to see the compromise of stakeholders / sponsors when things go off the trails, rarely do I see a compromise on scope. I also don’t see a focus on de-prioritizing items or addressing impediments that the team are facing.
This can lead to managers adding additional responsibilities to key people to reward them with more responsibility. It isn’t uncommon to see people touring multiple roles like a badge of honour e.g. one person is the delivery lead, scrum master, project manager and business analyst.
We know from science that human beings cannot multi-task so if you are cognitively overloading someone with context switching, you are dooming them to not being able to focus. This inhibits anyone's ability to concentrate and do things well, this only gets worse when people aren’t getting a good night's sleep. Management may be OK with that approach in a command-and-control structure, but if you want teams to be autonomous and self-managing, which isn’t a successful strategy.
Shared stories and narratives
As human beings, we love to tell stories as a way of sharing information and experience. Hollywood celebrates the individual far more often than the team, do you really think Frodo could have made it to Mordor by himself, could Ironman defeat Thanos by himself? Even Spiderman required help recently (no spoilers on who helped him).
I’d like to consider a way of giving people opportunities in a sustainable away that doesn’t simply pile on more work onto their plates, instead allows people to take on new responsibilities whilst handing over existing responsibilities to other people in the team. Think of this as a relay race, rather than spinning many places at once. Sharing learning and practices with the team is a wonderful thing to do, not only as it creates improved resilience within the team so that no single person is a dependency and at risk of the bus factor.
Roaming butterfly, over piling work
To take this one step further, Chris Matts once suggested a way of working in a team that has stuck with me ever since. The expert in the team should not have any work assigned to them, instead they should roam within the team to help others learn how to do the work and then if there is a crisis that same expert is able to help the team by responding directly rather than having to drop the work that they were working on.
This approach really resonates with me as it means the expert doesn’t become the bottleneck of any piece of work and it simultaneously treats the experts in a reverent way that they are there to help and coach / teach others rather than the only ones who can do the work in the team. This is a far more sustainable approach, and it also means that everyone can learn to do the work and have the safety in place to learn it without fear of failure as the expert can be there with the person to help them on their way.
To balance this approach, it is entirely possible that a team has many people with their own expertise, they don't all have to be junior, with a single expert. Team members can all bring something to the table and that means that they can all teach other and share skills.
This is where the idea of staff liquidity from Chris Matts comes into play. It allows a team to collaboratively map the skills and knowledge a team has vs what it needs for the work they need to do. This works because it’s based on the activities the team needs to do, rather than some abstract competency or learning framework. Being able to know if someone is familiar with the topic, can they do the work, can they talk about the work in public and can they teach others is a straightforward way to think about competency and skills.
There’re other models such as Sh-Ha-Ri from Aikido that tends to be used in the agile space, as well as the Dreyfus model which is a more complex way of thinking about skill acquisition and competence.
Update: yet again, Chris Matts points me something called ‘the tragedy of the commons’ — which describes the problem with individual, local optimization over the good of the group.
Summary
Building capability in a team is far more important than a single person becoming an isolated expert that doesn’t help lift the rest of the team with their knowledge. As many organizations move to cross-functional / product teams it is more important than ever to focus on your teams' capabilities. Completing certificates or short courses is interesting for people, but unless those skills are put into practice and experimented with, they will quickly become forgotten. Worse still, the time taken by the individual is a loss if the team never gets the benefit of the investment of time.
I like the idea of having a learning backlog in a team as a way of sharing what people are going to learn and teach each other, this can be done through existing work (the most effective type) or it can be more esoteric and reflection based but either way the individuals in the team should try to share the learnings with the team so it helps retain the knowledge and enables the team to learn from you. This approach works well, especially for attending conferences as well. Give the team a playback of what you learnt, and the value can multiply!
Additional reading
Chris Matts — Introducing Staff Liquidity (1)
Chris Matts — Introducing Staff Liquidity (2)
Chris Matts — Managing your team’s liquidity
Chris Matts — Stress testing skills liquidity
Chris McDermott & Marc Burgauer — Maturity Mapping
Marc Burgauer — Maturity Mapping
Liz Keogh — Capability based planning and lightweight analysis
Emily Webber has a similar approach — Capability Profile Mapping
Wikipedia — Four stages of competence