Teams Blog

The benefits of empowered teamwork are one subset of the benefits of Agile software development. Having served as a project manager in an Agile company, I have seen this firsthand, but a talk by an “Agilista” last night confirmed my belief.

If you know about Agile, you might want to skip down three paragraphs as I explain it to newcomers. Traditional “waterfall” methods start a software project with an attempt to capture everything the end user needs to do and estimate the time and money needed. Once that information is approved, next comes design of the software. Then the software is created (“coded”). Next comes the testing phase, during which mistakes (“bugs”) are fixed until the client accepts the software. Finally comes rollout of the product. Each step flows downward into the next, hence the “waterfall” allusion.

In Agile, an initial set of requirements is collected and prioritized by a “product owner” working with the client. These are broken into small chunks, feature by feature, and captured in a “product backlog.” The product owner, a facilitator, and the other team members take a short period to do some initial design work. Then they decide how many of the features they can finish within a pre-selected time, usually two to four weeks. In perhaps the best known Agile method, the period is a “Scrum” and the facilitator is a “Scrum Master.” Once the team decides what to do, that set cannot be changed short of an emergency. The team then does a mini-waterfall of sorts, finishing the selected set of features to the degree they could be released to the customer (whether or not they are right then). After a demo and lessons-learned review, they repeat the whole process with the next set of features, starting the next business day. They’re done with the whole thing when the customer says they’re done.

At a meeting of the local chapter of the Association of IT Professionals, Robert Galen spoke on “Mature Agile Teams–Sixteen Essential Patterns.” Galen is director of research and development at iContact, an e-mail marketing company, and also has his own Agile consulting practice. Along with making me feel better about two points over which I parted ways with the aforementioned company–for those keeping score, I was right on one and half-right on the other–he provided a number of points about teamwork that work in any environment.

One of his 16 “patterns” was “Truly Collaborative Work.” Examples on his slide included, “Developers willingly engage in Testing.” This is not common in waterfall projects, and I have witnessed how it improves quality and cooperation. Another point was, “Members help each other out.” Science has shown that “organizational citizenship behaviors” improve team performance. “Listening to each other; mutual respect” appeared as well. In poorly performing teams, people listen at each other, listening but not really hearing (hence my Active Listening class).

“Behaving Like a Team” was another of Galen’s patterns. I especially liked his point about “Providing each other congruent feedback.” Agile promotes a practice I suggest for all teams in my teamwork book, daily “stand-up” meetings. These are conducted literally standing up, for a maximum of 15 minutes. Each member reports on only three things: what I did in the prior work day, what I plan on doing the next day, and any blocks I’ve run into. The last item becomes a top-priority action item for the facilitator. Galen said members of effective teams also participate in “Passionate debate.” He added “conflict,” but I later suggested the word “confrontation.” The scientific evidence shows that conflict of any type harms teams, but members must be willing to confront each other to make better decisions. Galen also said members will spend personal time together and succeed or fail “as a team.”

The research literature supports the use of self-managed or self-directed teams in most circumstances. Under his pattern, ”Quality on all fronts,” Galen said Agile teams are “Self-inspecting; self-policing; self-learning.”

He did an excellent job of defining the role of the supervisor of a self-managed team. My oft-repeated summary is, ”Tell the team what direction you need it to go, give it its boundaries, and get out of the way.” Then you fall in behind, making sure the team has the resources it needs and nudging it to stay on course. A previous speaker last night had a great analogy. Josh Anderson, Agile Coach at Teradata, likened this to raising the bumpers when you take kids bowling, so their balls stay out of the gutters. Galen’s related pattern was “Saying NO as a Leader.” He emphasized that managers can’t just walk away from the team, and added in bullet points:

• “Sometimes direction is required.”
• “Courage to tell it like it is.”
• “Behind the scenes, 1:1 Coaching…”

Finally, he emphasized, members’ first loyalty must be to the team. This made me uncomfortable, because plenty of teams have failed by focusing too much on themselves. But Agile’s emphasis on including at each step the customer’s representative (the product owner), and often the customer, is a perfect way to align team cohesion with business goals.

“Survey finds mostly grumps,” the headline said in the Raleigh News & Observer recently. According to a report by The Conference Board (the same organization that reports Consumer Confidence numbers every month), employee satisfaction is at its lowest level “in more than 22 years of studying the issue.” Only 45 percent said they were happy with their jobs, down from 61 percent back in 1987, according to the Board’s press release. The decline has occurred fairly steadily over time, so it’s not just related to the recession.

More than half of American workers don’t like their jobs. That is shocking to me, despite the sad stories I often hear as I network for my business. Money is part of the issue, with incomes falling and health insurance cutting discretionary finances further. But a major component is workers who don’t find their jobs interesting, a figure that dropped from 70 percent in 1987 to 51 percent. In fact, the drop “crosses all four of the key drivers of employee engagement: job design, organizational health, managerial quality, and extrinsic rewards,” the release said. (Money falls under that last category.) It also says the data indicates “the increasing dissatisfaction is not just a ‘survivor syndrome’ artifact of having co-workers and neighbors laid off in the recession,” quoting John Gibbons, program director of employee engagement research.

Among those under 25, only 37% like their jobs. Given that job satisfaction correlates strongly with the likelihood of someone staying in the job, this poses a direct threat to long-term organizational efficiency, dependent as that is on the transfer of corporate and industry knowledge from older to younger workers. If they don’t stick around, you can’t pass it along before older workers retire, as the Board notes.

A quote in the N&O (actually Associated Press) article caught my eye for obvious reasons, from a 26-year-old: “There is no sense of teamwork in most places anymore.” It’s one thing to hear a 56-year-old say “anymore,” but simply pitiful from someone that young. However, he is also right on the mark. Multiple studies report that a sense of teamwork is related positively to job satisfaction.

Along with team development, another answer is empowering employees to make more decisions about how they accomplish their work. Cross-training people to do each others’ jobs is an easy way to raise the “interestingness” of their work. Note that none of these tactics necessarily require an investment of much more than time: time to put teamwork best practices in place, train some managers, have people shadow each other, and maybe change some policies and procedures.

Why bother? In addition to the higher innovation and productivity of satisfied workers mentioned in the press release, I have seen it positively linked to higher retention rates, lower absenteeism, and higher motivation. Even in good times, money is not a Top 4 motivator for most employees (among those above a subsistence level of pay). At a time when companies can’t even offer that, low-cost alternatives like training and empowerment just makes that much more sense.

Note: The report was based on a survey of 5,000 U.S. households. Neither the release nor the article report the data-quality specifics like margin of error, but the Board’s research is well respected. That said, I’d prefer to be reporting on the original report, but I ain’t paying $395 to do a blog post!

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Two nights ago I attended a Raleigh Chamber of Commerce event for our local elected officials. Although I always feel a little out of place at such events, I am a veteran networker and dived right into the fray. The officials and business “names” in the crowd were gracious and approachable, I’m pleased to report.

You never “sell” at these events, so I did my “bartender” routine, as I call it. (My long-time joke is that I’m the guy who walks into a bar and ends up with the bartenders telling me their problems!) I asked questions and learned about the various folks. With business people, I asked what their companies did and kept digging. With officials, I first thanked them for serving. As a former reporter, I have talked to many elected officials from city councilors to U.S. senators. No matter what I thought of a person’s politics, I have found the vast majority genuine in their interest in doing good. That night I asked how they handled the stress, what got them started in office, and other such human questions, in part to see if I could pick up any interesting ideas I could pass along to people in my classes.

One such conversation turned up a pearl. I spent at least 20 minutes talking one-on-one with a state senator. I’d love to be a name-dropper here, but my ex-reporter ethics won’t let me since he didn’t know he was speaking to a blogger. Anyway, he mentioned an incident from his business days. His company was losing a lot of tools through “shrinkage,” internal stealing. Instead of taking a harsh, punitive approach, he went the exact opposite direction. He told the managers to give each employee a $100 budget to buy the tools they needed. The shrinkage stopped.

This is a fantastic example of using employee empowerment, in this case to solve a problem you would never expect it to fix. By making employees responsible for the problem they were causing–and, importantly, combining that with the resources and authority to address them–he solved the problem without lifting (or wagging) a finger.

He seemed genuinely saddened by his inability as a legislator to treat state workers with that same compassion and ingenuity. It was reassuring to remind myself regarding our legislators the same thing I ask team leaders to keep in mind about their employees: they are human beings first and foremost, and most of them want to do good.

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