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by llamajams
1111 days ago
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I'm not sure there are any solutions other than customized and active management. Have lead two teams over the last 3 years. I'm not a manager, a mere scrum lead, that entails more of a frontline people/technical leadership position in my org as opposed to process evangelist. Both teams Ive had the exact same approach with at least in the beginning; people over process, autonomy over oversight, explicit expectation of no more that 80% commitment, flex time etc etc a healthy approach as far as I was concerned. The first was brilliant sucess to the point that the team was naturally agile, scrum was a joke of a projects, and I actually started cancelling dayil stand-ups because they were a pointless meeting. Over half the team turned into overachievers, we actually had to start forcing people to take time off to guard against burnout.And not PTO mind you, unaccounted flex time as a courtesy for good performance. The second went completely off the rails. Near total underperformace, maybe on average 20% utility, people trying to game the system and cheat the team, esp with flex time and PTO. Why I have no clue because we never changed our policies, "I don't want to work today" has been a valid excuse our org. The larger org is so cooperative, that you could check out in the middle of release if you wanted to, no questions asked and people would cover for you, because there has always been an underlying trust that you do you best when you can and you would do the same for your mates when the time came. This was so widely abused that I have to take 2 sets attendance, one publicly and one on the side (the latter is where I count how many times grandma died), I'm having to chase people for deliverables, stand-ups are daily and an interrogation session when I have to publicly shame people for trying to cheat their teammates. One guy actually posted his second job on his linkedin(he was axed). And now I have to wave the big hammer of looming layoffs around. Overall a pretty miserable situation. Finally after many draconian measures there is a glimmer of acceptable performance. |
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I think this is the real issue here. People are not replaceable parts and it's very hard to come up with generalizeable solutions.
Maybe one thing we could do as an industry is switch mindsets from predictive models (i.e. "if we just implement XYZ methodology, the team will do better") to reactive models (i.e. "something is going wrong, we should try to understand it and change something"). This is probably just a roundabout way of describing the customized and active management that you mentioned, but I also think that sometimes these problems can be structural.
For example, sometimes a team member leaving can have detrimental effects because they weren't just a programmer, they were also the social glue holding the team together. Conversely, sometimes adding (or replacing) someone can bring about a situation where it feels like there are too many cooks in the kitchen, even if the overall team size hasn't changed much (or at all).
Maybe one area to look at with respect to people gaming the system is around people's personal values and how they track with the org's. These can be hard to gauge and people will intentionally misrepresent them because they want that job and the money that comes with it, so they are prepared to say what you want to hear. Also in larger organizations, sometimes the values statements are very dilute and not really saying anything. For example, saying "success" is a value is pretty useless because everyone wants to succeed. That's not a value, that's just effectively a no-op generic filler statement.