How to manage a team - the story of one success
Hi Habr!
In the process of reading an article from Milfgard about how to blame people, I had a cognitive dissonance. For some reason, it always seemed to me that the spirit of freedom and creativity reigned in his company, but no, the ghost of fines for being late looked out of the closet again.
Under the cut you will find a small trip to the opposite point of view.
')
Disclaimer: The article does not pretend to be complete or ultimate truth. The author also does not pretend to anything, but simply shares his observations as is.
The company size is 300-400 developers.
We take the old, understandable sludge and make something like Scrum, Agile and self-organizing teams out of it.
We take some super-expensive consultants, for example, Craig Larman , to rub bosses, as well as some ordinary consultants for everyone else.
We hold a 2-day training, break old teams, form new ones and go ahead, towards a dream.
That's about the 7-month result, how they came to him - and I would like to talk.
Have you ever seen self-organizing teams? I have always watched only attempts to build something like this. It always seemed to me that this was some kind of self-indulgence for managers, well, or an impossible dream, like C ++ IDE from Jetbrains.
And so, the person with a whip is replaced by a person who does not have a whip and who himself is a convinced pacifist (thanks to a 2-day training session), and he says:
“Now you don't have a boss.”
- In general, no one has a boss (formally, he is, but he is 1 in 40 people and he has nothing to do with it).
- In the team, everyone is equal, there are no more titles - neither tech-lead'ov, nor other sinyerov.
- Everyone does everything - download secondary skills (design, testing, analytics).
- The team itself decides how to cope with the task. If a team decides to go to the park and kick the noodle there, it can go and there will be nothing for it.
- The team decides for itself what tasks it should work on, it can choose and it can refuse from the proposed task at all.
- The team can break deadlines - in a scientific way, this is called split the story (tell me a good translation).
Let's go to work.
What happens if you give people freedom? Most likely - chaos. In our case, the chaos lasted for about 2-3 months, 1 iteration = 2 weeks. No one knows what and how to do, who is responsible for what, as a result, the usual story is the breakdown of deadlines and many unhappy.
Any prudent person understands that there are no teams in nature that never break deadlines, but for some reason, every manager perceives his team as the one that is not in nature.
In general, a rare leader is able to endure 3 months. There is no instant result and somehow manual control returns.
Indeed, well, they have played and will, it’s necessary to work.
I remember a hackneyed illustration:
Observation 1 - patience is often not enough.
Have you ever had a periodical glance at your watch during a trip to the subway?
Have you ever thought that it is absolutely useless, because the subway will not go faster, he does not care where you are in a hurry.
The team takes time to debug the mechanisms. There is nothing you can do, you have to be patient.
Observation 2 - honesty without reservation.
Imagine an absolutely unlikely situation. Instead of working, you read Habr for half a day, drank coffee for half a day and watched a video. As a result, the work is not done. It is time for the morning standup. Because of the inevitability of punishment, you are most likely to make some kind of nonsense, or even worse - say that everything is almost ready and only a couple of tests are missing.
Or you can say - I was not in the mood and didn’t really do anything, if someone has time to help, help will not hurt.
Observation 3 - do not look back.
In the situation described above, a person must inevitably get a scolding, because he sets a bad example and decomposes the team.
And what if, instead of exemplary punishment, it is indicative NOT to punish?
For example, deadlines have passed and nothing has been done.
And instead of the usual dressing, you are unexpectedly calm and just express yourself in the spirit of the fact that we are a great team and the result will definitely come.
People understand that you know perfectly well that they are profiled, but you believe in them.
And they begin to think - that I can not whip some kind of service, what kind of nonsense.
Better motivation than intrinsic motivation has not yet come up.
Therefore, instead of reflecting on the topic of something that cannot be changed, you just have to move forward.
Observation 4 - people do not know how to communicate.
Surprisingly, in every team there are people who are simply afraid of expressing their thoughts, either they don’t know how to do it, or they don’t know how to listen to others.
A trivial example, but even after many months of work, there are those who write emails (with a dozen CC, because you need to escalate the problem) instead of going up and chatting with a specific person who needs a specific result.
Often this is called “politics”, but in my opinion, this is banal unprofessionalism.
In our mentality - this is generally the cornerstone thing - justice is above any relationship, if I am right, I must prove my point and burn it all.
In my opinion, this is one of the most undervalued skills, for which you should not squeeze money and time for training.
Somewhere in 5-6 months, the team turns into a machine for the production of task. And you don't need to drive a car, it goes by itself, you just put the user-story on one side and take out the product from the other end.
Many team members are “revealed.” For example, the eternal silence is quite sensible people, they were silent, just because what for to say, when no one is listening. Inveterate perfectionists begin to train lagging colleagues and get pleasure from it. Procrastination sufferers are on the path to recovery because they do not fall out of the process.
All go together for lunch / bowling, without a boss and without corporate parties.
I agree that the process is not fast, but you do not have to sign resignations every six months.
After all, we all know what the army’s methods lead to sooner or later, really.
There is a turnover, of course, but it is lower, because the general discontent with a complete mess with control disappears.
All - Laissez-faire, colleagues.
In the process of reading an article from Milfgard about how to blame people, I had a cognitive dissonance. For some reason, it always seemed to me that the spirit of freedom and creativity reigned in his company, but no, the ghost of fines for being late looked out of the closet again.
Under the cut you will find a small trip to the opposite point of view.
')
Disclaimer: The article does not pretend to be complete or ultimate truth. The author also does not pretend to anything, but simply shares his observations as is.
Initial data
The company size is 300-400 developers.
Task
We take the old, understandable sludge and make something like Scrum, Agile and self-organizing teams out of it.
The way
We take some super-expensive consultants, for example, Craig Larman , to rub bosses, as well as some ordinary consultants for everyone else.
We hold a 2-day training, break old teams, form new ones and go ahead, towards a dream.
Results
That's about the 7-month result, how they came to him - and I would like to talk.
Rules or no rules
Have you ever seen self-organizing teams? I have always watched only attempts to build something like this. It always seemed to me that this was some kind of self-indulgence for managers, well, or an impossible dream, like C ++ IDE from Jetbrains.
And so, the person with a whip is replaced by a person who does not have a whip and who himself is a convinced pacifist (thanks to a 2-day training session), and he says:
“Now you don't have a boss.”
- In general, no one has a boss (formally, he is, but he is 1 in 40 people and he has nothing to do with it).
- In the team, everyone is equal, there are no more titles - neither tech-lead'ov, nor other sinyerov.
- Everyone does everything - download secondary skills (design, testing, analytics).
- The team itself decides how to cope with the task. If a team decides to go to the park and kick the noodle there, it can go and there will be nothing for it.
- The team decides for itself what tasks it should work on, it can choose and it can refuse from the proposed task at all.
- The team can break deadlines - in a scientific way, this is called split the story (tell me a good translation).
Let's go to work.
Process
What happens if you give people freedom? Most likely - chaos. In our case, the chaos lasted for about 2-3 months, 1 iteration = 2 weeks. No one knows what and how to do, who is responsible for what, as a result, the usual story is the breakdown of deadlines and many unhappy.
Any prudent person understands that there are no teams in nature that never break deadlines, but for some reason, every manager perceives his team as the one that is not in nature.
In general, a rare leader is able to endure 3 months. There is no instant result and somehow manual control returns.
Indeed, well, they have played and will, it’s necessary to work.
I remember a hackneyed illustration:
Observations
Observation 1 - patience is often not enough.
Have you ever had a periodical glance at your watch during a trip to the subway?
Have you ever thought that it is absolutely useless, because the subway will not go faster, he does not care where you are in a hurry.
The team takes time to debug the mechanisms. There is nothing you can do, you have to be patient.
Observation 2 - honesty without reservation.
Imagine an absolutely unlikely situation. Instead of working, you read Habr for half a day, drank coffee for half a day and watched a video. As a result, the work is not done. It is time for the morning standup. Because of the inevitability of punishment, you are most likely to make some kind of nonsense, or even worse - say that everything is almost ready and only a couple of tests are missing.
Or you can say - I was not in the mood and didn’t really do anything, if someone has time to help, help will not hurt.
Observation 3 - do not look back.
In the situation described above, a person must inevitably get a scolding, because he sets a bad example and decomposes the team.
And what if, instead of exemplary punishment, it is indicative NOT to punish?
For example, deadlines have passed and nothing has been done.
And instead of the usual dressing, you are unexpectedly calm and just express yourself in the spirit of the fact that we are a great team and the result will definitely come.
People understand that you know perfectly well that they are profiled, but you believe in them.
And they begin to think - that I can not whip some kind of service, what kind of nonsense.
Better motivation than intrinsic motivation has not yet come up.
Therefore, instead of reflecting on the topic of something that cannot be changed, you just have to move forward.
Observation 4 - people do not know how to communicate.
Surprisingly, in every team there are people who are simply afraid of expressing their thoughts, either they don’t know how to do it, or they don’t know how to listen to others.
A trivial example, but even after many months of work, there are those who write emails (with a dozen CC, because you need to escalate the problem) instead of going up and chatting with a specific person who needs a specific result.
Often this is called “politics”, but in my opinion, this is banal unprofessionalism.
In our mentality - this is generally the cornerstone thing - justice is above any relationship, if I am right, I must prove my point and burn it all.
In my opinion, this is one of the most undervalued skills, for which you should not squeeze money and time for training.
results
Somewhere in 5-6 months, the team turns into a machine for the production of task. And you don't need to drive a car, it goes by itself, you just put the user-story on one side and take out the product from the other end.
Many team members are “revealed.” For example, the eternal silence is quite sensible people, they were silent, just because what for to say, when no one is listening. Inveterate perfectionists begin to train lagging colleagues and get pleasure from it. Procrastination sufferers are on the path to recovery because they do not fall out of the process.
All go together for lunch / bowling, without a boss and without corporate parties.
I agree that the process is not fast, but you do not have to sign resignations every six months.
After all, we all know what the army’s methods lead to sooner or later, really.
There is a turnover, of course, but it is lower, because the general discontent with a complete mess with control disappears.
All - Laissez-faire, colleagues.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/232499/
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