Are Leaders Keeping People in Their Lanes? - Mike Cohn

ARE LEADERS KEEPINGPEOPLE IN THEIR LANES? YOU CAN'T DEMAND TEAMWORK WHILE REWARDING INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIOR. And perhaps a small visual callout: STAFFED AS INDIVIDUALS. MEASURED AS INDIVIDUALS. REWARDED AS INDIVIDUALS. EXPECTED TO ACT LIKE A TEAM. 🤔 That last sequence is the hook I'd especially want on the artwork. For the episode itself, I’d make sure we explicitly credit Mike Cohn for the source idea rather than making it appear to be an original AgileDad concept. The AgileDad commentary can then build upon it and ask what leaders should actually change. How to connect with AgileDad: - [website] ⁠https://www.agiledad.com/⁠ https://www.agiledad.com/ - [instagram] ⁠https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/⁠ https://www.instagram.com/agile_coach/ - [facebook] ⁠https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/⁠ https://www.facebook.com/RealAgileDad/ - [Linkedin] ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/leehenson/

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I recently received an email from my dear friend Mike Combe. And I thought it would be fun to highlight what he had to say here and to kind of talk about it and see what we come up with. So he starts out, he says, leaders often wonder why their scrum teams still act like groups of individuals. I thought this was a good concept to start out with because I'm sensing the same thing. I'm seeing the same thing happening and the answer is sometimes uncomfortable. The organization may be making real teamwork difficult, making it hard. A scrum team may be told to own the sprint goal, collaborate across specialties and deliver a valuable increment together.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  But the same team may also be staffed part-time, measured individually, interrupted constantly, and pull back into functional silos whenever priorities of the organization shift. When that happens, people adapt, they protect their own tasks. They focus on what their manager will notice and they avoid helping too much outside of their specialty because they're already overcommitted. They attend the scrum events, but inside the sprint, they still behave like individuals. Teams work like individuals when the system around them rewards individual behavior. Here's a few places you can look. Are specialists split across too many teams?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Are people rewarded for individual contributions and output more than team delivery and outcome? Does urgent work interrupt the sprint without a visible trade-off? Do functional reporting lines pull people away from team ownership? Do leaders mostly ask who owns this instead of what is the team trying to finish next? None of these are signs necessarily of bad leadership. They're common organizational habits. But each one can make it harder for a scrum team to become more of a real team that works together. A useful test for leaders is to ask this question. Are we asking teams to behave as teams while staffing, measuring, interrupting, and rewarding them as individuals?

• 2:26Speaker 00

  If you are, then you need to make some pivots or adjustments. And if you're not, you need to ask yourself, what are we rewarding? How are we rewarding it? And doesn't make sense in the grand scheme of things. What I can tell you is, I've been doing this for a long time. And I've seen many teams, especially inside of large enterprise organizations, Mike, that struggle with this. This is a common problem. Usually in smaller startup-type organizations, you'll see individuals who take on way too many roles, but it's only because there's just sheer not enough people there to do the work. But in organizations where you have enough people to do the work and you have enough to spread it around, are you trying to align the people to the work?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Are you trying to align the work in such a way that it's easy to consume and then letting the people swarm to it? That's the big question. And in my experience, what I can tell you is the more you organize the work and the less you organize the people and make that work easy for people to tackle and grab hold of, that's when you're going to have the best chance for success. That's when you're going to be able to rock and roll and get things done. Mike, as always, your emails always fascinate me and I appreciate it. I'm glad that you let me chime in on these. This is just another powerful email. Mike is just an incredible agile coach and trainer and I'm grateful to have him as one of my friends. If you have a topic you want us to discuss, learn more at agiledad.com. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, we encourage you to stay healthy, stay well, and stay agile, my friends. Until next time, do take care. Thanks again, Mike. We'll see ya.