Transformation: Attitude over Aptitude

When you’re involved in any type of Business Transformation, the success or failure of that transformation may lie with the company’s culture. However, there’s more to culture change than the environment everyone works in as there’s a bit of culture within each of us that struggles and resists against change; it’s likely our fight or flight reflex.

Years ago I met Gary Swart, former CEO of ODesk, and asked him how he chose people to join the company. He said he looked for three things in order: Personality, Motivation, and Skills. He said skills are last because you can teach skills. The point is not to abandon those who are of the right mindset and are motivated. Believe in the people you’re working with and it’s much more likely they’ll pull through.

In my view, the team is central to any transformation success once the executive management team has agreed to change. To embolden a team to seize control of the product or service and their customers is the aim. Success is more likely to happen once the team and customers are working together to solve customer problems. A great team solves customer problems to meet business goals.

When hiring, the first thing most people look at are skills which can mean future change of the work force will be just that much harder. While skills are important, personality and motivation are more important. The ability for someone to change is more strongly connected to personality and motivation than the ability to say, write code. Let’s look at a situation where personality and motivation come to the forefront.

Have you ever sat in with a ‘team’ and heard someone say, “it’s not my job” or “it’s so-n-so’s job” or “I’m here to work” or “I wasn’t hired to do that” or “This is the way forward”? Or perhaps you’ve seen a situation where the team has accepted a particular way of working but then a person does their own thing their way? If you haven’t then you might be in the presence of a high-performance team. For the rest of us, this behavior is an anti-pattern to a successful self-organizing, cross-functional, and high performing team. Attitude is arguably more important than aptitude in any team.

I believe there are two different people who say these things:

1.    Person A says this because they’re apprehensive about doing something they’re unfamiliar with but there’s a reluctant willingness to try. They are not sure how to proceed but a glimmer of opportunity exists in their eyes.

2.    Person B says this because they’re stead-fast determined to do what they want to do or do what they perceive as their role to do full stop. They are closed to new and different ideas. They hear the new ideas and say, “but”. They are happy if nothing really changes for them but are quite happy to see others change as long as it doesn’t impact themselves.

Let’s deal with Person A; Person B should be relocated out of the team and given training or a job were this behavior is an asset.

Fear of the unknown, fear of failure, and fear of change are pretty much the same thing (a $1300/hr. psychiatrist might disagree). Helping someone become a better team mate is certainly within the scope of an team’s obligations and duties but it may take time and an abundance of patience. If you’re in an agile environment, having the team solve their internal issues is a great step in building trust and empowerment.

Prerequisite: If there’s a manager of the team, ensure this person is practicing servant leadership and not C&C. This may take several weeks to months to get the desired manager behavior. This step is a prerequisite before a team will feel responsibility for self-management of team members.

How to start the process of building a better team from within:

·    Recognize and understand the specific self-organizing, cross-functional, high-performing goals the team wants to achieve. Person A must understand and agree to these goals.

·    Recognize and understand the specific goals the individual wants to achieve. Fully understand how individual and team goals compliment or compete with each other.

·    Determine specific measures that can be used to determine progress toward a goal, either personal or team.

·    Setup work tasks that allow team members to work with Person A in a pairing environment toward achieving team goals.

·    Have the Team Coach help the team understand the benefits of being a self-organizing, cross-functional, high-performing team. Connect this to business and customer value.

·    The Coach is continuously helping the team to improve and learn from previous actions and work results; blame is not an option.

·    Allocate some time in every retrospective to discuss further both individual & team growth.

The measures for achieving individual & team goals are usually simple. For example, to help someone become familiar with a specific product or outcome so they can contribute, the team and Person A should complete a skills matrix on all areas the team is responsible for. For Person A, the goal may be to achieve a knowledge score of ‘3’ on a scale of 1 – 5 in a specific area. While the measurements are subjective, by having the team determine what great looks like and using the same measurement scales within the team, a meaningful measure will result.

Team skills matrix can help identify areas for improvement.

I once worked with a team who were very much thinking roles and role based responsibilities. The team was having a problem getting new development work delivered. It was found that the 8 developers were feeding all their great work to one person for testing. All their work flowed to one person who did the acceptance & system testing. Here was a bottleneck requiring people to move outside their areas comfort. When I first raised the issue with the team, one developer said, “hire more testers.” The problem was resolved with the COO and General Manager of Product both saying testing was the “job of the team”. The unspoken truth was you act as a team to get stuff done or you’re not likely to be better. The second point is there needs to be a strong, very strong, buy-in from management for the team to be agile in their behavior and work practices.

Another measure a team might consider using is:

“Number of hours in iteration spent helping team members grow and be better”

·    This reflects the total hours per iteration where the team spends time learning new skills, honing existing skills, teaching other team members new skills (T-Skills), interviewing and discussing customer/user problems with the customer/user. Measure in hours of an aspect of a self-organizing team: caring and improving the team.

Summary

It’s the team’s collective responsibility to help individual team members channel the fear of new things into excitement about new things. It’s also in the team’s self-interest to see themselves as responsible for the team’s collective behavior. If the team is unable to enact change then it’s almost a certainty the person is removed from the team and management takes over the disposition of the individual. In my experience this has happened only twice and each time the team and team coach (scrum master) spent more than a month trying to enact change without result. However, overwhelmingly, the team is able to work within itself to improve individual & team behavior in a most positive direction.

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