Identity and Narrative - Managing Change

Feb 052012

People hate change, and the reason they hate change is that they really hate change, and that change is hated because they really hate change…….

I’d love to know who said this

All teams are subjected to continuous environmental change, but it tends to be gradual and hard to perceive at a week by week level. I want to talk about the sharp, often unexpected step changes and go into some strategies to guide a team through the worst.

Before diving in, I want to introduce a model for characterising teams. There are two attributes that I consider critical in determining a team’s ability to function.

  • Identity – Who the team perceive themselves to be, what they value.
  • Narrative – Why the team exists, what value they bring.

I’m unaware of anyone else talking specifically in these terms but similar thinking appears in Daniel Pink’s ideas of Autonomy, Mastery (both mapping to Identity) and Purpose (narrative) as well as echoes in the higher levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Ordinarily, definition of identity and narrative is straight forward. The team will arrive at their own identity over time, while the narrative, for the most part, comes from the commercial arm of the company. In times of change there are no such guarantees. I’ll look at each in turn.

Identity

As an individual, our identity is in part context specific and a function of those around us. The same is true for teams. This means that when the environment changes quickly, it can be difficult for a team to define itself. Definition means identifying the skills and attributes that set it apart and most importantly what it values when compared to those around it.

A manager can help speed this process. They have a birds eye view, they know how their team have defined themselves in the past and have more opportunities to interact with the broader business. The manager ought to be able to spot and highlight specific points that will go and form part of the team’s new, long term identity.

Additionally during upheaval it is for the manager to contextualise the actions and focus of other teams/departments. It’s all too easy to enter into a spiral where ‘everyone apart from us is an idiot’. A team needs to understand how they are different, but they also need to collaborate and work effectively with those around them.

Narrative

Narrative is interesting in that it should be easy to identify. The business is willing to invest in the team for some purpose and that purpose ought to be the team’s narrative.

During times of upheaval this is not a given, and it could take months for a clear narrative to emerge, as the dust settles and the business redetermines the best way for the team to add value.

But waiting months for the new vision is not an option. Put bluntly, if the business cannot provide a compelling narrative quickly then the team manager must arrive at one. Once again it is time to make use of the manager’s elevated view of the organisation to sift through the confusion and draw out something tangible that resonates.

Conclusion

All teams need a sense of identity and a sense of narrative in order to be productive. During times of significant change both of these characteristics come into question. It is up to the team’s manager to act as the catalyst, as the team aims to arrive at new definitions.

Too Much Trust

Nov 182011
Trust trust trust trust trust trust trust trust trust trust
Excerpt from the management book I wish someone would write

 

A central theme in agile software development is that of trust. The agile (small a) movement speaks of openness, collaboration and collective responsibility – none of which are possible without trust. As a manager my team cannot be effective if they do not trust each other nor can I bring about anything but the most superficial change if they don’t trust me.

I’m not the only one who feels this way, turns out I’m in good company 1 2 3

So I like trust and consider it to be a ‘good thing’ but the point of this post is not to talk about how great it would be if there was more trust in the world. In fact I want to talk about situations where increasing trust can actually be destructive.

The total level of trust is undoubtedly important, but equally important is the distribution of that trust. The greater the differential between the relationship containing the most trust and that containing the least the less chance that the overall group can act as effective team.

A good high level example might be an engineering org and a sales org. It doesn’t matter how much internal org trust exists – if org to org trust is low the company will not perform as well. In fact the lack of inter org trust will felt all the more keenly in contrast to the strong internal trust that exists.

Applying this idea to a single engineering team, if a team has high trust for one another and a new member joins then it will take time for that new member to earn the group’s trust and be accepted as part of the team. This healthy and only natural. However if the team is split down the middle with two groups of high internal trust who do not trust one another then strengthening internal group trust will only entrench the distrust of the other group. In this case increasing trust can actually be harmful.

What I’m saying is that the effectiveness of a group to act as a team can be characterised by the weakest trust links in the group. If the differential between relationships is high then increasing trust in already strong relationships can actually hinder rather than help the team.

From a practical perspective, the manager’s job is always to create an environment where trust can grow, but it is important to focus on the low trust relationships since they are the ones that characterise the effectiveness of the team.

'We only hire the best' - I don't believe you

May 072011

Ask anyone about hiring developers and the advice is always the same ‘only hire the best’. The principle reasons being that

On the face the face of it this seems like great advice, who wouldn’t want to hire the best? It turns out pretty much everybody.

For instance, how long are you willing to wait to fill the position? What if you are really really stretched? What if you’re so stretched that you worry for existing staff? What if hiring a specific individual will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff? What if not making the hire is difference between keeping a key client or losing them? At some point every company has to draw a line and elect to hire ‘the best we’ve seen so far’.

The difference between the great companies and the rest is how to deal with this problem. Great organisations place recruitment at the centre of what they do. If hiring is genuinely everyone’s number one priority then hiring the best becomes more achievable. For starters you might even have half a chance of getting ‘the best’ into your interview room in the first place.

Of the rhetorical questions posed above, in all cases the impact can minimised (though not eradicated) so long as management understands and anticipates the challenges in recruitment. For example “What if hiring them will mean huge disparities in pay between equally productive staff?” A company that intends to hire the best understands the value of keeping the best. So compensation of existing staff, especially longer serving staff relying on annual raises to ensure market parity, must be at an appropriate level. Doing so can be hugely expensive when multiplied over all employees and this cost comes directly from the bottom line. Companies that put recruitment at the core are willing to make the investment. Yishan Wong’s writing on this subject is brilliant.

If hiring really is everyone’s number one priority then there is a trade off to make, something has been deprioritised or sacrificed to make room. As a result hiring is much more than a partitionable activity, it is a statement of corporate identity. Proclamations like “we only hire the best” are meaningless without an understanding of the trade offs and sacrifices made.

People are not our most valuable resource - a response

Apr 252011
Pawel Brodzinski recently wrote a post entitled ‘People are not our most valuable resource’ the point being that people aren’t resources at all , they’re people and should be treated as such.

 

“Every time I hear this cliché about people being most valuable resource I wonder: how the heck can you say people are most valuable when you treat them as resource? As commodity. As something which can be replaced with another identical um… resource. If you say that, you basically deny that people in your organization are important.”

I’m in agreement with Pawel on this point, but I’d go further. Not only is a statement like ‘People are our most valuable resource’ degrading and counter productive, even if you restate it as ‘Nothing is more important than our people’ it’s still incorrect. The real value had nothing to do with people and everything to do with teams.

The key thing that a team provides is a means to align the goals of its members. These goals need not be for the greater good of humanity, in fact they’re generally much more mundane. It really doesn’t matter who wins the world cup* or whether project omega will ship by next Tuesday, all that matters is that the team succeeds in its common goal. A group all pulling in the same direction is orders of magnitude more effective than that same group working as individuals – a business cannot be successful without effective teams.

The trouble is the word ‘team’ is massively over used, it’s a buzzword that has become so ubiquitous we don’t even notice it. The tendency to assemble a group of disparate people and label them as a ‘team’ devalues the concept. One area where this is especially true is that of ‘The Management Team’, generally comprised of middle management peers from various disciplines this group often have very little in common in terms of shared goals and identity.

And here lies the problem, if management is unused to working in a team themselves, then the value of a team is less visible. Furthermore, since it is generally individuals, not the team as a whole, who complete the component tasks the team effect is not obvious from afar.

I don’t think you’ll find an organisation that is anti team, simply that it’s hard prioritise the tasks necessary to encourage team formation when the value of teams is poorly understood. It’s easy to measure the cost of co-location but much harder to measure the benefit to the co-located team, hence the true value of the team is passed over.

Not only are ‘people are not our most valuable resource’, people aren’t our most valuable anything just on their own, it’s all about teams.

[In this post I’ve purposely avoided the subject of how to form a team. It turns out that it’s quite tricky, I’d recommend Peopleware as a good place to start.]

* Except if it’s England of course.

 

 

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