17I resemble that remark – Curly
The latest hot topic at the moment seems to be around the idea of product-oriented delivery through self-managing teams. There is a prevailing thought that rather than being an essential part of a team, management could not only be superfluous but could even have a negative effect on productivity.
Naturally coming from a proud and long standing project management heritage, my first reaction was to decry this nonsense as out-and-out heresy, and nothing more than another shallow surface murmur of the current zeitgeist, desperate for successors to “innovation” and “disruption”.
But that’s too much of a knee jerk reaction – and might make me look foolish if it’s not thought through. I am very conscious of the urge to justify defending management, through finding evidence to back up that claim, but I have to be able to also defend the comments section of this article at the end of the day…
The theory
I wanted to do a little background reading first off to really make sure I understood the point and some of the history here and what I found was that – no surprise – people tend to quote the great and wise to suit their own ends.
Take for example, the “no bozos policy” article : http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/31/why-every-company-needs-a-no-bozo-policy/ – which has a very clear statement that bad managers who are not self aware, have a detrimental impact on a company, it occurred to me that Eric was making a different (though valid) point to Steve Jobs , whose focus was not so much around no bozos (that’s a given) but that the idea of “professional managers” was the problem that needed to be avoided (based on this video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsLpQnIJviE)
We went out and hired professional management – it didn’t work at all. Most of them were bozos. They knew how to manage but they didn’t know how to do anything!” – Steve Jobs
The best managers are, allegedly, like the best politicians – people who don’t want the position, but do it because they have to. As much as my defensive hackles are up, I can’t help but agree with that. My own path came from leading a development team due to a natural ability (and enthusiasm) to plan and distribute workload. It wasn’t a big step into project management and from there into the wider world of Operational Leadership. Have I crossed a bridge too far and become a “professional manager” with no more right to live on God’s clean earth than a disgraced MP?
The natural progression is to ask, well if we don’t have management then how do teams determine workload – and the answer is self-empowered teams.
A nice article on this topic can be found here: http://www.joe.org/joe/2004april/tt1.php
Self directed teams
There have been many studies on the idea of self-led teams leading to greater individual motivation, higher quality solutions, greater innovation and better retention. Certainly I believe that most individuals work better when they set their own goals, and work for the joy of what they are doing rather than to meet a quota or target that’s been handed to them by a manager. Micromanagement is a horrible thing that is used to drive a team to achieve a goal, but I don’t think anyone would ever claim to either enjoy doing or receiving that style of leadership.
A small team of A+ people can run rings around a giant team of B players – Steve Jobs
The goal has to be to motivate people to achieve on a shared target and allow them to solve their own problems to questions they ask themselves. I strongly believe that no manager – no matter how demanding, forceful or cajoling – will ever drive a person harder than they will drive themselves to achieve something they are passionate about. Our senior team members have to therefore inspire through ability, to coach and mentor based on their own capability and both empower and enable more junior team members to stretch beyond their current ability into brave new frontiers that both excite and scare them
I’m talking myself out of a job here.
But….I believe in management
This article was inspired by comments on a previous article that made me think and question what I’m doing. Because if I can’t justify it to myself then I need to find a new path.
Actually its brought me back full circle around the role of a leader, not as a dictator or sole problem-solver, but as a facilitator and guide to empower the team.
Life’s most urgent and persistent question is, what are you doing for others?
There’s a great article here on Martin Luther King and the idea of servant-leadership : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-perry/martin-luther-king-jr-a-t_b_427417.html
I believe that management has two key purposes – to inspire and to serve.
To inspire a team to a vision greater than their current horizon – to convince them to reach for the seemingly unreachable and to go beyond the easy-and-achievable, to the hard, and worth-striving-for.
A great manager also has to recognise that their role is not to enforce, or threaten, or demand – but to serve. To enable the team by removing obstacles. To facilitate the team in achieving more than they thought capable of, by helping them to align, by moulding consensus, by providing what they need to be successful and by smoothing out issues that might take their focus.
The cost of communication
There’s a diagram doing the rounds at the moment around lines of communication – making the point that the more members of a team, the more the communication need increases exponentially and the greater the overhead. That the less people, the easier it is to share a common vision.
Lines of communication – from Stack Overflow
My personal experience is that the ideal size of a team is 6 people – a fairly un-contentious number that fits nicely in the Agile model of 4-8 (depending what flavour of Agile you prefer). This is enough to get a decent amount of output but not so many people that communicating becomes difficult.
However – with the best will in the world, a team of 6 people can only achieve so much and there are plenty of projects which demand a greater amount of productivity than is possible in such a small team.
My preferred answer is to use a “scrum of scrums” model that can be scaled almost indefinitely – where you group teams into 6 people and then form a temporary, regular leadership team of the leads of those teams. They are responsible for the communication down to the rest of their team, and to communicate up to the leadership team.
Facilitating Focus
The important shift here is about focus. Focus on the skills you bring to the table.
I don’t want my design or development team focused on all aspects of a large complicated plan – when the component pieces are complicated enough themselves. They need to be able to focus their attention on the specific question at hand, knowing that if they hit their immediate challenge, its in line with the bigger picture and meeting the dependencies of other teams. Let the designers design, the coders code, the planners plan.
I also don’t want my individual team members to have to spend significant proportions of their day communicating about the bigger picture – I want them thinking, creating, problem solving, not having to explain themselves to multiple stakeholders.
” Specialization is for insects.”
– Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Okay, okay – nice convenient black and white statements sound good but the reality is that talented people are often capable of a myriad of things. There is a happy compromise here that means the days of “I’m a graphic designer” or “I’m a business analyst’ are behind us – and that’s a good thing. However that doesn’t mean we want everyone to do everything. It’s about complementary skillsets where one skill enables another.
So whilst it holds true that unless we allow people to focus on their specialities we run the risk of developing “generalists”, the idea of T-shaped people has a very strong allure. People who understand different skillsets and can seamlessly combine talents in one area, with ability in another – sometimes even being a team of “one”. We all search for these individuals and once we find a great one, we try and hang on to them. However, when they become less “T-shaped” and more “jack of all trades, master of none” we immediately lose interest.
Allowing people to focus on what they do best, without making them pick up non related skills such as planning, communication, stakeholder management, risk/change management etc allows them to build those deep skill capabilities across related areas whilst their “manager” takes care of the hygiene tasks.
A leader is not an administrator who loves to run others, but someone who carries water for his people so that they can get on with their jobs – Robert Townsend
It’s tempting to think that a manager is in charge of the team – that everyone reports to them and that they call the shots. The reality is however that the manager is there to serve – and whilst they have a duty to harness their team towards a shared common goal, ultimately they are first the most humble person on the team, and by understanding that, the most important.
My request therefore is – let’s lose the managers, the dictators, the enforcers, the bozos. Instead let’s celebrate the visionaries, the cheerleaders and the pathfinders – the servants of the project and the people who do the dirty jobs, so our creative geniuses can do what they do best.
Create.