At some point each agile engagement begs the question of performance management. By this I mean how goals/objectives are leveraged to manage team members’ performance. “What’s that got to do with agile?” you might ask.
Plenty. People act according to their organization’s mission and directives. You know, those yearly Goals and Objectives, with the company’s mission followed by departments objectives and measurements. And of course the awkward annual performance review based on, let’s say:
50% Company and 50% Individual contribution
This annual review, If not done carefully, can lead to lead to a dilemma in an agile transformation. Some examples:
- Missing Team Component – Most obvious, note there’s a Company and an Individual piece to the contribution mix. But where’s the Team contribution?
- Irrelevant Objectives – A team’s given goals/objectives have likely changed since a year ago — more than once actually. So do they still apply? Do teams try to restate their actual performance in terms of the original objectives?
- Hidden Agenda – a given department may have its own incentives — stated or not. Imagine a division manager who’s been given the charter of making his group “more efficient.” Taken the wrong way, this could lead to a department cutting back on all capital investment (e.g. CI/CD or agile tooling)
- Conflicting Goals – a given department’s goals may differ from that of the teams. At a minimum this means team members are distracted; worse they’re not aligned. Worst case: they’re disincentivized to truly gel as a team.
- Busy Work – teams are told they’re self-empowered, meanwhile their boss still wants them to fill out their “TPS reports” or perform other busy work that adds questionable value
- Hero Tendency – When critical milestones occur — especially highly visible ones – organizational culture tends to reward individual heroism. Hence the guy who works all weekend to pull of a release gets recognized by name. Or it could even be a group of individuals. The point is, they are individually recognized, and thus distinguished from their teams (who very likely worked hard as well). This could work against team identity and discourage high-performing teams.
- Alpha Teams – Similar to the above, I’ve worked several places where a critical initiative causes management to herald “The A Team”. So existing teams are disassembled to form this new high-powered team, and they’re given carte-blanche and rallied via a “take no prisoners” speech about their crucial cause. While this sounds agile, it’s really disheartening to the teams that were just disrupted, and the elitism and limelight given to the alpha team leaves the folks behind wondering if they still matter.
How to solve this recognition dilemma? Do we reward individuals or teams? Actually I don’t believe a conflict needs to exist. It’s not a zero-sum game. Individuals want to excel and further their career aspirations. Simply add “teamwork” to this list and you have the ingredients of a solution. In other words, reward Team and Individual performance.
How could this work? For starters, create explicit objectives relating to learning other domains/technologies, which helps build a cross-functional team. Likewise reward sharing knowledge with other team members. And how about rewarding team performance (value delivered, quality improvement). This could be measured over any timebox – sprint, PI, quarter — you name it.
So maybe now the mix is:
%30 Company, %40 Team, %30 Individual contribution
Of course, this assumes management support. But I believe having team goals/objectives explicitly added to the mix starts creating the environment that will encourage management to move in this direction.