Teams, conflict and self awareness

Lately I and my team mates have been increasingly busy and it finally got to me. During the last two weeks I became more and more bitter, interpreting everything as personal critique, shooting down ideas from my peers and just really been in a downward spiral. I stopped communicating with my team mates and finally got angry with them because I felt they did not support me. When I finally realized that my anger might stem from lack of communication, I had waited so long with taking the conflict that I felt I did not have the time since other matters pressed. Then, yesterday, I finally erupted and confronted them. I blurted out my feeling in a crude and maybe not optimal way but boy did it feel good to get it of my chest. With one day hindsight I can honestly say that I could have handled it better, would like to have had more time since not everyone had time to speak their mind, and should by now have better self awareness then to end up in this kind of situations. But all in all, it has really helped me to move on and be energetic again. It is amazing how much it helps to be open and honest in your communication. And how terrible and devastating it can be to you as a person and your team if you're not!

The more difficult the goal, the greater the achievement - goal-set motivation

First of all, let’s establish our goal. We want to get out more bang for the buck in our development process. Since we believe in an empowered, self organized team which takes responsibility for their actions and work we need method to promote this behaviour. It turns out that using goals to steer and focus is just that method!

In this post we will look at some of the more important aspects of goal-set motivation and why it should appeal to you as a leader.

1. The more difficult the goal, the greater the achievement

This means that situation that the team, or individual for that sake, is commited and posses the ability to achieve the goal, the performance of that team or individual will increase. If not, the performance will instead drop at high goal levels.

2. The more specific the goal, the more precisely performance in regulated

This might sound desirable at first but give it another go. In reality this means that if you focus too much on details you run a very high risk of dampen or kill creativity. This is one reason we preach the usage of negotiable user stories in Scrum instead of function based planning.

3. Goals that are both specific and difficult lead to the highest performance

People do not actually do their best when trying to do their best because, as  a vague goal, it is compatible with many different outcomes, including those lower than one's best. Therefore, goals need to be both specific and difficult to maximize performance. All in accordance with statement one and two above.

4. Commitment to goals is most critical when goals are specific and difficult

Obvious perhaps but I’ll spell it out anyway. Easy and vague goals do not require much dedication and are therefore easy to commit to.

5. (This one is important) High commitment to goals is attained when:

a) the team is convinced that the goal is important

b) the team is convincend that the goal is attainable

6. Participation by subordinates yields higher commitment

For example, participation from the team leads to higher commitment. But the goals might not be set as high as of they where set by their superiors.

7. In general goals stimulate planning and leads to higher quality

Therefore we should strive for using goals in planning and in measurements. And goal setting is in fact most effective when there is feedback showing progress in relation to the goal. The goals help to orient us and affect performance by affecting the direction of action, the effort exerted and the persistence over time.

8. When people strive for goals on complex tasks they are least effective in discovering suitable strategies if:

a) they have no prior domain knowledge or no relevant training (obvious right?)

b) there is high pressure to perform well (a team where failure is not allowed)

c) there is high time pressure to perform well immediately (an already late project)

Here, feedback is very effective in motivating higher performance. But remember, feedback alone is just information. You must relate it to the goals.

9. Finally, high goals might actually lead to less performance satisfaction than easy goals

This has to do with the fact that goals server as standards of self-satisfaction and harder goals demands higher accomplishment in order to attain self-satisfaction than easy goals.

So why should you this leadership technique of self-set goals? Well, because:

• It can help you to provide and communicate an inspiring vision

• Let you act as a role model when aiming for a more self organizing organization

• You can expect outstanding performance if you make it work

• It promotes those who embrace the vision and dismiss those who reject it

• It is a very efficient way of delegating responsibility and ownership

• You express genuine confidence in your employees and peers

• You can actually ask for commitment in public and who knows, you might finally get it as well!

Definitions or the ability to move in the same direction

As a child I had a great friend, we loved to play with Lego, Computers and discuss various subjects such as new gadgets on the market and new scientific discoveries. Sometimes though we had arguments that could last for a couple of hours, usually these arguments were easily resolved. Often the resolution, much to our surprise, was such that we realized we actually had meant the same thing from the beginning but used different words for what we meant. Thus the words we used had different meanings for us but once these meanings were revealed we could see that we actually agreed on the subject.

Many a times I've been involved in discussions about teams, about how they ought to be organized, should there be a team leader that gives assignments to the team members or should the team members them self assign tasks. Where the team should sit, together or spread out, in small separate offices or close together in a landscape?

A minor investigation of the word Team makes a major difference to these questions. If the definition is simply a group of people making similar kinds of work or work related to the same product there is no reason to organize so the team members sits in the same spot and who should do what is often obvious. A team leader that assigns tasks and coordinates the work might be a proper way to master such a team.

If what you want is rather a group of people working together to reach a common goal the answers to the questions above would probably be quite different. It would probably be appropriate to let the team sit together and decide who should do what together.

Simply put you need to get each other's definitions clear before its time to argue about what is the right way or the wrong way to go!

Creative Measurement

Much that we'd might love to envisage our life in a world of unbounded possibility, when it comes to stimulating our creativity and resourcefulness there's really nothing quite like a constraint. Agreed?

You're a hard audience. Let me (you?) demonstrate.

Imagine (go on i dare you) that you've been arrested by the measurement police for subjecting teams to your experimental metric whims. Citing your mindless adherence to a host of management references in your defence the judge takes pity and offers to release you on conditional parole. The condition being that from this time forth, you shall utilise only ONE single measurement to guide you and your team on their quest for continuous improvement.

You duly accept your lifeline and have 24 hours to deliberate. What measurement would you choose?