Self Management

Most Teams that regularly run a Sprint Retrospective use the dreaded quadrant, What worked well, What Didn’t work Well, Ideas and Actions (and variants of this quadrants). I am sure your team has used this format many times. I coach Scrum Masters and their team to always prepare for Sprint Retrospective, and part of planning is observing the team all through the Sprint and experiment with different formats for running the Sprint Retrospective.

1. You assign tasks to subordinates and chase up for updates as soon as you feel they should have been done.
2. Regardless of what your subordinates are currently doing, you believe they should be working on something else.
3. You have just assigned task to a subordinate and immediately you follow up with instructions on how they should be doing it.
4. You are so bothered about how they spend their time; and you just need to ensure that they have enough work for 40 hours a week, that’s what their contracts says anyways.
5. You feel that your subordinate should be able to multitask as that’s inherent in humans.
6. Your subordinate shared a better idea but you don’t trust that they are smart enough; so you insist it must be done your way.
7. You subordinates are part of a product team but you want to keep them in a siloed functional team where they report to you.
8. You really need a daily status report - What they are current working on and what they did the previous day.
9. You believe that you need to help your subordinate prioritise their work as they must be struggling.
10. You need to make a decision, even when your subordinate could have made these decisions; at the end of the day you are the BOSS.

Does any of these resonates with you? Managers have a crucial role to play in organisations but managers can become too helpful that they get in the way of effective work. Oftentimes, the ways of working is an attempt to optimise for efficiency which ultimately affects the effectiveness of the team. The behaviours listed above might be appropriate in the complicate domain such as Manufacturing, where managers have a desire to maximise the utilization of “machines”. In the complex domain such as product development, these sorts of behaviours tend to have adverse effects on people and are counter-productive. People are a product of their environment and Managers micro-manage for a myriad of reasons, include pressure of deliver, lack of trust, immature teams among others.

Within a Scrum Team, there are no sub-teams or hierarchies.

An autonomous and self-managing team thrives when hierarchies take a backseat, allowing Scrum accountabilities to drive the ways of working. While organizational hierarchies persist, especially during the formation of Scrum Teams, it’s crucial to discuss privileges and their impact on a team’s ability to self-manage.

Privilege is when you think that something’s not a problem because it’s not a problem for you personally…

Hierarchical Privilege: This explicit form of privilege arises when a Scrum Team comprises employees with varying levels of seniority. Senior employees wield influence, sometimes making unilateral decisions that affect the entire team. For instance, a line manager, also a developer within the Scrum Team, might cancel a Sprint retrospective without consulting other team members.

Increasingly, I encounter developers who don’t seem to enjoy using the Scrum Framework to deliver software, and this is a cause for concern because I have fond memories from my days as a developer working on a Scrum Team. I relished the collaborative atmosphere within the team, where everyone supported each other in development, testing, deployment, and held a shared sense of accountability.

However, nowadays, I hear developers express their discontent with Scrum for various reasons, including: