What Not To Do

Great learning often comes from failure, and there are certainly several mistakes we have made or observed in others.

One of our business areas followed up their self-selection event with a management call to move one person from their selected squad. This is something still talked about in the hallways and brought up in the run-up to any scheduled self-selection event. We use this example to demonstrate what can go wrong, if after all the good intentions of a self-selection event people can’t resist the urge to dive in, solve problems on others’ behalf, and move people around by management selection. It was obvious to everyone that this completely undermined the process that we had followed, and there was a combination of sympathy for the people highlighted to be moved and anger toward those doing the moving. We can’t stress enough that self-selection isn’t just a one-off event but a set of principles that should be followed indefinitely.

We said previously that the only thing worse than managerial selection is a fake self-selection where people are led to believe they’re in charge of their own destiny, only to find out that wasn’t the case at all. It’s important to stick to your guns and follow through on the principles on which you promised the event to your participants.

This is also worth taking into account for future hiring, which should directly involve the squad. It would be wrong to ignore the process of self-selection and choosing squads by hiring a new employee and plunking that person into a squad without considering what people want or need.