Chapter 25. Stop doing their work
Chances are you were put into a leadership position because you were good at your previous job. Continuing this behavior as the leader, however, is a dereliction of your current responsibilities. In other words, this means you aren’t focusing on learning and growing in your current position. In addition, you’re taking away opportunities for your team to learn and grow in their positions. Worst of all, you’re actively building a team that has an absence of trust, a lack of accountability, and low commitment to their responsibilities.
I was promoted as lead developer of a team I had been a developer on from day one. I helped build the system from the ground up and had intimate knowledge of its more complicated and critical subsystems. This worked well when my job was to build the system.
I quickly identified what needed to happen. I understood the history of the way the system was built (within reach if not within my head), and deciding direction and impact came without much effort. The team of 4 grew to a team of 30 (over the course of a year or so), and then, shortly after, I was promoted.
Soon enough, things ground to a halt. I found myself wondering why as I spent my days putting out fire after fire, cleaning up after my developers. Retrospective after retrospective, the team would push back by saying things like, “Brian’s never around,” “Brian’s too busy to help me, and it’s taking me longer than I expected to complete this work,” and “Brian’s always in meetings.”
It didn’t take long for the situation to further decay because of my poor reaction to what they were saying; I took it literally. I stayed around more, and I made sure I was visible when I couldn’t be actually present. I told people I trusted what to build, only to have to swoop in and clean up something later. The quality of the product deteriorated quickly, and velocity was virtually glacial. I never helped the team with their real problems with ownership, accountability, and trust. I didn’t even realize what I’d done to that team until six months after leaving for a different team within the same company.
I can reflect now that what they were really saying wasn’t, “Brian’s never around,” or “Brian’s always in meetings.” It was, “Brian doesn’t trust us. I need to make sure I get his sign-off before I continue.”
That one statement sums up three of the common dysfunctions of a team:
- Absence of trust
- Lack of accountability
- Low commitment to the project
This atmosphere developed not because I didn’t trust them or didn’t want them to be successful, but because I took their growth opportunities from them. I failed to learn how to be an effective leader. The irony is I had previously been the catalyst for a healthy velocity of the product, only to turn around and, as team leader, make it grind to a halt. Had I realized then what I know now, things could’ve been better for that team. It still would’ve been difficult to let go of complete control, but every time I slipped I would’ve had something to fall back on that I could try again.
Roy’s analysis
I believe this note depicts a classic case of a team leader who, for one reason or another, keeps their team out of learning mode. Another way to interpret this is that you’ll get bad behaviors if you treat a learning team or a self-organizing team as if they were in survival mode.
Acting as a command-and-control leader when being a coach fits the current situation brings poor results. Being “command and control” with a self-organizing team is disastrous.
BRIAN DISHAW is a leader who embraces failure and uses experiences to empower, teach, and grow others.