James King

I was talking to someone about the people I want in my team.

They are team oriented. They are open to conversations that involve both respect and conflict. They are willing to fill the gaps we have rather than referring to a job description.

But “willing to fill gaps” carries with it two dangers:

• We can create a misalignment between authority and accountability
• We can spread people very thinly and lose the focus on our critical goals

To start with authority – people do RACI matrices, role definitions and other things. But a core management principle is that:

• If you are accountable for something then you need the authority to make it happen. You can take actions, set standards and make decisions; and
• If you have the authority to do something then you should be accountable for understanding and owning the consequences.

This simply means that people need to know what decision rights they have. In fact the team really needs a shared understanding of the decision rights that others have.

This sounds like role clarity and it can be. But it can also be delegation – both upwards, peer to peer and downwards.

It also means that people need feedback loops. They need to see the results of their decisions and actions, rather than blindly just seeing the impact on themselves.

So what about spreading people thinly? I do this a lot. However, I know that system thinking impacts the outcome. It is as important as the person’s talent and motivation.

In system thinking people have resilience (or buckets) to fill up with extra work and stress. That means they can absorb quite a bit before stumbling. But when their bucket is full it overflows. No matter their talent and motivation, work and stress flow to others in the team.

Then the results start to show up – less quality, less joy and so forth. Then we can make two bad mistakes:

• Tell the person to push back, but leave the problem unsolved. They will push back and others will absorb the problem or they will feel guilty. If they feel guilty then they will either do the same work with more guilt or do the same work with more resentment of others. According to system thinking this is bad.
• Throw more people at the problem so they need to mentor someone and deliver the work, without us fixing the way the system sends them work and stress.

Instead I guess there are two plays that work

• Take the long view – agree what won’t get done and then start evolving “the system” (skills, people, resources) until we can improve; or
• Take the short-term, continuous improvement view. Make the issue the whole team’s problem and then get them to ask for help or realign to get things done

These plays require people to have respectful and challenging conversations. They involve ongoing discussions around authority and accountability. They also cover shared goals, capacity, and how we are working together.

So I guess we are back at being agile again. Not doing Scrum or AI but making our “system” of work visible and collaborating continuously to cope and make things better tomorrow.