Learning to be an Agile manager — Part 4: Continue — Let the team grow itself.

This is Part 4 in a series on lessons I have learnt as a line manager for Agile teams. It takes the form of the “continue-stop-start” approach often used in retrospectives. See Part 1: Release Trains for background.

The art of hiring is similar to playing with a educational toy , the objective is to fit different shapes into similarly shaped slots. In this case the slots represent roles in the organization, but it is a complex adaptive system. The slots constantly change, the shape in your hand also changes. To make it more complex you can only see half the shape in your hand and need to rely on what you feel to complete the picture. You evaluate the shape, the slot and hope the timing is right, if it is the shape in your hand and the slot will influence each other to determine the future shape it represents. If the timing is wrong, the shapes do not closely resemble each other. They stay out of sync and do not influence the future shape, but damage each other in ways that are difficult to repair.

It is not easy, I have not mastered it, not sure it is possible on your own. Initially I introduced technical assessments to obtain a quantitative measure, received help from an executive to help assess “culture fit” and a senior technical guy to further assess skills. I realized a technical assessment’s only value is the prospects comments on the results and how the score makes him feel, still qualitative at best. None of this is an alternative for working with the team. This is not always practical in the context of the organisation and legislative environment.

There had to be an alternative. One of the team members showed me the “Valve — Handbook for New Employees”. At Valve there are no managers (“Flatland”) and hiring is done by the team. I was not ready to fire myself yet, but saw a lot of sense in letting the team help with hiring. In the end it is their teammate we are hiring, they are going to have to spend a large part of the day in his company.

“Your Most Important Role” — Title of the chapter on hiring in the “Valve — Handbook for New Employees”

The hiring process was changed to include two interviews with team members. The first is an informal stand-up type session (15–20 min) with all team members from the skill set (PHP Developer, Oracle Developer, Tester, Scrum Master,etc) that the prospect belongs to plus representatives from the other skills sets. The session is informal typical questions are “IPhone or Android?”; “Chiefs or Pirates?” (Local soccer teams); “Bulls or Lions?” (Local rugby teams) ; “What is the last book you read?” etc. It is stressful for the candidate, the group is between 10–15 people. The value that comes from this interview is qualitative, does the prospect have a sense of human, did he establish rapport with the team and was he authentic?

The second interview is more formal the group is smaller between 5–7 senior team members that were part of the first interview. It normally lasts around 40 minutes with the prospect and 20 minutes to make a decision. The focus is on the prospect’s experience based on his resume and then moves to topics like conflict management; the prospect’s understanding and interpretation of the company’s values. Once the prospect leaves the room a retrospective style discussion is used to debrief and to decide if we will extend an offer to the prospect.

These two interviews follows a technical assessment, still used as a basis for discussion in subsequent interview, an initial interview with the line manager and a technical interview. We gain significant value from the team interviews, information gathered is still primarily qualitative, but richer and the picture of the prospect is a little more detailed. We still need to make assumption about how the prospect would perform, but the assumption are less of a hunch that in the past.

There is a number of additional benefits that we derive from this approach. The one that I place the highest value on is that team members take a greater degree of responsibility to getting the new employee integrated and productive in the team, because they were included in the decision to hire the person.

Give team members a significant role in hiring, they will own it.

This is Part 4 of 6 in a series, See Part 3: Continue — A disruption in routine, SURPRISE! or Learning to be an Agile manager — Part 5: Stop and Start — The difficult things.