Kanban & the Mythical “Team Player”

I’ve been reading Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry’s Personal Kanban.

The book was one of Dominica DeGrandis’ recommended readings in her Kanban for DevOps workshop, which I took last year.

Afterward, I immediately created my own Trello boards, but I recently decided to read the book after I found my board falling into some disarray.

Like kanban, the book focuses on making work visible so it can be better managed. However, there’s a thematic undercurrent permeating the book’s narrative about work/life balance and the ultimate (selling) point of kanban: being compassionate to yourself in the face of the never-ending treadmill of “work” that make up our workplaces and our lives.

I took special note of one of the footnotes; the parent passage:

Most people find that their work is pushed onto them by others. When demands and obligations overload them, they are seldom afforded the opportunity to object. Management expects them to “step up to the plate.” In those instances where workers attempt push back, they can’t justify themselves because they don’t have anything authoritative to point to that shows they’re already overextended. In such situations, they need an arbitrator, a disinterested third party who can say That person is overloaded, stop pushing work onto them. In the absence of one, they’re labelled whiners or worse, that they are not a “team player.”

And the footnote:

The team player concept is not a bad one, but in practice the moniker is often misused to single out individuals who make the rest of the group uncomfortable. The insidious thing about labeling an individual “not a teamplayer” is that it’s simultaneously unprovable and universally condemning; it is meaningless and sinister and fodder for witch trials. When working with others, beware of undefined condemnations and be brave enough to ask what they mean when others issue them.

This bravery is often difficult, which is why —simplistic though it may seem — my go-to recommendation when the issue of overwork, burnout, or wiggle-phrases like “team player”-dom (and lack thereof) comes up with clients or friends working in the operations space is to build a personal kanban board.

It can be as simple as creating a “TODO/Doing/Done” Trello kanban board and sharing it with your manager.

It has numerous benefits: it cuts off the “helicopter manager” pattern in frenetic environments, silences (truly) “data driven” managers who want to know where your time has gone, and can play that disinterested party. And it’s incredibly lightweight: the time you spend moving cards around should eventually take the place of those tedious, often uncomfortable “status report” conversations.

Then, if your manager still refuses to listen to that “disinterested, third party arbitrator,” decrying you “not a team player” and needing to “disagree, but commit,” you have “the data” to help you make the decision about whether or not it’s time to leave that toxic environment.