Part 9: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Creating Social Motivation
While our earlier experiments targeted personal motivation and ability, they also sowed the seeds of social motivation. Remember how aligning on ambitious goals instilled a sense of creative urgency? Or how establishing “silo-busting” as the new norm, combined with daily team goals, created a greater desire to collaborate?
Now, let’s sharpen our focus with experiments explicitly aimed at cultivating social motivation. We’ll delve into engaging managers as champions, leading by example, highlighting desired behaviors, and making the undiscussable discussable to foster meaningful exchanges about the benefits of multi-skilling.
If you’re joining me for the first time, I recommend reading the previous parts for context:
Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Series Outline
Chapter 10
10.5. Creating Social Motivation
Try … Engaging the Managers
The managers play a pivotal role in promoting a multi-skilled paradigm as a new norm within the organization. Securing senior management support is crucial, as these individuals possess the authority to modify the work system and address organizational impediments that may hinder the adoption of the new paradigm.
Initiating organization-wide adoption begins with ensuring senior management is aligned with this initiative.
Leverage the insights shared in earlier sections as a foundation to engage managers in examining the constraints of a single-skilled paradigm, its drawbacks, and the adverse dynamics it creates for teams, the product, and the organization. Additionally, explore how transitioning to a multi-skilled paradigm can mitigate these issues and yield enduring benefits that positively influence both the product and organizational success.
Moreover, managers can serve as a source of inspiration for the organization by sharing their narratives of how embracing a multi-skilled paradigm contributed to their success. For instance, recounting the story of Kevin Systrom and Instagram, as discussed earlier, can exemplify the transformative potential of a multi-skilled approach.
Try … Embodying the Multi-Skilled Mindset Through Your Own Actions
Seize every chance to showcase your pursuit of skill diversification and willingness to venture beyond your primary area of expertise for the collective benefit of the team and organization.
For example, I am currently immersing myself in frontend development along with engineering practices such as TDD (Test-Driven Development), BDD (Behavior-Driven Development), pair programming, Continuous Integration, and hamburger-style story slicing to aid my teams in adopting these practices cohesively, illustrating their efficacy through my own lived experience.
When an opportunity to assist arises, I eagerly step beyond my comfort zone to tackle tasks outside my core specialization. The premise is straightforward yet potent: by actively engaging in these practices, you exemplify to the team that such diversification neither diminishes your proficiency nor devalues your primary role.
A word of caution: avoid overindulging in this approach to the point where it undermines the team’s ability to self-organize. It might be beneficial to ignite the initial spark. However, once other team members begin to emulate and exhibit similar behaviors, it might be prudent to transition to a supportive role, allowing them to become the new conduits of social motivation and encouragement for each other.
Try … Engaging the Initiatives of Other Individuals
Utilizing one-on-one discussions alongside the Star Map exercise, as outlined previously, can aid in identifying individuals within your teams who either embody or recognize the significance of a multi-skilled paradigm for the success of the team and the product.
Such individuals may possess their own success stories to recount or be keen on supporting the gradual transition of the team towards this new paradigm. For instance, they might be willing to kickstart skill-sharing sessions to impart a skill they are proficient in or assume mentorship roles to guide and assist others in their skill development journey.
Moreover, by voluntarily taking on tasks outside their core specialization to aid the team in advancing towards the Sprint Goal, they exemplify to the rest that venturing beyond one’s comfort zone is not only normal and manageable but potentially enjoyable and fulfilling, especially when it culminates in achieving meaningful objectives collectively daily.
Typically, such individuals are or have the potential to become opinion leaders within the team, advocating for, partaking in, and endorsing multi-skilling endeavors.
Try … Highlighting Desired Behaviors Both Spontaneously and During Planned Events
When a team member steps forward to assist a colleague or tackles a task outside their core expertise to propel the team nearer to the Sprint Goal, ensure it’s acknowledged and celebrated. Express appreciation with exclamations such as, “Wow, fantastic! This will significantly advance our progress. Thank you!”
Stimulate an environment where spontaneous volunteering is encouraged when a need arises, whether a challenge is articulated during the Daily Scrum and assistance is sought, or a pivotal task that obstructs progress urgently needs addressing.
Call for pairing and swarming by posing questions like:
“Who can pitch in to work on this item and get it to ‘Done’ today or tomorrow?”
“Who can work with them to get it done sooner?”
“Does this work item present a learning opportunity for someone else?”
Clarify the importance of overcoming the obstacle, propose teaming up with any willing volunteers, and offer the necessary support to ensure success. If appropriate, step forward yourself. Such gestures, whether spontaneous or during scheduled sessions, help address immediate hurdles through cross-skilling and collective problem-solving.
Try … Making the Undiscussable Discussable
Gather real-life instances from your team where both the single-skilled and multi-skilled paradigms played out, focusing on the tangible impacts each had. Highlight scenarios where a single-skilled approach led to unfavorable outcomes like missed Sprint Goals, failed releases, dissatisfied customers, or missed market opportunities. Conversely, identify instances where a multi-skilled approach significantly contributed to your team’s success.
The potency of these stories lies in their authenticity — they are not hypothetical scenarios or external anecdotes but real experiences that your team has navigated through and felt the impact of.
Share these stories actively within the team, making them a focal point of discussions during Retrospectives. Celebrate and promote the adoption of multi-skilled behaviors that proved beneficial while exploring opportunities to transition towards a multi-skilled paradigm in scenarios where the lack of it led to negative dynamics. By bringing these discussions to the forefront, the team can collectively learn from past experiences and adapt behaviors accordingly.
Nurturing a multi-skilled mindset is more than a solo endeavor. It takes social support, collective effort, and leadership alignment. Here are a few action points to carry forward:
- Engage Your Champions: Managers hold significant influence in promoting a new paradigm. Engage them in understanding the limitations of single-skilled specialization and the benefits a multi-skilled approach offers to both teams and the organization.
- Lead by Example: Don’t just preach, practice! Embracing your own journey of skill diversification inspires others to follow suit.
- Celebrate Collaboration: Spontaneous acts of helping, swarming on challenges, and sharing knowledge are the building blocks of a multi-skilled culture. Acknowledge and applaud these behaviors whenever they occur.
- Open Dialogues: Make your team’s experiences — both successes and setbacks — a catalyst for ongoing improvement. Encourage open discussions on the impact of different paradigms — single-skilled and multi-skilled — to drive conscious adaptation.
Social motivation plays a critical role, but it’s just one piece of the Influencer puzzle we’re assembling in this article series. Social motivation goes hand-in-hand with enabling teams to collaborate effectively, learn from each other, and navigate the complexities of knowledge sharing. In the next article, we’ll dive into experiments focused on cultivating social ability — the essential skills to realize the full potential of the team’s collective expertise.
Continue exploring the nuances of multi-skilling in transforming our Scrum practices and elevating our teams to new heights of agility in the next part of the series:
Part 10: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Creating Social Ability
