Are your team members involved or commited?

Let’s start to think about that with a famous analogy, the pig and the chicken:

Observe that the chicken is being pretty smart here: He wants to provide eggs to the restaurant; yet the pig would have to provide ham.

The following situation could happen: The pig then suggests the name of the restaurant to be “Wings and Ribs”; this way, both of them would be committed.

So, now you start to wonder: are my team members committed to the work we do?

There are many factors that can make a person not engage in their work. I’d say they are probably unhappy with something; it could be some problem with their daily work (a boring routine? a job that they didn’t really choose?); could be salary/benefits dissatisfaction; or even relationship problems with colleagues.

Whatever the issue is here, it need to be found and the not engaged person might need help with it. If you are feeling that way, try to find help with your manager or scrum master. If you perceive that you have one or more team members with this problem, you need to help them. Try to use empathy and gentleness; maybe they haven’t even realized that they are not being the employee that the company needs; sometimes a small change can totally change the way an employee behave and can greatly improve their commitment.

The committed person is pretty easy to find: it’s the one that worry with problems the team might have and do something to help; the one that tries to learn more about the job and understand what she’s doing, instead of doing automatic work; the one that helps other team members to get better, helping to improve the overall team productivity. Their contribution is priceless and they should be rewarded for that. Teams in the 4th stage of development — Performing — usually have a lot of committed members. I talk more about the team stages in this post @ my personal blog.