Team Management Lessons Learned: Adhering to rules

When you are working with a big team, having and (most importantly) following rules becomes crucial. It brings consistency and gives a sense of security for you and your team because you all know what is expected from one another.

Despite all this, from my experience, people WILL try to bend the rules and work around them. There are many reasons for it — it is inconvenient at that particular moment, people don’t understand the purpose/value of the rule, or they are simply testing your boundaries. I’ve had my fair share of adventures on this topic (as I’m sure many other people did), and this article describes some of the situations I had to deal with, as well as some of the things I’ve learned to do to help myself and my teams.

Working agreements

When starting with a freshly formed team, one of the first things I do is setting up a working agreements workshop. The team agrees on the rules for collaboration by themselves, and SM records this. Of course, as an SM, you participate in the discussion by sharing what would be your personal as well as company-wide expectations. But keep in mind, you will leave it up to the team to agree on how to uphold those standards. It is a lot easier to get people to follow the rules this way — a person is more likely to follow something they took part in from the start (inspired by ‘5 dysfunctions of a team’).

Preparation for meetings

One of the challenges I have dealt with personally was making sure that everyone in my team is preparing for meetings properly. People would forget to update their Jira tasks before stand-ups, would not get acquainted with backlog items before refinement sessions, or would only skim through a business requirements document before a kick-off session with the customer. This was making our Scrum ceremonies unproductive, our customers and team members frustrated, and it even led to some miscommunications during the delivery process. Long story short — I needed to find a way to get people to take more responsibility and be more engaged.

I started by explaining the benefits of preparation: the better prepared you are, the more efficient the meeting, the better questions we have, the smoother the implementation. People seemed to understand it, but still, only a minor part of my team members would come to the meeting sufficiently prepared.

I would not back down. I kept insisting that people prepare for meetings. In the cases where it was evident that the majority of people were not ready for the discussion, I would just stop the meeting instead of trying to drag it out with one or two people who are ready. I would reiterate what kind of preparation is required and reschedule it for another time. Depending on the context, sometimes it’s for the next day, sometimes it’s in an hour. Naturally, people are not happy getting even more meetings in their calendar, but I figured that’s just more reason to come prepared sufficiently and push their colleagues to do the same.

Communication and persistence did work in some cases, but not always. Sometimes proper preparation for the session was not possible, not due to lack of intention, but rather lack of information or experience (e.g. working with a high complexity project that was new to the whole team). With one of my teams, we came to the conclusion that preparing for backlog refinement together could be more efficient, so I set up preparation sessions for them. HOWEVER, these sessions would belong to the team only — no SM, PO or BA to lead, keep everyone focused or to drag questions out. This way, even if preparing together, the team is still responsible for what they bring into the refinement session. It worked out well in some cases, worse in others, but definitely a practice I will repeat in the future.

Staying focused during meetings

One of the working agreements I generally have with all of my teams is active engagement in all team activities. As well-intentioned as it is, some people tend to wander off. Some even do it consistently. Next to working on your facilitation skills, meeting planning and preparation for the sessions, I’ve found it useful to ask my team members to facilitate some of the scrum ceremonies instead of me. In some cases, it failed miserably, but there were a few successes as well: some people learned a lesson of how hard it is to try and facilitate a session where people are not engaged, and some people liked facilitating so much they ended up taking over some of the sessions from me for good — and I congratulated that! Agile Principle no11: self-organisation for the win!

Lead by example

This is probably the most important thing when it comes to getting your team to follow rules and agreements. It’s also a phrase that we hear a lot, and still, it is very healthy to remember that every time you:

• Take a glance at your phone or laptop, reply that quick message on Slack during a meeting
• Send a meeting request with no agenda to it
• Get involved in an emotional discussion about how frustrating/indecisive/<anything else> a customer is

You discredit yourself right there. Yes, you are human too, but no, your Slack messages are not more important than those of your team members. You cannot possibly expect your team members to stay focused and engaged during ceremonies, to communicate positively, or look for alternative conflict resolution methods when you just showed them how not to do it. People remember what you do, not what you say. This is a lesson learned through mistakes, and something I keep reminding myself every day.

TL;DR:

Stick to your guns, but change your methods!*
*And lead by example.