If you're trying to use an agile approach, what do you care about in terms of finishing:
- That the team finish the work, regardless of the personal or team cost?
- That you know who did what, so you can reward them?
- Or that the team completed the work, without undue stress and strain? (also called sustainable pace)
Most of my management clients feel torn. They want a team that completes the work at a relatively sustainable pace. But they still have to write performance reviews, so they need to know what each person did.
When teams collaborate, these managers have no idea how to assess anyone's performance. However, if a hero finishes the work or if the manager can tell who did what—sure, the manager can write a performance review.
And too often, heroics lead to problems later, such as defect escapes. That's because the team didn't learn together. What appears to take less time now—working as heroes or individuals—often creates learning debt later. (Successful product development requires the team learn together—the faster, the better.)
Collaboration decreases learning debt. However, team-based collaboration means we don't know how to credit people for “their” work.
Learning Debt, Collaboration, and Credit
I said this on LinkedIn a couple of months ago:
The less we care about who gets credit, the more likely we are to collaborate.
But performance reviews require that someone understand who did what.
Agile teams always know who did what. Always. Even marginally collaborative teams know who did what. They might not have the words, “Linda facilitated Bob's thinking,” or “Tim supported the team's thinking through options,” because we don't tend to honor facilitative roles enough in organizations.
But the team always knows when the team works well together and when it doesn't. Performance reviews don't help teams learn how to be better as a team.
Worse, performance reviews often don't help anyone improve their performance. We've known this for decades. I wrote about this very problem in Practical Ways to Lead an Innovative Organization. (I added references for why performance reviews don't work.)
People need feedback to know what they're doing well and what still needs improvement. (See Performance Reviews Are Not Useful; Feedback Is for my original blog post and the myth about performance reviews. I updated this in the book.) In agile organizations, peers offer this feedback, not (just) the managers. And people need coherent career ladders, so they can see what their options are now and what could be in the future. (See Why the Popular & Easy Career Ladder Prevents an Agile Culture, Part 1 for a series about agile career ladders.)
If you want a sustainable pace of finishing, forget the credit business. Focus on collaboration, as a team works in flow efficiency. Teach people how to offer each other feedback and coaching.
You'll finish faster and avoid learning debt.
Reward collaboration. You can't tell who did which work, anyway. Not in an agile team.