Agile Teams Hate Your Performance Management Process. Here’s why…
Agile principle #12: At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior on a regular basis. (To read all of the principles behind the Agile Software Manifesto, go to: http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.) The Agile Manifesto and the Principles Behind the Manifesto are what started the whole Agile phenomenon.
This principle describes the concept that the Agile teams manage their own performance on a regular basis and drive productivity up in a very measurable but sustainable way. Every single Agile framework provides a space, a practice, a meeting, a ceremony, a construct, a template – SOMETHING – that facilitates this regularly. The team delivers feedback to each other directly. They decide on what the team needs to accomplish or do better in the coming timebox. And then they hold themselves accountable to get as much done as possible.
And over here in HR, we understand that performance management is super important, too! Certainly, feedback and support keep our employees engaged and satisfied, leading to higher levels of discretionary effort and higher levels of productivity. Yup, for sure! The concept is right on. But the tactical process hasn’t been revisited since we built them in the 90’s. I mean, you may have implemented something recently, but how different is it from the process you built last year or the year before? Maybe now it's quarterly. Still not what they need. And the problem is pretty simple, yet Agile teams and HR are just not speaking the same language. Here’s why Agile teams hate your process:
The process you have built is superfluous to what they are already doing. This means that it is a time-suck rather than a value-add. It’s better to build a process that brings value and visibility to the team and leverages their Agile frameworks.
The basics of the “best-practice” processes were built in the 80s and 90s – a time when our considerations for employee experience were very individualistic in nature. This individualistic lens facilitates the practice of asking managers to evaluate their employees outside the context of the team, which is a huge cultural no-no for Agile teams. Team-based outcomes are EVERYTHING. It’s the whole point of Agile. Collaboration is key, and teams that don’t perform aren’t productive or successful!
Because the concept of performance management is translated at the tactical level into a formula for almost all compensation, we’ve now “hard-wired” the money to follow the "individualistic, superfluous, time-suck" that is performance management. We think we are paying for performance... you know... like we used to B.A. (before Agile). But really, we've compromised the very core of the productive Agile team, and, instead, incentivized them AWAY from what make Agile magical in the first place - team-based outcomes. Talk about mixed messages! Not only are we presenting a roadblock for managing these teams to leaders, but also for higher productivity within our organization.
The good news is that there’s an elegant solution for this, but it means we have to commit ourselves to understanding what Agile teams need to be successful and consider that there is something to it we haven't seen before - something NEW! And it means that the disconnect between Agile teams and HR has to be reconciled as soon as possible so we can work together... ahem... collaboratively. Agile teams are awesome, but they can't do this properly or in alignment with your organizational talent strategy without HR!
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