Tag Archives: skills

The Skills Matrix and Performance Evaluation on Agile Teams

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For a few years now I have been working with managers and executives to help them do Agile-compatible performance evaluations of their staff.  The method that has been most successful is based on a tool that comes from the book Toyota Talent called the “Skills Matrix”.  The basic approach follows these steps:

  1. Baseline the skills within a team for each team member.
  2. Set development goals and action items.
  3. Regularly review performance in relation to the development goals.

Of course, the details matter.  The OpenAgile Center for Learning has published a brief overview of how to use the Skills Matrix and a convenient A0-size pdf that can be used as a template for a team’s Skills Matrix.  I highly recommend using these to get started.  If you are a manager, ask your ScrumMaster or Process Facilitator to arrange and facilitate a team workshop to do the initial population of the Skills Matrix, rather than doing it yourself.  Once that is done you have a baseline and you should take regular digital photos of the team’s Skills Matrix for record-keeping and as a backup in case of disputes.  You should also let the team know that you will be basing performance reviews on how they improve their skills.

The development goals that team members set then should be made such that every team member understands that they have a responsibility to diversify their own skill set and assist other team members in doing this.  As a manager, you should review each team members’ goals for development and provide mentoring support when needed.  At the end of a fixed period of time (quarterly is a reasonable period), you will review each team member’s development relative to the baseline and the goals set.  Of course, normal guidance around performance (or lack thereof) can be given at these regular reviews.

I strongly recommend reading “Drive” by Daniel Pink as an important adjunct to understanding how to do performance reviews for individuals in an Agile environment.  In particular, individual performance reviews should not be tied to bonuses.  If bonuses are used at all, they should be measured and delivered purely at the team level or organization level without measuring individual contribution.

Seven Essential Teamwork Skills

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I’ve been researching teamwork lately.  I just finished reading “The Discipline of Teams” by Katzenbach and Smith which is an HBR summary of their much more substantial book “The Wisdom of Teams”.  I decided that it would be good to be able to describe the essential skills an individual needs to acquire in order to work effectively in a team.  First stop, Google and a search of “list of teamwork skills”.

Strangely, not much turned up on the first page.  The best result is found at “7 Essential Skills for Teamwork” which is a page on a public elementary school web site.  So, here’s my adaptation of their list:

Active Listening

Active listening is a skill that allows a person to completely focus on the communication of another person including both verbal and non-verbal aspects.  Active listening requires the ability to not think of your own responses until after a person has finished speaking.  One simple way of doing this is to echo what a person is saying in your silent internal voice.  When someone says “I think we should build a new gimbal on the widget”, you are saying exactly the same thing in your own mind.  Active listening also requires that you request clarification, often by rephrasing what a person has said and asking if you have understood correctly.

Questioning

Being able to frame and express questions effectively helps us understand and integrate knowledge into our own mental model of the world, or even to modify our mental model.  Asking questions is easy.  Asking good questions is much harder.  We need to use an appropriate set of words and tone of voice so that we do not alienate or offend the recipient of the question.  For example, asking “why did you do that?” will often put people on the defensive since they will assume that you mean you disagree with their actions.  Instead, saying “I do not understand the reason you did that.  Could you please explain it to me?” can be a much more gentle way of getting to the same information.

Logical Argument

When presenting an idea or position, being able to logically support it is important to exploring the truth of it.  This includes being able to share your assumptions or axioms, the data you are basing your argument upon, and the logical sequence of reasoning to reach your conclusion.  Being able to avoid fallacious logical methods is also important.

Respecting

Showing respect includes acknowledging the fundamental human value of the existence of your teammates, and being able to step back from your own understanding of the world to acknowledge the legitimate nature of the perspective that other people have.  This does not mean that you have to let teammates get away with inappropriate behavior.  In fact, respect for your teammates will allow you to support them in behaving in ways that are in alignment with their fundamental nobility as human beings.

Helping

Offering help and actually following through with real assistance are aspects of helping.  When you suspect that a team member is struggling with something, you offer to help both verbally and with your actions.  This can take the form of offering information, offering emotional support, offering to assist with problem-solving, or actually taking action to do an activity together.  When we help someone, we share their burden.

Sharing

Sharing our knowledge, time, skills or physical resources are all aspects of sharing.  Sharing among team members is focused on those things which will help a team reach its goals.  This is similar to helping except that it tends to be more of a transaction than an ongoing activity.  The transaction is that you give a gift and then the other person uses that gift to meet their needs.  Sharing does not require reciprocity.  If you share something with another person, you should not expect that that person will return the gift at any time in the future.

Participating

It’s probably obvious, but in order to effectively be on a team, you need to participate!  Participation itself is mostly obvious: do work with the other team members.  However, there are also some less obvious aspects of it.  You are not participating when the team is having a discussion, you find it boring, so you check your email.  You are not participating when the team makes a decision and you abstain from helping to execute the decision because you disagree.  You are not participating in a work team when you are mentally checked out because of a crisis at home.

All of these skills are critical teamwork skills… but there may be others.  Do you think there are other skills missing from this list that are critical for effective teamwork?

The Importance of Questions

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I’m currently doing some coaching work with Regina, a new project manager working with a small team of web developers at a community development organization in Toronto.  We had our first session last week. Regina was having trouble getting started on a particular project and I shared with her some of the Agile methods of creating a prioritized Cycle Plan, breaking it down into small tasks, etc.

Regina seems to be finding Agile methods helpful in general, but there was a special kind of interaction that we had around removing an obstacle that was particularly interesting for me.  It had to do with an email she received from Peter, a developer working on one of the websites she’s managing. Regina shared a concern that she didn’t know some of the technical terms Peter was using.  So I had her read through the email and form questions around the points she wasn’t clear about – i.e., “what are buttons?” and I wrote them down as she was speaking.

I then suggested that she compose a reply email containing the same set of questions.  Regina’s eyes opened wide and she exclaimed, “Oh yeah – that’s so obvious!”  I went on to mention that another option would be to go and do some research on her own but that there were some valuable advantages in asking Peter directly, particularly in terms of team-building, that may not be as immediately apparent as asking the questions solely for the purpose of having them answered.  Here are a few:

First, it’s a way forRegina to remind Peter that she does not have a technical background and that he should not assume that she is familiar with web-lingo.  Second, it also reminds him that she is a different person from the last manager he was working with and subtly reinforces that it’s important that they get to know each other as two individual human beings and learn to work together effectively.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, it gives Peter an opportunity to help someone else on the team learn something new, and by doing so, contribute to the culture of learning on the team.  Fourth, and perhaps most obviously, it promotes open lines of clear communication on the team.

(Of course, if the team was colocated, which it is not, lack of communication would be much less of an obstacle!)

Asking questions in the interest of learning makes it visible to others that you don’t know everything.  For some people, this presents a dilemma.  What makes it a dilemma is that asking meaningful questions is something that many people aren’t able to do well.  The ability to ask meaningful questions is a learnable skill requiring the capabilities of truthfulness, humility and courage.  Such capabilities – let’s call them moral capabilities – can themselves be developed through conscious, focused effort.

Someone in the position of a newly hired manager, or a veteran manager with a new team, who lacks these capabilities may feel that it is important to present to a team a persona of all-knowingness.  But, of course, this is false and the truth of one’s degree of knowledge and capability, or lack thereof, soon becomes apparent anyway.  Clearly, this person needs to do some honest hard work to develop some humility, but truthfulness and courage are still often major factors.

Or maybe you’re the kind of person (like Regina) who just doesn’t want to bother anyone.  In this case, humility is not necessarily lacking, but truthfulness – and perhaps most of all courage – may need some attention.  Concepts around moral capabilities deserve much more elaboration, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll leave it at that.

To sum it up, if you are open and clear in the way you ask questions, people will tend to appreciate it and will trust you more in the end.  Moreover, it can have a transformative effect on the environment of the team.  When your team members realize that you are not afraid to ask questions and be truthful about your lack of knowledge in a certain area, it will encourage them to be more truthful about their own capabilities.  Not to mention that most people feel good when they are able to help others.  When your team members feel safe to ask for help and free to help each other, it is empowering for everyone.

Asking meaningful questions, therefore, is an essential aspect of learning together, and nothing is a more powerful contributor to the success of an organization than a team that learns as a team.