#172 - Individual Productivity is Probably The Wrong Thing To Be Managing
Plus: Coaching the team member towards deciding; unlocking team performance; Decision transparency for stakeholders; Paying attention to the next larger context; Working in your best environment.
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Every now and then I get asked a question from a manager about measuring the productivity of individual team members, and I reply that as a rule, we mostly shouldn’t.
There are kinds of teams where that can make some sort of sense, but those aren’t the teams we’re normally asked to lead. We’re experts, we’re normally managing teams of experts, and those experts are generally working together to solve problems.
Defining, much less measuring, productivity in those contexts is really challenging. Which is fine — we’re good at doing challenging things! — but I’d also argue it’s not especially valuable.
Effectiveness » Productivity
There’s a reason why I basically never talk about personal productivity here in this newsletter. Time-savings tips, tools to get through your email faster… There’s lots of perfectly fine practices out there about batching activities to minimize context-switching, choosing a good to-do app, etc, and it’s all fine I suppose. I’m not against any of it, and do some of it myself.
But it doesn’t really move any needles on your personal impact, nor would your team members doing those things significantly change your team’s results.
Everyone being focussed on the right things to be doing in the first place, prioritizing the highest-impact work and neglecting things that matter less, is far more important than churning out output at 95% efficiency rather than 80%. Every hour spent doing something that doesn’t really matter, or duplicating work because people didn’t know someone else had done it, or fixing up low-quality work because the requirements weren’t clear.. is an hour completely wasted, regardless of how “efficiently” it was done.
Notice how all those misallocations of effort above come down to communications or collaboration failures, which brings up another important point:
Teams Produce, Individuals Contribute
In the sorts of teams we’re usually leading, producing results is a team sport. The work of a number of highly-capable team members is brought together to produce some result that matters to the rest of the organization. It’s the team working together that has the impact.
Individuals each have their contribution to this collective effort, and the contributions are likely to be different. Your own contribution to your team’s effort matters, quite possibly a lot, but it likely looks very different from that of the team members. And each of their own contributions differs, from each other and likely over time.
Further, in any high performing team, a lot of effort is going into “glue work”, which when done well is largely invisible. Keeping people on track, making sure the right people know when some next phase of work is ready to begin, smoothing over miscommunications and ruffled feathers - some of that will fall to you, some of it will fall to others and you’ll never even know it happened. This all matters, a lot, and it will look like wasted time on a productivity measure.
We Measure To Inform Decisions
As scientists, we measured things to learn about them. That’s not how our new roles work, though. As managers, we measure stuff to inform decisions.
Either way, trying to measure individual contributions in a team doing complex interrelated work will neither help us learn nor decide about the work of that team and its members.
To learn about the work all we have to do is watch it happen, and talk to the individuals. Sure, we could try to measure the contributions of the individuals and plot them over time, but that’s not going to teach us anything. How would you even plot them against each other? How many “design decisions” equals one “presentation to the internal client?” At the end of that month is that change-management effort 50% done or 75% done? How would you even know and what does that even mean?
Making decisions about such measurements is even worse. What happens when one team member starts taking on new responsibilities in the work, and their “productivity” in that task is lower than the person who had been doing it for years - especially when they’re doing some of the old stuff? Is that bad? Do they get dinged for it? Is it better for their “score” to just keep doing the same stuff all the time? If so, why on earth would anyone take on a growth opportunity? How about the team member who’s doing some of the glue work needed to keep everything running smoothly? And how exactly do you calculate the ratio of a design decision to an internal client presentation for making those decisions?
Any quantitative individual productivity measure is going to be corrosive to team work, reducing the impact of the team, while doing roughly nothing to keep you better informed about how to improve your team’s performance.
Unblock Teams, Grow Individuals
Does that mean that teams and individuals shouldn’t be accountable to how well they’re doing? Absolutely not. It’s just that measuring individual productivity in some set of uniform, normalized units is the wrong mental model to bring to bear here.
The team is the right conceptual unit to consider when talking about speed or productivity. You want to make sure the team is doing its work, having its impact, as effectively as possible.
But it’s not the speed of the team (again, in what units?) that we need to keep our eyes on. It’s what’s slowing the team down.
We can find the steps or procedures or tools that are causing friction and making the team wait or lose time or have to re-do work, and systematically work to remove that friction. Doing that, one friction-lessening step at a time, will get the team moving faster (and generally happier), while teaching both you and the team the whole-system view of your teams work.
So how do we find the rate-limiting steps? We could do it quantitatively, ask people to measure where they’re spending time; it’s a lot of work, though, and kind of annoying to do. It’s also kind of overkill, especially at the beginning of this work.
Simply asking people what is slowing them down, in retrospectives as a team and individually in one-on-ones (in case they have uncomfortable things to say about individuals), will normally get you lots of useful data to work with. The team collectively can inform prioritization of the inputs you get.
Then choose something tractable, work to improve things, and come back to the team and see if they agree it’s gotten better. Rinse and repeat.
Repeating this step, and removing friction where you can, will make the team move faster, generally make people happier with their work, and teach everyone about the end-to-end process of the work getting done. Documenting what you learn will also make onboarding new team members go much faster.
You can unblock teams; individuals get better and faster at their work by growing their skills. Quarterly goal setting (#60) can help with this; having career development goals along with work goals gives you an opportunity to make sure they’re spending some time in skills development that will help them and the team.
Don’t neglect skills development! The problem with professional growth goals is that they’re important but rarely urgent. There’s always some work thing coming up around the corner which is more urgent, and it’s tempting to deprioritize growth over meeting deadlines. This is a mistake. An investment in growth today is something that can pay off for getting work done tomorrow and the next day and…
Manage Individuals, Don’t Measure Them
When I dig into the reasons why a manager wants to measure productivity of an individual team member, there’s often some underlying concern that a team member isn’t performing up to expectations.
As uncomfortable as it may be to those of us with quantitative backgrounds, measuring some productivity number doesn’t really get us closer to our goal of our team members performing well.
Instead, the answer is qualitative — conversations, expectations, feedback, and goal setting — and in the worst case, there being consequence for not meeting expectations and not achieving goals.
But that’s the job.
We need our data-collection pipelines (one-on-ones) with everyone on the team, along with, retrospectives (#128) together, to get to the heart of what’s going wrong, and whether the team member is contributing to the team the way the team needs them to. Maybe they are, and the concerns were unfounded!
If not, then you have feedback and goal setting (which are both a form of communicating expectations, #57) to hopefully get the team member where they need to get and help them grow. Rapoport’s five conditions for improvement are useful here — if they agree there’s a problem, want to see it overcome, sees their role, can come up with a plan to improve, and can execute that plan, then they can grow into the team member the team needs. If not, then they might not be a match for the role, and you might need to let them go.
But most of the time, worries about a team member underperforming are either misunderstandings or can be turned around. Not with a dashboard and a spreadsheet, but by consistently and routinely using the standard, qualitative, communications-based tools of management.
And now, on to the roundup!
Managing Individuals
Ask Questions, Repeat The Hard Parts, and Listen - Michael Lopp
In our research careers, we were doing well if we became the indispensable expert.
As a manager, the better we do our jobs, the less our team will need us over time.
In this article, Lopp describes his approach when a team member brings him a problem that requires a decision:
My immediate goal with these questions is to educate myself regarding these decisions. See, if it were trivial, low risk, or obvious to decide, you would not need me. You would’ve made it.
My second goal, and it happens more than you’d think, is that you make the decision.
This is really tough for us; we’re used to being the experts who are consulted in our area of expertise. But as Lopp describes, the goal is for the person closest to the decision to make it. If they need additional context, or reminders about the context, that can be shared in the form of questions: “One related goal we have is XYZ - how do the options you’re considering support that goal?”
Earlier in this piece, I wrote I was disappointed when you asked me to decide. I’m not disappointed in you; I’m disappointed with myself. See, my primary job as your leader is to give you the skills and experience I’ve gained over the years. If I cannot guide you toward making the decision, I’m reminded I’ve not yet achieved my primary goal in our professional relationship.
My job is to teach you not to need me.
Managing Teams
Beyond the Individual: Unlocking Peak Performance in Teams - Christophe Louvion
Here the focus is on tech company teams, but the points of the article may sound familiar:
[…] the shift from individual to team performance as a measure of success is not just a trend but a strategic imperative. Traditional organizational processes have long focused on managing and assessing individual performance. However, these methods often fall short of effectively capturing the essence of productivity and innovation in software development—a field inherently creative and collaborative.
Louvion describes several areas to focus on to grow effective teams - the ones relevant to us are:
Innovation and Strategy
Collaboration and Communication
Workflow and Efficiency
Leadership and Empowerment
Team Dynamics and Structure
Skills Development and Diversification
Technical Proficiency and Security
I’d argue that underlying all of these is trust, mutual respect, and accountability within the team.
Managing Within Organizations
On “Predetermined” Outcomes - Ben Cotton
When you make a decision, there are always going to be stakeholders who would prefer you had chosen differently. Some of them will be very… enthusiastic about that preference.
In the face of that, it’s pretty tempting to just make the decision, then be quiet, keep your head down, and focus on the implementation.
Cotton points out that this is a mistake:
This often leads to comments like “why bother? They’ll just do what they’ll want anyway.” […] But when, after the comments, you remain convinced of your proposal, you can help address the “this was predetermined” reactions. (At least the ones made from frustration or misunderstanding. You can’t do much about people acting in bad faith.) […] During the comment period, respond to the general themes of the constructive feedback. Explain which parts you agree with, which aren’t based on facts, and which are a different conclusion. Repeat this process at the end, too. Show people that you heard them and explain why you reached the conclusion you did. This is helpful even when you do change (or abandon!) a proposal.
Managing Your Own Career
The Next Larger Context - Camille Fournier
This article from last year just crossed my desk. It’s aimed at software engineers in particular, but I think the examples will be understandable. And the basic idea is widely applicable and I really like how concisely it’s expressed here - as we grow in our careers, we really want to make sure we understand the next larger context.
Last week (#171) I talked about the importance of managing up, and big part of that was just understanding our bosses needs. For us, that’s the next larger context - the one our boss works in.
We need that next larger context to do our jobs effectively, because we need to know what’s important and what’s not at that next level. Hyper-optimizing for the context in which we operate is going to miss some bigger-picture information.
If anything, we wrestle with being drawn in the opposite direction - the next smaller context. We are technical experts, enjoy getting lost in deeply technical work, and enjoy the very immediate feedback we get from such work. It’s easier to be drawn into the day-to-day context of our team members than that of our bosses.
But if we want to make sure the work we and our team are doing matters, and especially if we want to expand the scope of our role further, it’s the next larger context that we should pay some attention to.
What environment gets the best out of you? -
When we were in academia, we didn’t hesitate to do some of our work at a coffee shop or go for a walk in the quad to clear our head. Great reminder from Devlin that we can still do that, and I love how it is framed - we can still put some effort into adapt the environment that we work in rather than always adapting ourselves to the environment.
Her recommendations (read the article for the details):
#1 - Understand the environment that works best for you
#2 - Learn how to adapt your environment
#3 - Be aware of what others’ ideal environment looks like
#4 - Work with a non-ideal environment
That’s It…
And that’s it for the week! I hope it was useful; Let me know what you thought, or if you have anything you’d like to share with me about how a newsletter or community about management for people like us might be even more valuable. Just email me, leave a comment, reply to this newsletter if you get it in your inbox, or schedule a quick Manager, Ph.D. reader input call.
Have a great weekend, and best of luck in the coming weeks with your team,
Jonathan