Hello All,
I have been thinking lately about a question that someone posted on a LinkedIn Group discussion. His question was “do you recognize individual performance in Scrum?”
Many of us are somewhat predisposed to a culture that rewards the individual. You might call this type of model a meritocracy and one of the goals of management in this type of model is to reward those that regularly excel in their jobs. By doing so, this serves to create a model of excellence for all team members..
Enter Agile and Scrum. One of the key principles in Scrum is the self-managed team. The team operates as one to move the project to completion. They work together to make decisions and drive results. The key Agile principle that governs this as stated in the Agile Manifesto is to “build projects around motivated individuals, give them the environment and support they need and trust them to get the job done.”
Although there is a lot of attention paid to the entity of the team in an Agile/Scrum project I also believe that to create “motivated individuals” that individual recognition and reward is essential. The difference, however, rests in who does the rewarding. In more traditional management styles, it is typically a project manager that selects the individuals that will be recognized. Sometimes this can be a bit subjective and can actually create more animosity than motivation.
True motivation and satisfaction however will be achieved when individuals are recognized by their peers. Therefore, I recommend that in keeping with the principles of Agile that the TEAM selects and rewards the individuals to be recognized. One thought is to create a program of “Sprint Champion.” After the completion of each sprint, the Scrum team votes for the person that contributed most to the Sprint. The voting should be based on a set of performance criteria established by the team prior to the first Sprint. A sample list of criteria could be:
- Contribution of ideas that led to the success of the sprint,
- Amount of assistance that a team member contributed to other team members in helping them achieve their goals,
- Accomplishment of work based on the contribution to the overall team velocity,
- Innovation in solving difficult problems,
- Enthusiasm, and
- Encouragement to other team members
Again, this list of criteria should be established by the team and there should be a budget that is managed by the team for each Sprint in order to recognize the Sprint Champion. This could be distributed as cash bonuses, prizes, plaques and recognition parties.
I would be interested to know how your Agile/Scrum team recognizes individual performance?
Pete
A healthy team does *recognize* its members naturally. If you want to foster it, include an appreciation-step in your retrospective, for example as part of a learning matrix, or like in temperature reading. That might do some good for motivation.
Rewards, on the other hand, are quite consistently shown to lead to reduced intrinsic motivation – the more “materialistic” the reward, the worse. (See “Punished by Rewards”.)
And basing it on a set on agreed upon performance criteria makes it even worse, as in any complex activity, where you simply can’t measure all critical dimensions, optimizing to those criteria will invariably lead to dysfunction. (See “Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations”.)
If you are really concerned about motivation, give your team members direct access to the users of the system they are building and let them feel that their work makes a difference to them. And then give them all the resources they need to find out for themselves how to do the best possible job of satisfying the users even more.
Ilja,
Thank you for your response. It has caused me to rethink a couple of things in my posting.
First of all, I am not familiar with the idea of reduced intrinsic motivation as a result of materialistic rewards, so I look forward to reading the recommended article “Punished by Rewards”.
I think based on your thoughts that I would alter my suggestions as follows: First, let the team decide if in fact this type of individual recognition program makes sense for their particular team. If it is a healthy team to begin with then perhaps your point of *recognizing* members naturally will be all that is necessary and an appreciation step in the retrospective is the best approach.
If, however, a team decides that the Sprint Champion idea would be appropriate, than instead of establishing a hard and fast set of criteria before the first Sprint, the team could simply decide, based on whatever process or conditions they choose, how they will nominate and select a Sprint Champion, the frequency of that selection and the best way to reward or recognize that individual.
Thanks again for your contribution. Very valuable advise and certainly in keeping with the principles of Agile.
Pete
A commenter on Linked-In, where a link to this was published, provided this excellent link to a brief presentation by Dan Pink where he explains some of the basics of extrinsic vs intrinsic motivators. Worth watching.
http://www.linkedin.com/redirect?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Eted%2Ecom%2Ftalks%2Fdan_pink_on_motivation%2Ehtml&urlhash=ev6Y
Lets try that again with a more direct link..
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html
One issue with your reward criteria is that you’ll keep rewarding the best team members and systematically leave out the underachievers. I therefore would recommend praising individuals that made the greatest improvement in their behaviour, so as to reward growth.
The issue of effective performance management and reward has become very difficult. Especially when dealing with employees from the younger generations who are more connected to their peers then the organization. A CIO for a computer games developer told me how star employees would often leave to work for a “sweat shop” simply to get their name listed in the credits of a new computer game. This recognition gave them social standing and star status among their peers.
It is also not difficult to understand why employees show a certain “lack” of interest in what management says about their performance, when a star employee could be laid off next week because he/she has become too expensive or the work has been outsourced.
I think pushing employee recognition down to as low a level as possible is important, no matter what development methodolgy you are using.
“build projects around motivated individuals”
not
“build projects around individuals and motivate them”
…or keep them motivated…
If you are a “motivated individual” you don’t need a reward (of course
you appreciate it, but it’s not ‘needed’)
“and trust them to get the job done”
and not
“and trust every single individual to …”
try to read it as “trust them all” or “trust the team to…”
maybe rewards could work inside an higly homogeneous team … but try to
adopt inside an heterogenous one…your death!
Ouch! Death! Pretty high stakes
Seriously though…thanks for the post!
Pete
Seriously:
I work inside an IT dept of a huge insurrance company and my team (6 devs – cross functionals) have relly different kind of professionals inside. How can you compare – and then reward – the SQL/db part to the middle leyer code development? or between fron end (web) and functional testing?
For example in my team we have also different level of “competence” and skills…if you rewards always the “best” one, the risk is to de-motivate the others. At the end you will split the team in two, good and bad ones…it’s risky.
If you reward only “the team” you would not have theese kind of problems
At the end my question for you is: why?
why you want/need to reward/recognize individuals? to achieve an higher velocity? stimulate kaizen? ….
One appealing aspect of agile is that it’s a framework for transcending traditional carrot and stick approaches (ostensibly because everyone is an owner).
Natural leaders & high performing individuals always seem to emerge.
I suppose their reward is the admiration of their peers.