The other day, I came to know about a interesting problem from one of my friend. He was working in a Agile team, and he shared with me that he had got stressed and burnt out in the last couple of weeks. After some discussions with him (with drinks in our hands), I started to realise the root cause of his problems. The real problem, I realised, was that he was putting extra effort in his project, which was not needed at all. He was coming earlier than his team mates every day, and he was leaving after everyone else had left for the day. When asked why, he explained to me that his other team members were not that serious about their work so he had to compensate for them, so that team as a whole achieves the sprint goal. It sounded impressive to me at first, and I praised my friend silently for his commitment, hard-work and team spirit.

Well, the first impressions about his problem didn’t last long. Some more discussions and it lead me to the core of his problems. To me ,it simply looked “lack of trust” which was creating all sort of misconceptions in his mind. Ok, before explaining anything else, let’s get back to my friends (so called) problems. Here are few of his problems which I can recall at the moment. My friend didn’t like that:

1.His team mates come late in morning.
2. His team mates didn’t take anything seriously. For instance, even if one is struck in a implementation problem, he would leave his seat, go out and waste 10-15 minutes with someone on phone.
3. His team mates never thought about coming in weekends even if they had some incomplete task and they had a demo after 2 days.
4. His team mates never looked serious(if you look at their face)

Now, it’s well known that every individual has got his own style of working, and he performs best when he works in his own way. It’s when you don’t trust your team members and start doubting their way of working, things start getting wrong. But anyway, I acknowledged his problem and asked him why he didn’t raise his concern in their retrospectives. That could have, I explained to him, brought the problem visible to the whole team and then some solutions could have been tried out. For example, they could have taken a lesser number of complexity points in the next sprint, because the team velocities in the previous sprints were not the true velocities in real sense, as one of the person was putting extra effort every time.

The answer which he gave me was what I had already anticipated. He simply said that discussing his problems with his team would have been useless, and that they wouldn’t have acknowledged their own short-comings. So only after thinking that he had no other options left, he had decided to take the responsibility to do work extra and compensate for other’s shortcoming. Sounds heroic, or a leader leading by examples, right?

Well, I was not completely convinced by his reasoning, even then I didn’t try hard to convince him. I still felt that bringing his problems visible to the team in a retrospectives would have been the right approach. Also, since I didn’t know his team much I avoided jumping to any conclusions and giving my expert comments or solutions. I believe that understanding the problem context should always be the first step to solve the problem efficiently.

I spent the next few days talking to my friend’s team mates, whenever I got some time. I tried to understand their personalities, their working style and their visions about their project. After some days of discussion, I came to know about their view point of my friend’s problem. I was amazed to find out that they were already aware of my friends feeling about the team. I also found that they were as serious about their project as my friends was. The only thing which was missing was trust. Had there been trust, the team could have understood that we work in our own styles. Style can be different, but the vision should be same.
Anyway, here is what I can compile right now, what the team member had to say, when I discussed with them about my friends pain areas (in the same order as the problems were):

1. It’s not that I come late. Company policy says that we are supposed to come no later than 10′o clock, and many other guys also come by 10′o clock. So what if I come at 10 AM, I also stays late and leaves only after spending 9 hours in the office.. If he has a habit of coming early, how is that my fault?

2. See, I don’t like taking tension as I believe it solves nothing. I think it’s better to take a break, divert your mind somewhere else, have a coffee or just talk to guys from other team or just call your friend(if you haven’t called him for a long time). That generally gives me new insights into a problem. That’ how I work.

3. Why should I think about coming on weekends. I am not a bachelor like him, and I have a social life as well. I like to enjoy my weekends with my family and friends. If it’s about work, just quote me an example when things have gone wrong because of me. I have always done my work on time. I think we underestimate the tasks sometimes and I have always opposed this. I think that our team should get better at that. Moreover, even if we have underestimated something, why shouldn’t we let the whole team(including the on-site team) know that we have underestimated last time. That will make the team more cautious, and the planning will improve next time. Why to hide the underestimations and project a false team velocity by working on weekends?

4. I don’t like to look serious when I am working. He has a habit of looking serious while working, I don’t know exactly why? Perhaps to show other people that he is working. . I think your work should speak for you rather than your face.

The answers given by the team members were good enough to convince me.

The situation, I realised, is very common in every organisation. What kind of person is able to impress others and the management more easily and quickly? A person, who look serious while doing things, who likes to discuss the problems with other team members on lunch table, who just let everyone else know that he came last weekend to complete a pending task, or the other kind of person, who is often found giggling with other team mates, talking over to phone a couple of times a day, talking about movies or cricket on the lunch table? The answer depends on organisation to organisation and manager to manager. There is no clear cut answer, but the basic idea is that we should acknowledge that everyone is going to work in different ways to do similar task and achieve the same vision. Perhaps it should be the first and foremost thing to understand about others, but sadly enough, is the easiest to overlook at the same time!