People often ask me whether teams should have the right to vote members off the team. To help answer that question, let me share a story with you.
When I saw Derek walking toward me at the conference, I was thrilled. I had first met him a year earlier when I taught a class at his company. I had been back a handful of times, and I always enjoyed talking to him, but we hadn’t talked in three months. I thought this would be a good chance to catch up. As we said hello, I could tell something was really bothering him, so we sat down to talk. Derek told me that at his team’s sprint review the week before, the team had decided to ask him to resign as their ScrumMaster and to leave the team. He had done so and was looking around within his company to find another Scrum team to join. But the shock of being asked to leave had not yet worn off.
Although rare, Derek’s situation is not unheard of. The question of whether the team has the authority to remove someone from the team is a common topic. Commonly referred to as “voting someone off the island,” removing a team member is not an action to be considered lightly. Before such measures are taken, efforts should be made to address problems that lead some or all team members to feel that they might be better off without one of their members.
A team alone should not have the right to remove someone from the team. As I detail in Chapter 12 of Succeeding with Agile, self-organization does not occur in a vacuum. The right preconditions must be in place for self-organization to occur. Individuals then self-organize within boundaries established by the organization. This is referred to as the CDE model, which says that for self-organization to occur there must be a container that bounds the individuals, some differences among them, and transforming exchanges.
Chapter 12 also makes the point that leaders within the organization exert influence on the self-organizing team by adjusting its containers, differences, and exchanges. For example, over time and through attrition a team might have become too homogeneous. An astute product owner, functional manager, or even ScrumMaster might counter that by adding two new team members with radically different backgrounds, skills, decision-making styles, or so on. Doesn’t it seem possible—likely even, in this example—that a team might have a knee-jerk reaction and vote the new, nonconforming individuals off the team, negating the work of the leader who deliberately added them? Ultimate authority for team composition, therefore, must reside with the leadership of the organization. Those leaders should listen, of course, when team members say they think they’d be more productive without a member. But, team members should not be allowed on their own to remove someone from the team.
Good blog post, always comes up in self-organizing discussions.
You mention ultimate authority should be in leadership roles, how often is too often to move people from teams? We strive to keep a team together as much as possible but I’d also like to the right people on teams that need a kick in the scrum pants.
Lyssa Adkins had a great keynote on navigating conflict. Kicking someone off the team seems like the last thing you’d want to do, vs dealing with the conflict now. (But maybe they did deal with the conflict and that wasn’t part of the story.) Here’s Lyssa’s keynote on Navigating Conflict: http://lyssaadkins.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/navigating-conflict-keynote/
I’m sure there was lots of conflict prior to this event, but was it made transparent or was it simmering below the surface?
Thanks Mike for continuing to make me think. I heard an interesting interview yesterday on NPRs Talk of the Nation in which a political science professor explained how the U.S. political “filibustering” process works. I always thought filibustering was just a silly way for the house minority to stonewall the majority. However, the expert made a great case for the importance of filibustering in keeping the majority in check.
As I listened I thought about the agile teams I’ve coached that struggle with working well together. Often it has more to do with personal traits and chemistry than effectiveness; and often an “in-group” forms to ostrecize members of the “out-group”. When I’m asked about voting members off the island as part of self-organization I’m reluctant to support a carte blanche right of the team to do so. Teams need something akin to the filibuster process to ensure that the majority doesn’t tramp on the minority and become too homogenous.
Hi Derek–
Like you, I try to leave a team together as long as possible. Sometimes, though, there can be bad combinations of good people. Two people who individually are great but just don’t work well together. If I suspect that, I will mix a team up. If doing so improves both of the resulting teams, I know I had two good performers who just didn’t work well together. I would never, though, just randomly mix up a team because it “has been together too long.”
Hi Catherine–
was not the first thing this team tried. They tried to work things through together and it just wasn’t a good match. The team went on for another two very successful years (before being disbanded onto a variety of other projects) and Derek went on to ScrumMaster at another company where I stayed in touch with him for a few months and he was doing well.
Kicking Derek off this team (and note that this isn’t the same Derek who commented on the post
And, yes, Lyssa Adkins is well worth following on this subject. She is working on a book on ScrumMaster / agile coaching that is wonderful and will be out in a few months.
Would you deliberately add changes periodically, then?
Some articles (haven’t got any references here and now – I lent the book with the references in it) seem to suggest that introducing changes – whatever the situation – might lead to increased productivity. I think the whole thing dates back to the earliest studies on moving people from offices to cubicles, and how that temporarily improved productivity. Moving them back into offices also improved productivity.
I am not specifically talking about adding or removing team members here, but about anything that will change working conditions for the team.
There is a growing part of the local management culture hereabouts who subscribe to this way of thinking. These guys mostly come from an economy background, so their tool of choice is reorganizations. As a scrum master, I have so many more tools at my disposal. I even have a self-organizing team who hopefully does many of these changes through retrospecives.
Let us say I have a well-performing team. I would never think about breaking them up. They are already a winning combination, with just the right amount of conflicts to be creative.
I still feel like having a go at changing their working conditions to see if something happens to their productivity. Anything would be legal, from bringing in a couple of potted plants to mixing the team up. I think this – apart from the whole redundancy thing – would make me personally more happy in my work if done right.
Splitting up a productive team just because is out. But does this idea make sense?
Hi Ken–
Thanks for your comments. It’s good to see you on here. Wow–what an interesting comparison between the US Congress and some teams. I’ve wanted to learn more about filibustering because I admit to not understanding its purpose so I will learn more about that. And yes most teams I’ve seen that wanted to vote someone off were really making a move toward greater homogeneity on the team, which I suspect is rarely a good thing.
Hi Geir–
In theory I can see mixing a team up because they’ve been together “too long” but in practice teams get mixed up often enough without me having to do it more often. Richard Hackman (Harvard professor) quoted a study in Harvard Business Review last year that I think said teams need a new person every 3-1/2 years in order to avoid becoming stale. I’ve seen studies that show average tenure in a company in the IT industry in the US is 24-30 months. So with team members changing companies every 24-30 months and teams being able to work together 3-1/2 years without becoming stale, I haven’t had to mix them up further!
A lot of reorganizations seem like managerial activity for the same of activity. I did it long ago–look at me, the good manager, always shifting my department to be efficient.
A boss of mine long ago told me about something he learned in an MBA program at the university of Chicago. It had to do with an employee that you thought was a superstar but who wasn’t performing at that level. In that case either you were wrong (and he really was a dud) or the person had “the wrong job or wrong boss.” That phrase always stuck with me and I’ve used the idea successfully a number of times. So if you have a team or person that isn’t performing as you think, try something to fix the wrong job/wrong boss problem (maybe wrong product owner or wrong ScrumMaster, too). If things don’t improve, maybe you are just wrong in your expectations of the person or team.
Based on my experiences in the past year, I think it should be up to a real manager, not the team and not the SM, to decide whether to remove someone from the team – or from the company. I think the team must have input, for sure, but there is a reason we have managers, and to me, this is a job for a manager to do after studying the situation and getting input from all concerned.
I was told by a SM (not at my current company) that I was an “impediment to the team”. I wasn’t – I was having the same issues as everyone else on the team (no working test environment in which to test the latest code), but I made the mistake (in his eyes) of raising this issue every day. I voluntarily left the team – who can work in that situation? But I don’t feel it was the place of the SM to tell me this (especially in that manner!)
It’s a tough decision whether to let someone go, whether from the team or from the company. I’d prefer a good manager handle the situation.
Hi Lisa–
It’s good to hear from you, even if you are an impediment to this blog
I completely agree. If we’re going to say that ScrumMasters shouldn’t have personnel responsibility (e.g., writing reviews, etc) they shouldn’t be able to make a decision to fire someone or remove them from a team. That rightly belongs to the person’s manager. So I completely agree with you on that. I would say though that if a team wants to kick someone off that the ScrumMaster is a first logical line in stopping that from happening, which is the example I gave above. The ScrumMaster can ask the team if they’ve thought of other options, etc. If they have and the ScrumMaster agrees the person is an impediment then those opinions can be shared with a manager. But a Scrum who is “just” a ScrumMaster (e.g., not a dev director / part-time ScrumMaster) usually shouldn’t be able to remove someone.
I think anyone who pushes a team to think in new ways will occasionally be told they are an impediment (to following the status quo). Knowing you as I do, I suspect that might have been your situation–in which case you were a good “impediment” and doing exactly what you were there to do.
[...] Cohn has just written about removing team members. In his post, he describes something he calls the CDE model. The CDE model describes a container [...]
Sigh !
Maybe its just me- but I would feel very uncomfortable voting someone out.
It’s not to say – that if someone is a misfit it is in the best of everyone’s interest to make some changes.But I would rather have his or her manager take the decision.
I think it could do lots of damage to his\her psych to be voted out by the whole team
Getting laid off is bad
Getting fired is worse
Voting someone out seems to be just even far worse.
I have been laid off once.
and I can even handle being fired.
But not sure how I would handle being voted off- and I would not like to do to others what I can’t handle.
Hi Rajiv–
I think you’re right that this could be particularly devastating. I think that was why Derek looked so horrible when I saw him at this conference. I’ve seen plenty of people after they’ve been laid off and you can’t really see it just in their faces and how they hold themselves. Derek was clearly pained so that the first thing I asked him was “what’s wrong?”
Hi Mike,
I agree that ultimately the decision regarding whether or not a particular person stays or goes must rest with the leadership. However it seems to me that if your team feels sufficiently empowered and comfortable enough to even consider the fact that they may have the power to influence if a particular person stays or goes – you’re in a pretty good place as far as your team/organisational spirit/culture is concerned. Plus if the team and organisation is at a level of maturity where things such as ‘voting someone off the island’ are possible, the situation is a lot more likely to be resolved amicably.
I think “voting someone from the island” isn’t the problem of a team any more. Well, they’re self-organized and so on, but if there’s a conflict or a problem they can’t solve by themselves it is time to call someone with authority to deal with it.
Asking a person to leave the team tells you very little about the source of the problem, let alone pointing who started it, but very much about scale of the problem.
If I were a manager of the team I would step in immediately and either look for reasons why it all came to the point where people voted off someone,what can be done to change it etc. Moving a person to another project can be a solution but it should be very well-though since it has significant impact on both sides: team (“hey, we won this one, we can decide who works with us and who doesn’t”) and a moved person (“have I just failed?”). I’d likely to look for other solutions.
And one more thought: if the situation came so far it is a yellow card for a manager of the team. They should know there is some problem way earlier. They should know when this was a small issue which hasn’t yet pupated into big ugly problem.
Hi Alan–
I think it depends if the team members are really taking this responsibility seriously and making the right decisions for the business/product or just making a decision to make themselves happy. I’m reminded of some of the things I saw in high school where cliques would just suddenly banish someone. I remember seeing this quite a bit with my sister who would suddenly be out with one group of friends and in with another. My friends and I were all too nerdy to have any options but playing Dungeons & Dragons all day sure was fun. (Actually we mostly played Chainmail, because D&D hadn’t even come out yet!)
Hi Pawel–
I think this is part of what I’m getting at–even if a subset of the team decides they are better off without someone, I still think there needs to be a manager or similar involved to make the ultimate call. You’re also right that the manager should be aware of this before it becomes a big problem. Realistically, though, most teams figure that someone is a poor fit before a manager does. But hopefully the manager figures it before the team is ready to *act* on it.
It’s not a perfect world. I think Scrum teams needs top quartile members. I frequently coach teams and team members that have difficulty to adjusting to the reality of time boxed delivery with no-where to hide. I am a scrum master (SM) with people manager experience, and I often get delegated people management responsibility. I have had to coach good teams that went through less well performing periods shall we say. Coaching for better performance and pruning poor performance is critical to maintaining/improving velocity in my view. I think that if the scrum master smells that the team is re-storming due to a perceived non-performer, he/she must bring it to a head. If I also had people management responsibility in a SM role, I coached the perceived non-performers with fair and documented improvement plans. A unanimous recommendation from the rest of the team is helpful. But, I learnt that the scrum master must be able to use his/her own judgement to go with a majority rule team decision, if he/she agrees with it, and then take the necessary action using due process. If the SM waits for a unanimous recommendation, too much time may get lost, and the situation festers. Equally, if the “non-performer” is simply highlighting a dysfunctional aspect within the team/organization and becoming unpopular because of that, that dysfunctional aspect should be dealt with as efficiently as possible by the SM. Perceived non performance needs to be dealt with quickly with one important caveat. The maintenance of dignity and respect should not get lost in the process of coaching/pruning teams.