Comments on: Removing Team Members

By: John Coleman

John Coleman — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:41:04 +0000

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.

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:02:26 +0000

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.

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:59:43 +0000

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!)

By: Pawel Brodzinski

Pawel Brodzinski — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:19:22 +0000

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.

By: Alan Skorkin

Alan Skorkin — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:50:30 +0000

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.

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:23:04 +0000

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?”

By: Rajiv

Rajiv — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:48:08 +0000

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.

By: The CDE model – and cultural musings « Geir Hedemarks blog

The CDE model – and cultural musings « Geir Hedemarks blog — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:23:45 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:10:03 +0000

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.

By: Lisa Crispin

Lisa Crispin — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 21:04:05 +0000

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.