The unquestioned economic system is why we can't have nice things.
Agency is for the powerful only.
I was having lunch with a dear friend and former client colleague yesterday, and he brought up one of the concepts that often emerges from leadership: measuring or creating team “happiness” or some variation of team happiness.
I’ve heard of various metrics, such as turnover and satisfaction surveys, but when he asked, my answer was simple, and I realized it was complete.
“Agency” is what I said. Teams want agency. People feel happiest when they understand the purpose of their work and are permitted to use their expertise however they see fit.
I actually said, “VPs don’t want happy teams because the answer is ‘agency,’ and watch how quickly the VP shoots that concept down.”
I often hear Tonianne De Maria (Author of the excellent Shingo Prize-winning book “Personal Kanban” talk about how it’s a well-known fact that in neuroscience, removing agency from a person can trigger the release of cortisol or the fight or flight drug.
Many leaders instantly bristle at this concept of allowing labor to decide their work, but I suspect the reason is that, as leaders, they’re terrible at creating strategic clarity. You may remember from a previous post that strategic clarity and empiricism are pretty harmful to the authority of the authoritarian leader who uses fiat as their primary method of leadership.
So, let’s start by talking about a concept in the agile framework of Scrum.
Self-organizing teams
I’ve heard various ways to reframe the concept of a self-organizing team into definitions better suited for the authoritarian leadership styles preferred by our current oligarchy. I feel like the first time someone said “self-organizing team” to a VP, the VP lost his mind, and that person instantly started fumbling over themselves trying to keep their job.
“Self-organizing isn’t self-managing”
“Self-organizing isn’t self-directed.”
“Self-organizing just means they get to decide how, but never the what.”
and a bunch of other ridiculous nonsense.
Self-organizing means self-managed and self-directed.
The fundamental concept is that given clarity of purpose, people will organize themselves to the optimal outcomes. In fact, when working with technical workers, the leaders are typically farther removed from the technology as well as the customer, so the decisions they force on their knowledge workers are usually worse than the ones those workers would have made themselves. These workers know that, and being forced to do wrong, stupid shit makes them hate their bosses and their jobs.
Given the small number of sociopaths in the general population, this concept is sound. It eschews extrinsic motivation for intrinsic motivation. If we’re all in a rowboat and care about getting where we want to go, we’ll all pull in the same direction. If we’re all in a rowboat, have no idea what a rowboat is, and think we’re here to do the highest jumping jacks, we’ll lose the rowing race.
But leaders too often ignore empirical evidence and assume people aren’t motivated. Sometimes, they’re not; after years of being abused by horrible bosses and being told just to shut up and do things they know to be wrong, people develop learned helplessness. If you punish and shame people for mistakes or, worse yet, “mistakes” wherein you miscommunicate because you’re bad at it, people will react by protecting themselves. This learned helplessness usually takes the form of order-taking.
“Just tell me exactly what you want me to do.” Even the fiat manager hates this because the fiat manager often can’t or doesn’t want to spend their whole life defining every tiny step that needs to be taken.
Ultimately, the issue of team happiness is a loser not because it can’t be achieved; it can quite easily be achieved, but simply because leaders don’t want to achieve it. They don’t want to let go of power and allow workers to choose their work.
This is because of the relationship between private employers (i.e., oligarchs) and labor (paid workers). Suppose you restructured the organization into a more socialistic democratic worker cooperative. In that case, you’d suddenly no longer have all the incoherence and waste that goes into preserving power and hoarding profits for a tiny percentage of people at the top.
Richard Wolff (professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst) talks about a definition of socialism that sounds remarkably like self-organizing teams.
One of his definitions of socialism is the seizure of the management of the enterprise by labor. Instead of a board of directors and a tiny number of very powerful men deciding how to direct the efforts and resources of the enterprise, the workforce decides this.
This is my preferred definition of socialism. I know people will breathlessly rush to criticize me for advocating for gulags and authoritarian government-controlled communism, but those people are uninformed and/or disingenuous.
When we organize democratically, we make very different decisions. Efficiency and clarity of purpose become important to maximizing the return on our investments. A workforce is highly unlikely to decide to allocate a massive amount of their excess product to a few powerful men at the top. The profits of their labors are more evenly distributed meritocratically across the organization.
I strongly believe that crony capitalism is the reason we can’t have self-organizing teams. When I was at the fashion retail hereditary oligarchy, there was a revolving door in the CTO role. Every new CTO who appeared was certain he was much smarter than all the “losers” in this retail technology space, and they were slumming it. As such, they hired their bros into roles for which they were objectively unqualified.
Making a director of a small software team in a travel web company the VP of a national supply chain technology organization despite having literally never been a VP, never led an org of anywhere near 160 people, and never having had any supply chain expertise whatsoever is management malpractice. But, given the nature of the centralized authoritarian system, nobody can question it. Not least the lowly plebes who work there.
(an inside joke about one of many ridiculous non-sequiturs this “VP” uttered)
When some poor naive leader informed the CTO that people with long tenure and considerable domain expertise were being told they could not be promoted because there was no “business justification for a new director role,” then watched as very junior leaders from that CTO’s travel web alma mater were hired into VP roles that didn’t previously exist, it was causing feelings of nepotism and resentment, he responded with the ever egalitarian “I’ll hire whoever the fuck I want.”
When there are no labor rights and an at-will employment state, this is what you get—baldfaced, frankly ugly abuses of power.
He’s long gone, as are all his bros he brought in, but they’ve been very well compensated, and they’ve gotten the biggest gift of all. One of them got to be “Chief Product Officer” despite never having even been a product manager in his career, nobody seemed to care he had 100% turnover within a year of assuming that role. The other bros got to soak in a couple of years as “Vice Presidents,” which will open doors for them to be destructive at countless other organizations. Nobody can call them out by name for fear of being sued. The organization itself can’t call out what unmitigated disasters they were for fear that the shareholders would lose confidence in the hereditary oligarchs and sell their shares. They operate with impunity and without any accountability whatsoever.
Until we change the fundamental economic system and adopt labor rights and worker co-ops, all our attempts at “team happiness” are performative at best.