The sick, lame, and lazy blocking your team.

The most challenging job for a scrum master is building a team. I spend most of my time acting as a coach, encouraging people to work together.  It is not easy.   This week on the blog, I want to talk about team building and my misadventures.  

The gold standard for all software development teams is Bruce Tuckman’s 1965 article “Developmental Sequence in Small Groups,” which outlined the four stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, and performing.  According to Tuckman, a team moves through these four stages as it grows and develops.  I personally experience that these groups of people can get stuck at certain stages, and getting them to move to the next state is next to impossible.  The most significant burden for a scrum master is nudging the team along to get to a performing state.  

The biggest obstacle to building an effective team is what a former mentor called the sick, lame, and lazy.  These are the people who are going to make team building a chore.  When I refer to the “sick,” I am talking about people who do not take care of themselves because it is not a priority.  These developers think they can come into work hung over from a weekend revelry, thinking they can use Monday morning to sober up.  Developers who refuse to get proper sleep also qualify as “sick” because their mental fatigue is an obstacle to solving the problems they encounter during the course of their day.  You also have to deal with developers being petri dishes of illness coming into the office.  With VPNs and work-from-home strategies, there is no excuse for developers to be martyrs coming into the office to get the rest of the staff sick.  

The “lame” members of your development team are the people who lack the skills to succeed.  This means that other developers will have to work harder to succeed.  In many cases, this comes down to training.  More senior members of the team will have to take time out to train the more junior members of the team.  If this hurts velocity, so be it because the short-term hit will translate into long-term gain.  A team member can also be “lame” if they do not share the same commitment to the project that the other team members do.  This is going to be the primary job of the scrum master to educate the “lame” team members as to what is expected of team members.  Then, they must let the other team members use peer pressure to keep the lame member in line.  

Finally, you have the “lazy” team member.  These are people who think writing unit tests is someone else’s work.  They copy and paste code regularly, and when asked to refactor code, they respond with, “It is working. Why do we need to fix it?”  These are the most frustrating members of your team, and if they will not respond to peer pressure or your direct coaching, they need to be managed out of the team – immediately.  This is because if other developers see this “lazy” person in the team not being disciplined, they will think they do not have to work hard.  This will create a cascading effect of laziness, which will wreck your team.  You can forget about performing. You will have many developers storming and eventually leaving because of your tolerance of laziness.  

So, if you want to be a successful scrum master, be on the lookout for the sick, lame, and lazy.  They are the unholy trinity of personalities who will wreck your scrum team.  

Until next time.