I was watching Fox Entertainment’s new show Glee on Hulu and was struck by an interesting correlation between the plot and a core tenant of effective agile teams. In Glee a teacher discovers that the glee club is about do be disbanded and decides to take responsibility for it’s continued development. This is no small task in a school that primarily values jocks and cheerleaders over musicians and artists. Nonplussed, the teacher attempts to organize a rag tag group of nerds, geeks, and a diva into an elite performing glee group.
Sadly, the group just isn’t meshing well. Desperate, he turns to the cheerleaders and jocks and attempts to get them to join the club, he gets no interest whatsoever. Fortunately, his luck begins to change when he discovers the quarterback for the football team is an excellent singer and proceeds to blackmail him into joining the glee club.
Things really begin to start clicking, the new male lead singer and the diva are an excellent musical combination and he begins to think that things really are starting to look up for his fledgling club.
But in true television fashion, everything beings to fall apart when his wife announces that she is pregnant. He must now make contrived yet difficult choice between fiscally supporting his family and pursuing that which he loves, glee club. As any responsible soon to be father would, he turns in his two week notice so he can begin working at an accounting firm at a significantly higher salary than that which teachers make.
Meanwhile, the jock returns to football and the diva takes command of the club. The jock discovers that he was happiest with the glee club and returns to help them on their path to the state championship. The jock displays a keen intuition and identifies each of the glee club members talents and assigns them tasks. The diva does choreography, the wheelchair bound geek plays a mean lead guitar in the jazz band, the backup singer creates costumes, etc.
All of this culminates in a scene where the former glee club teacher is walking out of the school when he hears a noise. He walks into the room to discover his glee club performing a well coordinated musical number. Their uniforms are all coordinated, their pitch is spot on, all of their steps are in step, and the jazz band that is backing them up is rockin’ it out hardcore. So of course he decides that he should do what he has always loved and continue running the glee club. Words of encouragement are exchanged, hugs take place, and it cuts to credits, reminding you to tune in for the next episode.
Awww, that’s such a sweet example of Hollywood melodrama attempting to play off of the success of High School Musical! What does it have to do with agile?
Well, that is an excellent question. This is what it has to do with agile: a team member identified what each person was already good at and loved and put them in a position where they could own that talent and put it to work meeting the goals of the club. Of course this is a highly fictionalized narrative. There are very few teams where you can go from one minute barely able to stay in step to a mere 30 minutes later being a highly coordinated band of performing artists.
However that is an incredible effect of the power of ownership. When team members own the work they are doing, gather feedback from people who work with what they produce on a daily basis, and feel the effects of the software they create then something amazing happens. They become highly engaged. They start caring about the direction of the product. They start working harder, applying their natural skills and abilities in ways that people outside the team could never anticipate.
That is the heart of the role of a manager in an agile environment. We have to remove organizational impediments that detract from the teams ownership and make resources available so our teams can really use their talents in the best way possible.