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Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

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Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#11

Post by asgard1024 »

feverishaaron wrote: post #7
asgard1024 wrote: post #5

While I quite agree with the idea, it rests on the assumption: "leaders also need to create a culture in which employees do not have every waking moment of every day committed to project work" Unfortunately, I am currently in situation where is lot more project work than people (and I wonder, is it different elsewhere?). In that case, I don't think the approach the author describes quite works unless you have a dedic…

There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects), will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core responsibilities and deliverables. Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?

Not sure why are you replying to me, it's entirely different question.

I don't have a problem with people working on new things. The question of leadership - I think it's a little fuzzy. OS kernel decides what process gets to run and what not, but it's not like you can call it a "leader". He just does it on basis of processes' priorities, which may well be set by individual processes themselves or something else entirely. (And I am actually fan of direct democracy - where the leader designation is pointless, but that doesn't mean - in such system - you can't have project manager telling you what you should work on, as is obvious from the OS analogy.)

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#12

Post by YZF »

quanticle wrote: post #2

I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team. I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against t…

If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved.

It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum.

In the real world there is always vacuum and always stuff people think needs to get done that doesn't really need to get done. The illusion is that the manager is omnipotent and can see all the vacuum and inefficiency. A good manager works with the team to understand those.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#13

Post by Falkon1313 »

feverishaaron wrote: post #7
asgard1024 wrote: post #5

While I quite agree with the idea, it rests on the assumption: "leaders also need to create a culture in which employees do not have every waking moment of every day committed to project work" Unfortunately, I am currently in situation where is lot more project work than people (and I wonder, is it different elsewhere?). In that case, I don't think the approach the author describes quite works unless you have a dedic…

There are some, who in ambition to lead (or work on highly visible projects), will step up and take on new things – meanwhile skimping on their core responsibilities and deliverables. Are these the people we want to promote into leadership roles?

What about people who have a light load during a cycle (due to specialization), like to tinker with things in their 'spare' time, or would rather tradeoff their core and do something different?

Seems reasonable for an internal tool or process to help the team - not a necessity, so if nobody wants to do it, no big deal. If people are excited about it, it'll get done along with their core responsibilities.

The other case is giving people the opportunity to hand off their normal load (that may be uninteresting to them) to head up some project or initiative that would have to be assigned to someone anyway. In the latter case, isn't it better to have someone who's interested doing it than have that person doing uninteresting work while an uninterested person heads up the project?

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#14

Post by quanticle »

dmourati wrote: post #6
quanticle wrote: post #2

I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team. I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against t…

"And what if nobody had stepped up?" One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time. Iterate on approach and message. If it truly is an important project and if prospective volunteers had the time to commit, surely someone would emerge. Put another way, assignments represent opportunities.

>One option would be to pitch it again in a different method and at a later time.

Right, but the fact that you pitched it once, and failed, undermines your credibility the next time you pitch the same idea. In the worst-case, you can get known as "that guy who is always advocating for " and your interlocutor dismisses you even before taking the time to listen to your new argument.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#15

Post by sdoering »

mc32 wrote: post #4

In a world where there is no judging, this could work well, people would do things out of interest and want, but in this world, I feel this is more "gamification". This is because people will take these hints because know they are an explicit vehicle to get noticed and they know that _not_ taking the hint will cost them. It's playing with (psychologically manipulating) people. That's to say they do it because in this…

Thanks you just expressed perfectly my thoughts on this.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#16

Post by Animats »

I've heard this approach mentioned before, but it was in the context of how to hire hotel maids, as explained by a Four Seasons Hotels executive. They like people who are a bit obsessive about tidyness, and have a way to test for that.

This is a good approach to cleaning up a room. It may not be appropriate to programming.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#17

Post by codeonfire »

Ugg. I'm sorry about being negative but here are some protips:

1. If a manager leaves work unassigned and you pick it up, prepare to have a LOT more work dumped on you in the future for no reward.

2. If you pretend to be a manager with hopes of being made a manager, all that you will accomplish is you are going to end up doing your job AND your bosses job. Your boss will look like a hero to his/her peers. You'll kill yourself and won't be made a manager regardless.

A better approach is to be smart about it. Always negotiate the work and what you're going to get out of it ahead of time. Maybe you just get some political capital, praise, or a positive review. Don't just blindly do work you weren't asked to do thinking it will be rewarded.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#18

Post by asgard1024 »

YZF wrote: post #12
quanticle wrote: post #2

I think this is one of the arguments for holocracy. The entire purpose of management is to efficiently assign work to individual contributors. Instead of leaving a few work items unassigned, holocracy leaves all the work items unassigned, and then the ones that get done are the ones that are most important to the team. I'm not saying I buy the idea, and in fact that the same arguments against holocracy work against t…

If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place. win-win as long as it's a learning experience for all involved. It's definitely a problem if you force a team or a person into a certain pattern and then change the rules without telling. For example you may have punished someone for taking the initiative in the past and now you try to intentionally create a vacuum. In th…

> If nobody steps up then it's quite likely that work never needed to get done in the first place.

Seriously? Consider this: You have all people tied up in work for one month. A customer issue comes up. Who should step up to take it? Because you're not seriously suggesting it should rot there one month, do you?

It's a classical coordination problem (and that's why preemptive scheduling was invented). I, as a developer, have no idea if I should step up. I would have to asses importance of all the other work that is being done by others, just to get a boolean value out of it. So everybody has to switch context to examine the issue, and the everybody's tasks to see where it fits in the grand scheme of things.

Now you can say, OK, we will have priorities on things, easy. But then you actually find out that the low priority work doesn't get done at all. OK, so you start to calculate time slices, fair scheduling, all that jazz. And all of sudden everybody is forced to execute these overcomplicated scheduling algorithms and no real work gets done. It's a bureaucratic nightmare (because people are really bad at executing algorithms correctly, and have high task switching overhead), and I have seen it. While this could be sanely done by a single responsible person, project manager, who has an idea about:

(1) what is the priority (and required latency) of each work item

(2) how long things are going to take (estimate)

(3) what are the dependencies

(4) who prefers what kind of work

Furthermore, if he needs any help with these points, he doesn't need to ask the whole team. Only one person can assess importance of an issue; the others do not need to care.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#19

Post by CM30 »

One issue here; what if the people working in the organisation already have too many things to work on and there's no one who feels they can take on this task?

Seems like the article and its title assume that a workplace necessarily has lulls between tasks (or perhaps more employees than there is work available). By assigning people tasks, you can at least tell them that their new job is more important than their current one, at least at this point in time.

Re: Leave Work Unassigned and See Who Steps Forward

#20

Post by d23 »

> Companies don't need to go so far as the well-known Google 20 percent time

A bit of a digression here.

I love that people think the idea that letting employees spend a measly 20% of their time deciding what they should be working on is somehow an extreme idea. What portion of your typical day would you honestly say is devoted to solid, in-the-flow work? After all the meeting, context switches, random interruptions, lunch, distractions on company chat -- I personally would say a fraction. Or flow state is simply dead for me at the office.

Recently, my roommate and I came home after work and ended up knocking out a very useful skunkworks project in about 6 hours over the course of 2 nights. That completely uninterrupted time mixed with the fact that it was a project that was freshly conceived and still full of passion in our minds let us get more work done in that burst than we felt like we had in weeks.

20% time is a joke. We need to ditch this 40 hour, strictly scheduled workweek in distracting office environments and try some radically different ways of getting productivity boosts. It just so happens that people also feel a lot better when they get these boosts to boot. I know after knocking out that project certainly made me feel awesome.

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