Overcoming the Culture of Contempt in Agile Teams
In the realm of product development, especially within Agile and Scrum teams, a disturbing trend often emerges—a culture of contempt. This sentiment extends from leadership to the company, the product, and even the customers. It’s a profound issue that goes beyond mere dissatisfaction; it represents an active disdain for decisions made, often without considering the team’s insights or contributions.
The Root of Contempt
Contempt within teams often stems from a perceived disconnect between the team’s understanding of the product, its potential future, and the decisions made by leadership. When teams feel their input is consistently overlooked, it breeds an environment of frustration and disdain.
Key Factors Contributing to Contempt:
Decisions Made in Spite of Team Input: Teams feel their deep understanding of the product and market is ignored.
Lack of Inclusion in Decision-Making: There’s a sense that their expertise and insights are undervalued.
Traditional Hierarchical Structures: These often exacerbate the issue, with decisions made at the top, disregarding those on the ground closest to the product and market realities.
The Impact on Productivity and Morale
This culture of contempt not only diminishes morale but also severely impacts productivity and the quality of work. When employees harbor negative feelings towards their organization, it reflects in their output—unhappy teams produce unhappy products.
Personal Experience: A Case Study of Contempt
I once worked for an organization where contempt was not just an undercurrent but a palpable aspect of the workplace culture. This disdain was so ingrained that employees had derogatory nicknames for the company, signaling a deep-seated lack of respect and belief in the organization’s direction and leadership.
Building a Happy and Engaged Workforce
The antidote to a culture of contempt lies in creating an environment where every team member feels valued, heard, and engaged.
Strategies for Leadership:
Foster Open Communication: Ensure that team members feel their opinions and insights are respected and considered.
Involve Teams in Decision-Making: Make inclusivity a priority by involving team members in decisions that affect their work and the product’s direction.
Acknowledge and Address the Disconnect: Recognize the signs of contempt and actively work to bridge the gap between leadership and teams.
Personal Action: Change Your Company or Change Your Company
Faced with a culture of contempt, individuals often feel powerless. However, the choice between attempting to instigate change within your organization or deciding to leave for a healthier environment is a powerful one. This was a choice I faced and acted upon, choosing to leave an environment of contempt in pursuit of a more positive and constructive work culture.
Conclusion: Cultivating a Positive Organizational Culture
Leadership’s core responsibility is to cultivate a happy, engaged workforce that is passionate about the organization’s success. This cannot be achieved through directives alone but through fostering a culture of respect, inclusion, and shared purpose. Happy, engaged teams are the foundation of innovative and successful products. Addressing and overcoming a culture of contempt is not just necessary for the well-being of employees but crucial for the sustained success and innovation of the organization.
A common thing that I see happening in Scrum teams and any product teams, to be honest, any product teams, is that they have contempt. They have contempt for their leadership, they have contempt for their company, they have contempt for their product, they have contempt for their customers, and they have contempt for the outcomes. This is a little bit more than they just don’t care; it’s that they actively dislike, have disdain for choices that are made. This is largely, I think, because those choices are made in spite of their opinions and their understanding of the product and the direction that the company needs to go. Choices are being made without their support—input might be the right words. They don’t feel like they’re listened to on their teams or as part of their organisation, and that seems to be a trend of traditional organisations.
We’re just going to steer from the top; therefore, we actually don’t care what the people on the ground say or do or understand. That’s irrelevant. We’re making the decisions at the top, and unfortunately, it’s the people on the ground that tend to be closest to the market. It’s the people at the top that tend to be furthest away from the market, and this constant ignoring of the realities of the market, the realities of the situation, the realities of the product, the realities of the quality of the product breeds contempt in the people that are doing the work for the organisation they work for.
A great example is that I used to work for an organisation in the UK, pretty near to where I live. This was back when I was an employee, and I think it was one of the last employee jobs I had. There was absolute, abject, and constant contempt by every single employee for the organisation they worked for. So much so that they had a nickname for the company. The company at the time—I don’t think it exists anymore—was called Intelligent Finance. It was one of the first internet banks, but the nickname that the employees had, at least within the bounds of what I was interacting with for the organisation they worked for, was that they changed the “Intelligent” to “Incompetent” and the “F” in Finance to a Scottish term for somebody who’s not very smart.
If you’re going to think of your company as incompetent, what does that mean for the attitude and investment that people bring to work every day? It’s going to mean that it’s reduced or doesn’t even exist. There were a number of things that kind of led to that feeling. I remember while I was there, there was a new CIO for the organisation who admitted that he had trouble with email. This is the Chief Information Officer for the organisation admitting that he struggled to leverage email as a tool. You can’t make that up.
The guy I sat next to, a user experience person, admitted to me that he felt like he was unemployable because he’d worked there for four years and not done anything new. Think about those things. This was back in 2005 or 2006, so we’re pretty far into Windows 2000, pretty far into the .NET Framework and all of those capabilities. I had an NT4 workstation as a .NET developer. NT4 does not support .NET, so it took me weeks to get a badge, and then I had to request, using my badge, a machine to be installed under my desk that ran Windows 2000 that I could then remote into from my desktop.
That disconnect—that’s the focus here. That disconnect between what the people are doing and what the organisation believes is happening in the direction they believe that they’re going is the problem that creates that kind of disgust, contempt for the organisation that people work for. They don’t believe that it’s going anywhere; they don’t believe that they’re just there for the paycheck, and that’s it. I quit. I was the shortest employee ever at this organisation. I quit after six weeks. I did not want to exist in that culture of contempt for their organisation.
One of my favourite sayings is, “Change your company or change your company.” So I went with my feet and walked out the door. What is your organisational culture? If you’re in leadership, how do the people on the ground see your organisation? Do they believe in what you’re doing? Do they feel like they’re engaged and involved in what it is you’re trying to achieve? Do they feel listened to? These are all the things that create a group of people that are engaged and want to see the organisation succeed.
Unhappy, sad people don’t build amazing products; they build unhappy, sad products. One of the core responsibilities and accountabilities of leadership is to create a happy, engaged workforce that wants the organisation to succeed, and you can’t do that by just telling people what to do.
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