Don't Hate the Game; Uplevel the Game
Ensure your Unique Value Adds are recognized … and leveraged
When a team reorganization gave me a dev manager position in Windows, one of the first problems I spotted was that we didn’t have good clarity on how all the different roles and responsibilities of our team were being handled. If I asked enough individuals, I could eventually figure out each. But there was a lot of hunting involved.
My solution was to add a “Team Chessboard” table to one of my whiteboards. I created seven columns:
Team Member - Name of the team member.
Key Strengths - Beyond the standard engineer skills we expected, what does this individual excel at, to the point that they model this skill and could even teach the team how to grow this skill?
Ambassadorships - What is this individual passionate about? What do they advocate for? This could include aspects of software engineering, things that improve team dynamics, or aspects of team culture.
Team, Organization, Division, and Company - These represent the four meaningful altitudes in our company. What responsibilities does this individual have at these different altitudes?
With this table on my whiteboard, as I had 1:1s with my 8 leads and skip 1:1s with the 40 developers that reported to those leads, I would ask for their additions to this table. I would create a row for them and we would fill in the columns accordingly. “I organize all of the team’s lunch and learns.” “I am passionate about design.” They were also welcome to call out additions to make to the other rows. “Linda is our Watson contact for the division.”
Along the way, many people asked about why I called this the “Team Chessboard.” I said, “We’re not playing checkers, we’re playing chess. Our team is not a collection of uniform one-dimensional pieces. We are an aggregation of individuals, each with unique abilities. The pieces need to make their value adds known, and the players need to strategically utilize all the pieces for maximum win potential.”
Obviously, talking about people as game pieces can be dehumanizing. When I spotted any negative reactions, I would first say, “Well certainly you’d rather be a chess piece than a checkers piece, right?” That helped some, but my second response was far more empowering. “The players of this game are the leaders on our team. So, if you want to lead1, our Chessboard presents you with that opportunity.” (At the bottom of this post, I’ll share the evolution of this metaphor that gives team members even more power. But first I want to expand on what our Team Chessboard unlocked for us.)
This table grew over time, with regular “oh yea” additions, as new responsibilities were given to us, and as individual team members came and left. I never thought to do anything more with this until an office move forced my hand. The chessboard had lived entirely on my whiteboard for several months. Now I’d have to take a picture and recreate it in my new office, or … I could seize this opportunity and make an addition to our Team’s External Brain2.
I created a “Chessboard” page in our Team’s OneNote and transcribed the content from my whiteboard.
Over time, our published Team Chessboard accrued win after win. Here are the five key wins, in the order we discovered them.
Create clarity
Encourage contribution
Model scope growth
Publicize opportunities
Turn our Rewards Discussions into team strategy sessions
