The democratic team

A team should aim for being something people want to engage with. It should give people new opportunities for learning and taking responsibility and, most of all, offer opportunity for both personal and career growth.

It isn’t entirely obvious how a team becomes something that enables this, and in this post we’ll discuss the complex interplay of competence and indispensability as things that, when left unchecked, can hinder some of that opportunity.

The team shares responsibility and ownership

If we wish to enable the team to shoulder responsibility and ownership of their work together, we must first think about what structures exist in teams.

A team usually has at least two distinct things in play that govern their day to day operations. One of them the group uses to create consensus, and another one is the social hierarchy of competence. Let’s discuss them both here.

The challenge comes from the fact, that idealistically, the most competent people should wield the most power within a group. On the other hand, a team is expected to shoulder responsibility as a whole, which is very difficult if the decision making is dictatorial.

Is democracy the answer?

The idea is that we should build social systems that enable people to have a sense of meaning or ownership about the things they do daily at work. A sense of agency. As we often get to define the internal structure of a team amongst the team itself, I believe democracy to be one of the prime building blocks that lead to this sense of agency.

For me, the sense of agency requires that I am given the opportunity to weigh in on the decision-making. It also means that, to a degree, I am able to question that which is established - and be heard when I feel things are going the wrong way. In other words, to engage fully with the immediate social structure around me. Enabling agency and opportunity should be the goal with social structures, because this makes work meaningful and engaging and “worth it.”

Idealistically, nobody should be toiling away or suffering for something that they had no part in deciding. Basically, every member of the team should voluntarily participate in decision making, and therefore aim to be equally responsible.

The competence problem

"appropriateness, capability, capacity, expertise, fitness, know-how, proficiency, qualification, savvy, skill, suitability, adequacy, makings, what it takes"

I say “competence problem”, because it isn’t entirely obvious how competence works within a democratic team.

A team should aim to delegate tasks to its particular members who are the most competent in said tasks - but not to a degree which drives the individuals to become indispensable oracles. On one hand, you should show appreciation to the strengths and specific interests of the individuals you have by allowing them to take ownership of wherever they want, equally. On the other hand, differences in competence should never lead to differences in opportunity for individuals.

This is the most important point, so let me give you an example:

If Sidney is the most competent at installing the FG-Filange to the Thingamajiginator, it should not be automatically assumed, that Sidney is the only one who can make decisions about FG-Filange installations and any details surrounding it. It should not be assumed that Sidney is the only person to install FG-Filanges within the team forever. Equally, if Parker joins a team later and Sidney installed FG-Filange years ago, it doesn’t make FG-Filange hallowed ground that Parker has no business in deciding about. Sidney can still do the installation if the team decides it, but it should still be everyone’s call what happens to the FG-Filange. Sidney’s competence on the subject should be weighed accordingly, but it should still be the whole team’s decision.

The above is an example of taking care of equality of opportunity even with differences in competence.

As the above example demonstrates, within the context of a democractic team “competence” becomes the skill of being persuasive. You cannot and should not get more votes than others, but you can persuade people to your cause. Ideally, you do this persuasion by bringing strong arguments and backing those arguments with facts. Ideally, your team also values those kinds of arguments in their decision making.

The major pitfall of a “democracy gone wrong” is that as a side effect, it can entirely devalue competence and past lessons and become a bad course of identity politics. This can lead to every single decision being revisited and there being no appreciation for the particular strengths of the individuals within your team, which equally eats away at the agency of the individuals.

Keep in mind that democracy is about shared decision making and shared ownership of those decisions - it is not about incorrectly assuming, that people are all the same or that they have the same skill sets.

As was established, a competence based hierarchy exists within any social structure. It is an absolute requirement that the team tries to acknowledge its existence and also manages any massive disparities within it by ensuring, that at least the domain knowledge spreads. You must also foster equal opportunity for everyone to take ownership of any area, and make sure information and past decisions are documented.

Just to be clear, democracy is simply a means to an end. It’s a tool for sustainability and work well-being. Democracy requires that a lot of time is spent on discourse and all the aspects are weighed for validity. Democracy should also require active acknowledgement about who is the most competent individual in any given topic (literally, you need to discuss this and have it out in the open). Everyone’s input in decision making should be valued accordingly. This also means that anyone who fights for any cause, must be ready to show evidence and back up their claims and competence with literature and source data. It also naturally follows, that when a claim is made on assumed competence, then the source of your competence is also up for discussion.

The oracle problem

Competence can naturally lead to being indispensable, and that is a position with many problems.

Indispensable means unsustainable, that’s all

First of all, from a work point of view, being indispensable means that not being present for any reason stops all work. People requiring you to decide on everything means every decision gets throttled behind you. Indispensability means that everyone is required to be at work when the indispensables are at work, which drives a culture of unsustainable working hours. People also never learn to make decisions and therefore learn nothing about carrying the outcomes of those decisions. The team not only makes decisions slowly, but also learns slowly.

On one hand, indispensability denies the group any character development, seeing as others cannot carry any responsibility. Responsibility is an absolute requirement for personal and career advancement and growth - it is what most companies use as a basis for salary advancement. Best case scenario is if your juniors are gently being pushed to take on more responsibility and the seniors are more than willing to let it go. This is actively managing the competence hierarchy.

On the other hand, from an outside of work point of view, being indispensable also means that you can never be “off duty.” You have to cater to colleagues’ schedules and you cannot be on leave, or else the group stops moving forward. In the worst case scenario you may return from a vacation just to find that nothing has happened or everything that has happened sorely needs to be revisited. These are the symptoms of having become indispensable.

Furthermore, people who tend to become indispensable tend to also have a skewed idea of their own value. They might be afraid of losing their position, or afraid that the value they bring is never enough. They might perceive their own competence in a distorted way or constantly be comparing themselves to others. The way these biases often manifest is that the misguided indispensables fit themselves into every nook and cranny and carry far too much of the effort on their backs. They do succeed in becoming absolutely indispensable, but as a result risk compromising their mental health and work-life balance.

A team requires oversight

To reiterate, for a successful recipe, both the competence hierarchy and the democratic method need active management and oversight. By which I mean that the team must actively pluck the weeds in both of these systems for the team to remain sustainable.

You must acknowledge and discuss openly that you have differences in competence. You must also acknowledge and discuss openly if someone holds disproportionate power over the group both within and outside. Most of the problems with equality and democracy arise by having implicit power structures that the people inside the team do not understand or can’t even see.

The way forward, is simply, open discussion.