Team Leadership Roles

greenspun.com : LUSENET : work teams : One Thread

We are re-exmining how leadership roles are used in our SDWT's in a software engineering environment. We would appreciate any examples of how others have implemented leadership roles in their team organizations. Currently we do not require teams to have a peer team leader. The teams do report to a coach who has multiple teams with approx. 45-60 people reporting to them. We have starpoint coordinators that have in the past been assigned to different people on the team--schedule, budget, quality, staffing, training, etc. We also have asked teams to have meeting facilitators. We also ask the teams to have a rotation plan in place for these roles. The problem we have run into is requiring rotation--some team members have neither the desire nor the skills to take on these roles. As engineers, many of them have the philosophy that all they want to do is technical work--write code, test, etc. and these other activities are not what they signed up for when they took the job. Have any of you tried any alternatives for still having the team take responsibility for managing these key performance areas with non-traditional SDWT approaches. WE are currently considering alternatives such as hiring and providing the teams with support staff to do the grunt work and communication/coordination associated with the starpoints-- with the teams still making decisions as needed. The other alternative would be to find existing employees on the teams who have the skill and desire to do the various roles and not require the teams to rotate the roles. We are also considering making a peer team leader role a requirement to ensure more accountability and follow-through on committments. If the team did not elect a leader the coach would appoint someone. The down-side is this could put a team member in the awkward position of being the heavy--what the former supervisors used to have to do but at least with a little higher salary. Is anyone out there compensating there team members for taking on some of these responsiblities? How-adjustments to base salary, stipends, bonuses, etc? I know this is a long post, but any thoughts or comments related to some of these issues would be appreciated.

-- Denise Palmer (palmerd@agcs.com), December 18, 1997

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