Management and vision

So I had the opportunity to consider the challenges of management employees and vision of what is delivered out of a team the other day.

I was speaking with someone and they communicated that they felt that they really weren’t vested in what his team was developing.   They felt like they were going through the motions, and weren’t participating in the process of deciding the overall spectrum of the deliverable.

This caused me to think, how, as a manager, I can keep my team feeling like they are vested in the development process, other than  a paycheck.    I realized that it comes down to vision.

As a manager, and many times when we accept the role of manager, we have a specific vision of how the end product (the deliverable) will “be.”    As a manager its pretty easy to say “ok, this is what we’re going to generate, and here’s what I need you to do.”   Its a relatively straightforward process.

However, the issue with this approach is that manager’s employees no longer feel vested in the vision.    In Agile development they talk about the concept of stakeholders.   The idea with this management structure is that each product has a stakeholder, and that stakeholder creates the vision, etc.   This certainly works, however, as a manager, if we can develop an environment where all staff feels like they are an integrated part of the vision process, they’ll feel vested in the project, and be willing to “go the extra mile.”

Now that doesn’t mean that we should simply accept all of our employees visions.   Our job is manager is to process all the different ideas, take the ones that are appropriate, and explain to employees why the ones that aren’t appropriate aren’t appropriate.  If we put forward this extra effort, even if a team member’s vision aren’t implemented, they’ll feel like they are part of the process.


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