Where is my Striker?

Do you really know your team? Are you aware of each one weaknesses and strengths? Are they ready to win the championship (or deliver the requirements)?

The Team Competency Matrix, one of the practices from Management 3.0, can help you, not only answer you these type of questions with facts, but also assist you to direct efforts and energy to develop your team where needed.

The concept behind this exercise is quite simple, but it's really powerful. Actually, teams from any field may leverage this practice. Let me move away of our office environment for a while and talk about a passion for most brazilians (like me): Football (or soccer for our American colleagues). Imagine a Football team, like Corinthians (the team I root for -- "No comments, please :-)" - and think about how you would put together the right set of players to win the championship.

In my mind, the first question would be: Which are the "functions" needed to be performed?

• Protect the goalie.
• Block shots.
• Stop the other team's offensive players from passing, receiving, shooting and scoring.
• Find opportunities to move the ball forward on the field via passing.
• Take throw-ins.
• Take corner kicks
• Defend the goal
• Sometimes take goal kicks.

Then, you need to figure out which types of resources do you need to fulfil these functions: goalies (at least 2, don't forget the bench), attackers, defenders and middle-fielders.

After that, considering each player have distinct levels of skill for each existing "function" on the field, adopt three levels of expertise -- 1 (Can't do), 2 (Can do) and 3 (Can Teach How to Do) - and build a matrix, like this:

As you can see, this brings a lot of transparency for the skillset available. Ideally, you should have a team where every function can be performed by *at least* one person. Also, you should identify where are the green dots, because these people are key in replicating knowledge and therefore strengthening the team as a whole!

Now, back to my experience in the office - I had the opportunity to facilitate the development of a similar mapping for one of our Agile squads. The objective of the practice was two-fold: firstly, identify the team's bottlenecks in terms of skills and then to ensure everyone knows how each colleague can help deliver the requirements.

Here are the steps I took to build the team's matrix:

1. Created the above basic frame for the matrix (which I made available for download in this page!) and uploaded it into Microsoft Teams, to allow the team to update it as needed. I took time to pre-populate the lines with functions I knew and columns with the name of the team members to facilitate the work for the team.
2. During our team retrospective meeting, I presented the matrix to the team, explained the objective and asked them to do two things: to assist revising the matrix and adding more lines (new functions) if he/she felt there is something missing and, after that, to provide a self-evaluation for each of the functions.
3. Provided a time box for answers gathering.
4. Presented the results during the next meeting and allowed the team to reflect about what we found!

Based on the information obtained thru this exercise we will now work on a competency development plan. The matrix itself became a living document, attached to our Trello Board, and is reference to be consulted and maintained by the team.

I hope this article helped spark some ideas in your mind on how you could leverage this practice on your team and I would be more than happy to receive your feedback and exchange ideas about how to leverage Management 3.0 to develop people and improve business results!

In time, if you are interested in more information about Management 3.0 and the Competency Matrix, please follow this link:

Best Regards,

Tulio Polonio