Does your team have momentum?

Imagine a developer in your team, unprompted, did:

• a refactor that nobody asked for but others liked

• a bug fix for a bug that wasn’t reported

• an improvement to a test suite

Assume this change took half a day.

Are you happy or upset with it? Is that a good or a bad thing? Did the developer go rogue or showcase initiative?

I think the answer lies in the perceived momentum of your team. If it’s perceived that there’s no time to waste (low momentum), such time spent feels misaligned with the absolute most critical mission important goals. And that is upsetting. If it’s perceived that the team is a powerhouse of delivering the goods, then improvements are great, as they are aligned with preserving what makes the team so good.

It’s important for you to know where your team sits and adapt to it. If you hear “we don’t fix things just because we can” you should avoid taking initiative by yourself. Initiatives require synchronisation and prioritisation, because time is of the essence. That might feel like a waste of time to you, but you have to consider that you taking actions that are perceived as you going rogue means people will perceive you as less reliable. It’s a net negative overall.

Team momentum is a hell of a drug and makes a lot of actions that seem bad become suddenly welcome. People are suddenly less concerned if you are running slightly in the wrong direction, because direction is in such an environment easy to correct. It’s much easier to correct course than it is to get things going.

So, does your team have momentum? And are you acting accordingly?