One of the characteristics of many teams that Casual Miracles has helped over the past few years is that team members have felt a lack of authority to make changes that are necessary to achieve success. Frequently this occurs despite senior management telling them that they can make the changes they want to.

Sometimes this is due to organisational constraints. In some very hierarchical, command-and-control organisations, by the time the message reaches those who have the ideas, it has been corrupted beyond recognition, and appears to be an admonishment to maintain the status quo or instruction to move in a different direction completely. Even without these confusions, and within a relatively shallow local hierarchy (one or two layers of management), team members can inhibit themselves because of a sense of impotence, with each team member thinking that others have greater authority because of a whole host of factors.

In most organisations hierarchical rank is a major component of a person’s authority and power. But the concept of rank is a complex, multi-dimensional notion that frequently speaks to our primate brains. Furthermore, rank is dependent on context and is relational; a person only has rank with respect to others and in a particular situation – there is no absolute rank.

The Problem

One such organisation we worked with recently suffered from just this issue. Various well-intentioned management attempts to help the team had actually reinforced this sense of lack of authority.

We ran retrospectives to try to get the team to cohere around certain issues and solutions. Almost every retrospectives followed a pattern of identifying issues, coming up with solutions and then declaring the solutions impossible because the team lacked the authority to apply the solutions.

An Exercise

Several years ago, I attended a course run by Ben Fuchs and Joseph Pelrine of CATeams entitled ‘The Deep Dynamics of Agile Teams’. A large part of this course was about rank, and this is where the ideas and material came from for this exercise.

After a (too) brief introduction to the concept of rank, we gave everybody a questionnaire which asked them to assess their own rank on 25 distinct dimensions (e.g. position in the formal hierarchy, education, gender, intelligence, self-confidence, etc.) placed into 3 categories (Situational, Social and Personal).

Having done that, we then asked everybody to pair up. We gave each team member another copy of the questionnaire, asking them to assess their partner’s rank in the same way. Having done that, we asked the pair to discuss the differences in the two assessments of each member of the pair.

What is striking about this process is that usually, individuals will assess their own rank lower than their partner’s assessment on many dimensions. In this instance, almost everybody afforded their partners greater rank than their partner had afforded themselves.

This is quite common and was actually the point of the exercise when Fuchs and Pelrine asked us to do it on the course.

Taking it a Bit Further

Somewhat on a whim, we asked each person to provide us with two post-it notes.

On the first, we asked them to write ‘<’, ‘=’ or ‘>’ if they felt that, in general, their partner had assessed their rank lower, equal to or higher respectively, than their own assessment of their rank.

On the second, we asked them to write ‘<’, ‘=’ or ‘>’ if they felt that, in general, they assessed their partner’s rank lower, equal to or higher than their partner had assessed his or her own rank.

Of course, given that software development teams (including testers, BAs and project managers) frequently believe that they have impeccable logic, this request was regarded with incredulity; ‘surely the results will be symmetrical?’ they asked.

However, once the team had done as we asked, we put the post it notes on display and found that in response to the first question, just over half of the people present felt that their partners had ranked them higher than they had ranked themselves. However, in response to the second, almost all believed that they had ranked their partners higher than than their partners had ranked themselves.

So to some extent the participants’ assessment of their own rank even coloured their assessment of the questionnaire results.

Conclusion

The message is that we frequently assess our own rank lower than other people assess it. The gap between our assessment and the assessment others make of us represents rank, authority and power that we can use if only we are prepared to wield it.