With all the gravity of putting things out onto the Internet and never being able to take them back, I have made my proclamation that I have a management weakness - an almost complete inability to be able to mushroom manage with any degree on competence or efficiency. Now that it is out there I feel that a weight has been lifted from my shoulders - I no longer have to pretend and struggle to get it right. Also, there is the added advantage that if I ever find myself in one of those interview situations that ask "Describe a weakness and how your overcome it", I no longer have to rattle off a prepared 'I take my work home' answer. I can simply tell the interviewer "Google 'Simon Munro weakness'. I never overcame it. Next question please". Update I tested this and it is the first result.
What is mushroom management you ask? Well there are definitions out there but the best explanation that I have heard is "Put people in the dark, feed them sh1t and watch them grow". Mushroom management is everywhere, like a smelly tinge of pollution on the air - I should know, where I grew up there was a mushroom farm a few miles from where I lived. You get used to the smell, but it is always there.
Okay, so enough of the obscure definitions, what is mushroom management practically? The larger the organization, the more mushroom management there is and it is both broadly applied to all staff and in some cases at a more personal level. The broad applications that I have seen are practices such as conveying the feeling that you are lucky to have your job and had better not think about a raise or leaving. Companies will do this by creating a sense that benefits are good and making sure that they feature in 'The Best Companies to Work For'. At a more individual level there are incentive programmes that offer pretty much zero reward - burger flipper of the month prize, for example.
So let me try and describe it more generally. Mushroom management is any personnel management technique employed in order to:
- Get more time out of workers, and/or
- Reduce salary expectations, and/or
- Reduce staff turnover, and/or
- Reduce water-cooler grumblings
by:
- Creating a false sense of insecurity (e.g. you won't get a better salary out in the market), and/or
- Offering trinkets (e.g. two slices of pizza for four hours of work), and/or
- Telling people (individually or in groups) how great and valued they are but keeping it internal, and/or
- Hiding the real factors influencing the environment
- Creating a sense of achievement, but no measurable achievement
Mushroom management is not always a bad thing and doing away with mushroom management is not the same as full-bore participative management, which may be a bit much. I am quite happy to see mushroom management practices on burger flippers, but I can't see it working on highly skilled developers on an agile project - which is the reason for this post.
Agile, by its very nature requires a lot of open participation amongst the stakeholders. Developers don't need to know everything (such as how much profit is being made), but to function in an Agile environment they need to know the business drivers behind functionality that is on the backlog in order to come up with the best solutions. In an Agile world the delivery of a set of functionality is the primary reward and, in the right environment, a lot of energy goes into achieving this. Only with openness and communication can the right functionality be delivered - mushroom management results in effort being spent on things that the business may never even be interested in.
Excessive mushroom management inevitably results in a death-march project where deadlines, resources and functionality are fixed - the only things that change are an increase in hours worked per day and a decrease in quality. It is the lack of involvement (and intrinsic understanding) that results in the inability to estimate and the making of weak promises that are nonchalantly thrown aside.
In the context of embarking on agile projects, excessive mushroom management is one of the practices that needs to change. Doing away with it is necessary to create a development environment that has the maturity and propensity for agile. As much as I may try (and I have tried) I cannot pull off mushroom management, which may make me a bad manager (that and the inability to swing a golf club). I cannot stand up in front of my team and feed them sh1t, trying to squeeze the most out of their geeky lives. I have to be able to engage with them and open the blinds so that any fungus shrivels away like a vampire in the sun. I don't want burger flippers on my team, I want people who can see the bigger picture and help them reach out and touch it.
So I challenge all agile managers and team leaders out there. Do your management techniques have the corporate smell of mushroom management (which I know the developers can smell)? Or are you breaking the mould of management practice to embrace the principles that will make your project a success?
I have resigned myself to the inability to mushroom manage, I suck too badly at it to pull it off. I will continue to lead teams through technical and architectural leadership, and leave the mushroom management to, well, the mushroom managers.
Simon Munro