Fingers in the Dike

No matter how well roles and responsibilities are defined in your organization, problems arise that fall through the cracks and challenge the team. When this happens, many times a team member will rush to take ownership of the problem to quickly address it. In the classic analogy, this team member has "put their finger in the dike". Their willingness to rise to the challenge is a great benefit to the organization, and team members that are aggressive in addressing problems should be applauded. What inevitably happens, however, is that the team member who has their “finger in the dike” gets stuck owning the problem, even if it hurts the performance of the organization. It also the case that the people most likely to rush in to help solve a problem, will also be the people who rush in on future issues. If this is allowed to continue, a team member can easily become stuck doing a bunch of activities that aren’t value added for their role, and they end up becoming unproductive. Even worse, they end up creating bad behaviors for the team, as people who should be owning the problems believe they are not responsible for those issues. This can have the effect of de facto changes in the definition of roles and responsibilities over time and likely creates confusion in an organization. 

When thinking about a team member rushing to give help, I think a great analogy is thinking about a team playing defense in basketball. There are many times the offense will manage to get the ball into an advantageous position. At those times, defensive players need to rotate to the ball to help prevent the offense from scoring. If a defensive player rotates and stays too long, however, the offense will exploit the imbalance in the defensive alignment to get an easy score. In basketball, playing defense requires the defense rotating to help and then getting back to its best alignment. In engineering and development teams, like in basketball, its important team members rotate to give help when needed, and then quickly get back to their own position.

Leadership within an organization must always be on the look-out for team members who are stuck after rotating to give help. Getting them back to their highest value responsibilities will deliver the most benefit for the organization. Leadership also needs to follow up to understand why the team member had to rotate to give help and make sure the right person or team understands their responsibility for preventing or addressing future issues. As in most cases, it is good to start a conversation with people and teams that will be involved in crafting a solution, allowing everyone to buy into the solution.

Warning: It is common to have a team or team member try to push a responsibility "over the line” to another team or team member, meaning they are attempting to redefine roles and responsibilities. Starting discussions about what the right responsibilities are for a role in our organization will inevitably lead to this issue. Leadership must take a wholistic view of the entire organization when determining responsibilities and make sure ownership increases a role’s multipliers.

Rules of Thumb

• Encourage team members to rush in and fill gaps.

• Ensure team members understand it’s alright to hand-off a problem to others on the team that should own the responsibility.  

• When problems are handed off, make sure there is a positive hand-off.

• Ensure people rotate back to their roles and responsibilities once the hand-off is complete.

• Start and guide a conversation about who should own a problem or responsibility long term.