Originally published 2017.
Today I participated in a meeting where N people were matched to M tasks. None of the N people were in the room. None of the M tasks were fully understood. And yet, the folks doing the matching looked completely confident in the decisions they were making.
N people, M tasks, match ‘em up. Seems like the most basic management task, but it’s one that conceals (or reveals) a profound truth about managing.
Constraints
Matching people to tasks is a difficult problem. Any solution must:
Address the most impactful tasks.
Not address less impactful tasks.
Put enough (but not too many) people on each task.
And these decisions must be made with necessarily-insufficient information. Which people would be best suited to which tasks is not known. Which tasks are most impactful is not known. The relative numbers of people per task is not known (and changes depending on the people).
Matching people to tasks is a people problem, not an operations research problem.
Matching people to tasks can like a bin packing problem. Or Tetris. Or even chess. Any of these metaphors is a mistake. Matching people to tasks is a people problem, not an operations research problem. Treating it like a game with rules ignores the most valuable and, if it’s managed for, abundant resource in our world: enthusiasm.
Allocation
Daniel Pink’s Drive breaks it down—people are enthusiastic when they have:
Autonomy
Purpose
Mastery
Moving people around like chess pieces eliminates autonomy and masks a lack of purpose.
This is already a process that matches N people to M tasks: allocating people to teams. Applying that here, leaders would articulate the purpose associated with the tasks and ask people to sign up for what they want to work on.
Objections
What if nobody signs up for a task? Maybe the tasks really isn’t all that important. Maybe the leaders haven’t articulated the purpose of the task sufficiently.
What if the wrong numbers of people sign up? Let that become a problem. Nobody knows the precise correct proportions. Publish your guess and let people balance themselves out.
What if the wrong people sign up? Only the people know whether they are burned out and ready for something new or picking up steam and ready to dig in. And nobody knows a priori who should do which tasks anyway. So don’t sweat it.
Conclusion
The enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves. They have context, in the form of accountability and purpose and approximate proportions, but to preserve enthusiasm they must make their own decision. And a fired up engineer is five times (for some value of five) as valuable as that same engineer just putting in hours.
Thanks for another great article!
I mostly agree with the sentiment that "the enthusiasm-enhancing way to allocate people to tasks is to let the people allocate themselves." However, I was left mulling over a thought after reading this - when is it appropriate and/or justified to intervene?
Sometimes we don't have the "courage" to take the initiative and work on novel projects. I feel that part of the human condition is to have a tendency towards fearing the unknown, whether that fear is warranted or not. This can come at the cost of working on more fulfilling projects. Given that, isn't there a balance to be found -especially for our less experienced geeks- between "autonomy" and their "mastery"?
One way I have been trying to help the geeks around me feel safe in the world is by pushing them towards more challenging endeavors. I noticed this often requires limiting some of their autonomy, but it is always with the intention of helping increase, respect, and foster their sense of self-efficacy and mastery. I have found that, for the most part, they seem to be more fulfilled that way.
Love it. Letting people choose what they work on would be a huge quality of life upgrade for many workers. And letting people work on what excites them can only boost productive as well. Seems like a win/win. I wonder why so few organizations practice it?