Yesterday I expressed my discomfort with the term Individual Contributor to describe people not in management or leadership positions on LinkedIn.
I want to expand the idea to help people understand why we need to start adopting the Team Contributor (TC) term over Individual Contributor (IC).
Individual Contributor to refer non-manager roles.
In almost all organizations I worked, we used the terms managers/leadership and individual contributors to refer to different people’s responsibilities.
When we speak about ICs, we usually come with specific expectations.
They are not managers.
They might be leaders.
They do the deliverables like adding a new feature to the application, starting a marketing campaign, and creating new infrastructure, …
We expect them to be the people that get the job done.
Etc.
The problem with the term individual is that you cannot deliver value to the customers alone. We already identified years ago that today’s software complexity goes beyond what an individual can handle by themselves.
It’s a team activity.
The team is the minimum unit of delivery.
If you read Team Topologies, you might remember Chapter 3 is about Team-First Thinking. Let me quote a specific paragraph.
In this book, “team” has a very specific meaning. By team, we mean a stable grouping of five to nine people who work toward a shared goal as a unit. We consider the team to be the smallest entity of delivery within the organization. Therefore, an organization should never assign work to individuals; only to teams. In all aspects of software design, delivery, and operation, we start with the team.
Team Topologies - Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais.
I align a lot with this definition of team and being the minimum delivery unit. It changes a lot the mindset of people and which are their expectations of people.
The term you use is your culture
and how the organization will measure people’s performance.
Let me ask you some questions:
Do you rely on individuals to make stuff happen or teams?
When you consider a new feature, do you think about the team delivering it or expect specific people to do it?
Do you measure individual performance or team performance?
Do you expect an individual to build a feature and move into production (or the next delivery stage) or the team?
You might say that you care about the team, but your actions might say otherwise.
Start using the term Team Contributor tomorrow.
The language we use determines a lot of our behavior. Start using this term tomorrow and see how your behavior evolves into the team direction.
You might see sooner than later:
People start thinking more about the team as the minimum unit of delivery.
People start on how to collaborate to deliver value vs. thinking about their part mainly.
Performance Reviews start taking into account Team vs. only individual outcomes.
Of course, this has been happening in multiple organizations without using this term, but… why not be coherent in referring to non-management roles that reflect the team-oriented culture we want/have?
Meme for you
