The Drama Triangle vs. The Empowerment Dynamic

Within product teams, between product teams, and with stakeholders, there can be conflict. In the 1960’s, an American psychiatrist named Stephen Karpman mapped out three roles that people play in conflict. He created a model that illustrates destructive interaction, and called it the Drama Triangle. (Karpman loved the dramatic arts, and found these archetypes to be roles we play, or masks we put on, in conflict scenarios.)

The Hero

The Hero (also called the Rescuer) wants to save the day. But the action is often a quick fix that makes the problem go away, not a long-term solution. The Hero is motivated by wanting to be right. And this can result in acceptance and praise from others, but their heroics are limited in effectiveness and don’t address the underlying issues. Often a Hero might jump into the middle before knowing all of the facts, so a true solution wouldn’t be possible.

The Villain

The Villain (also called the Persecutor) wants to place blame. They want to figure out who is at fault and throw them under the bus. Occasionally they blame themselves, but more often they point the finger at someone else. Many times the blame goes to an undefined “they”, in the form of blaming “management” or “engineering”. When you are speaking with a Villian, it can often feel like gossip.

The Victim

The Victim is driven by fear. They pursue personal safety and security above all else. Victims can list many reasons why they are the real victim of a person, circumstance, or condition. “I was never trained on that”, “There’s not enough time”, “Nobody is helping”, “I’m not allowed to talk to customers”, etc. The Victim operates from a place of powerlessness and helplessness. Victims will seek help, creating a Hero to save the day, who often perpetuates the Victim's negative feelings and leaves the situation broadly unchanged.

Note: In this model, Victims are acting the part, they are not actually powerless/being abused. But accusing someone else of “playing the victim” and gaslighting them is a classic Villain move!

In 2009, a way to distrupt these interactions was published. David Emerald created The Empowerment Dynamic (TED*) which stops the reactive nature of the Drama Triangle and empowers new roles.

VICTIM > CREATOR

Victims stop thinking “poor me” and become Creators. Victims are reactive - focusing on scarcity, considering themselves powerless, and not seeing choices. Creators, however, claim their own power in a situation and focus on possibilities. Creators take responsibility and look for what they can do to alter a situation.

VILLIAN > CHALLENGER

The Villain stops blaming and becomes the Challenger. Where the Villain points finger about the present situation, Challengers bring new perspectives to others through positive pressure in a way that creates a breakthrough. The Challenger inspires and motivates, a kind of teacher who points the Creators opportunities for growth.

HERO > CoACH

The Hero stops trying to save the day and becomes the Coach. The Coach is a support role, helping others create the lives they want and evoking transformation. Heroes take over and micromanage. Coaches facilitate and encourage. A Coach leaves the power with the Creator, not taking it for themselves.

Shifting to the empowered roles instead of the sabotaging ones has to be a conscious move, but one that can be implemented within a team that has good trust and psychological safety. Conflict and tension will always be present to some degree, but we can better manage it and our reactions to it.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Present The Drama Triangle and Empowerment Dynamic to your team. Use this 3 minute video to help illustrate. Talk to your team about what roles they most often play, and in which scenarios. One person might always choose the same role, or they may play different roles based on the people or circumstances involved. How can your team support each other when they see the drama roles surfacing?

Team Health - Speed and Trust

In their book “Move Fast and Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems”, Frances Frei and Anne Morriss speak to the need of not only speed, but trust. Gone is the mantra of “move fact and break things” which wreaked havoc on people and teams. We can gain speed while maintaining trusting empowered teams. While the book is not about product teams specifically, all the lessons easily apply.

Frei and Morriss created a “FIX” map of Fast Iterative eXcellence. There are four potential trajectories for your product team.

The Four Quadrants

• Inevitable Decline
  - Diminishing stakeholder value
  - Transactional culture
  - High team member cynicism

• Responsible Stewardship
  - Oriented toward the past
  - Consensus decision-making
  - High team member comfort

• Reckless Disruption
  - High innovation
  - Stakeholder churn
  - "Us" and "them" thinking
  - High team member anxiety

• Accelerating Excellence
  - Rising stakeholder value
  - Balanced culture of creativity and achievement
  - High team member confidence and creativity 

While a team prioritizes work and builds roadmaps it can be useful to weigh these dimensions. Product teams should have a foundational level understanding of speed and trust. We need to treat pace and momentum as mission-critical, but also focus on gaining and keeping the trust of our cross-functional partners and stakeholders. In turn that trust can unlock speed. If all involved trust the plan, in an empowered team, everyone can execute that plan at an accelerated pace.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Create a FIX map and have your product team rate themselves. At first glance, where would you rate your product team? Are you moving fast or slow? Are you building or losing trust with your stakeholders? Don’t overthink it too much, just pick a quadrant and map your team to it.

If you land in the Accelerating Excellence section, great job. These teams are are creating high and rising value for stakeholders and users, and the folks in the team itself. You and your teammates are energized and delivering creative solutions.

If you are in Responsible Stewardship, you are missing the mark on your potential impact.

And Reckless Disruption is likely inflicting a lot of collateral damage in your sprint toward your goals.

Inevitable Decline doesn’t have the advantage of either trust or speed, and really needs some help.

For those not in accelerating excellence, think through how you knew where you landed. How do you understand the tradeoff of being in one of those three quadrants that is lacking? Maybe for those in responsible stewardship, you thought about how many processes any given thing has to go through and the fatigue that comes with that, or how you’ve lost talented colleagues and now can’t keep up. If you are in reckless disruption, maybe you are feeling how what you are delivering isn’t quite meeting user needs or is causing technical debt you can’t get away from. For those in inevitable decline, maybe it just feels bad to come into work some days, you’ve got some frustration and cynicism about your team or situation.

Knowing where the team rates itself provides two areas (trust and speed) to take a further look at and see where improvements can be made. Perhaps this is an exercise to revisit periodically as you work towards improved team health.

Supporting Introverts on Product Teams

Extroversion is praised within American (and similar) society. People who speak the most, process thoughts out loud, or are very social often get a lot of attention, and it is typically positive. They often appear more confident or assertive. Extroversion can be a proxy for competency.

But it wasn’t always this way. In Susan Cain’s book “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking,” she traces the history of valuing extroversion to the changing society of the industrial revolution. American values shifted when we moved from distributed agricultural communities and migrated into larger metropolitan areas. As members of small, close-knit communities centered around farming and family, society placed value on inward traits like work ethic, integrity, and kindness. But the new industrial cities created more anonymous environments, and the ability to stand out or have your individual ideas heard became more important. Extroversion was realized as a positive trait. (Susan Cain also has an excellent TED Talk on the power of introversion.)

Introversion and extroversion may be opposites, but most people fall somewhere on the spectrum between them. The exact middle would be defined as an ambivert, a true balance of either end. Introversion or extroversion also may depend on a person’s environment or familiarity with a group.

Regardless, the goal of a product team is to empower all members of the team to actively contribute. We are also always looking for team members bringing a variety opinions and outlooks, and having a diverse team in terms of personalities is beneficial. Having introverts on the team can balance the more outspoken personalities. Introverts can also bring a level of thoughtful deliberation and depth of perspective, where extroverts may be quicker to act.

However, just having diverse personalities on the team is not enough - you must accommodate everyone’s communication styles to encourage their participation. In addition to psychological safety, there are other ways to create a more inclusive experience for all personalities, especially in our meeting-centric business environment. Generally these accommodations lead to more thorough and thoughtful discussions and decision-making.

• Collaboration Tools - I am a huge proponent of Miro, but any collaborative virtual space can do the trick if it provides real-time commenting in multiple modes. Polling during a meeting can also be helpful here.

• Collective Brainstorm prior to discussion - Many of my stand-up prompts follow a similar format of asking a question of the team, providing an opportunity to answer individually (usually through stickies on a board) and then coming back together to discuss. Even if all ideas don’t get discussed, they are usually all read, and will be recorded in meeting artifacts.

• Agendas! - Letting meeting attendees know what topics will be discussed or what decisions will be made provide those people who need a longer deliberation time to do so prior to the meeting starting.

• Asynchronous “meetings” - Beginning a dedicated discussion thread via Teams or Slack allows team members to answer once they are confident, or to decide on the correct wording before sharing.

• What else? Brainstorm more accommodations with your team through the stand-up exercise below.

And, perhaps one of the best considerations of all personalities is simply making space for them. Paying attention to the different needs and preferences of everyone - and valuing those individual differences - creates a culture of respect and acceptance within the team. That leads to better team health, and happier team members - regardless of personality.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Ask your team to take an introversion/extroversion quiz to see where they might fall on the scale. I had my team use this one from TED.

In our stand-up, we discussed results by polling based on the quiz result. Then, they answered the question of their own accord, placing a dot on a spectrum of where they felt they landed between extrovert and introvert both in their professional life and their personal life. Discussing how these roles flipped for folks between the two environments was very interesting.

We ended with a brainstorm and discussion prompted by the question “How can we better accommodate team members along all points on the scale in meetings / ceremonies / work streams?” The goal is to incorporate those ideas into our product team meetings.

Control versus Accomplishment

Employee burnout continues to be on the rise, with more than 50% of US workers experiencing at least moderate burnout. As a product leader, keeping a pulse check on your team members can help you spot burnout tendencies before they arise.

There are several risk factors to burnout:

1. Workload - everything you are responsible for, along with the access to the resources and support you need to meet those responsibilities

2. Control - your ability to direct or change your own work, setting your own goals and boundaries (can you say no to a request)

3. Reward - are you receiving recognition, opportunities, a sense of accomplishment, or simply positive feedback for your work

4. Community - a psychologically-safe environment, where you feel supported and connected, unafraid to show up authentically. Additionally, is the community consistent and fair, or reflect your values.

Three symptoms characterize workplace burnout:

• Exhaustion

• Cynicism (including distancing yourself from work)

• Inefficacy (or feelings of incompetence / lack of achievement)

Being transparent with your product team about what contributes to burnout and if your team is feeling any of the symptoms can help identify where changes might need to be made. It is important to note that while personal factors may complicate or compound burnout, it is by definition a workplace phenomenon. It is about the systems, structures, and demands of the workplace, not the individual employees.

There are many ways to pulse check with your team. The below is based on a weekly survey by Boston Consulting Group that they instituted while experimenting with predictable/mandatory time off. Awhile back I wrote about a tool called Care that provides a questionnaire as well as actionable insights. Regardless of how you do it, these discussions with your team should be a regular part of product team health check-ins.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

Using a survey or the matrix below, ask your team a series of questions based on two factors - control and accomplishment. These are two of the major risk factors when it comes to employee burnout. For control, ask how much predictability or stability team members might have regarding their workload and their schedules. For accomplishment, ask how much value they feel they are providing or if they’ve learned something useful lately. Understanding where team members fall on these axes can provide some insight to their potential levels of burnout.

To push the exercise further, ask team members what type of activities or interactions provide them the largest sense of accomplishment. Potentially think about answers on a timescale of daily, weekly (or by sprint), quarterly, etc. Are there ways you can facilitate or cultivate more of those types of activities?

Product Team Roles

Books are written, podcasts are produced, TedTalks are given, all about product and product teams. So much so that it can seem like there is only one correct way to build a product team. However, a more encompassing approach might be to take an Agile mindset to building a product team. At its root, a product team is a cross functional team (a team with members from different functional areas) who are united to design, develop, and ship a product that fulfills the target user's needs.

How that team is comprised can vary. The core components of responsibility can be met by specialists or generalists. You can have just a couple folks on the team or enough to eat two pizzas. Your organization may have both a product and a project structure, which introduces a new set of players.

Regardless of who is on the team, responsibilities should be defined. Everyone on the product team should know their role. This chart is generally what we shoot for within the teams I manage - from a product perspective. This chart does not include engineering roles. In a different organization, you might also want to add a product marketing role, or more.

Note that the headers of these columns denote a role on the team, not necessarily a job title. The team just needs to agree on who is performing what role.

The idea is that with agreement on who does what within the team, there is more empowerment for that person to take responsibility for the items within their jurisdiction. There is more individual autonomy and accountability, which leads to better team autonomy and accountability. The visibility into each other’s roles also allows for more communication within the team.

Teams evolve over time. New roles are needed as the team matures; folks leave and don’t get replaced; the product changes and requires a different setup. Periodically, the team should evaluate what is working and what might be missing. Iterating on the team construction is also part of the Agile process.

If you are a director or portfolio manager, you may also need to consider how you structure your product teams within the larger organization. There are just as many options here, which we can perhaps cover in the future.

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STAND-UP EXERCISE

A product team should all agree on roles and responsibilities. If you do not have a responsibilities chart like the one above for your team, you should construct it. An Agile coach or a manager can help bring an unbiased eye if there are any questions or discrepancies in jurisdiction.

One you know who is doing what, a good discussion can be “who are we missing”? If another person could be added to the team, which role would be most beneficial to add them into? Portfolio managers, this is a great exercise to see if your organization is under-emphasizing certain areas of product management.