When religion is a blasphemy

"Scrum is my new religion" - exactly the kind of statement you'd expect from a real life incarnation of the PHB. Congratulations dear PHB, you have hatched the plot (oopss ... plan) to successfully "manage" to bring motivational levels of Alice to match those of Wally. It would not be too long before your entire staff would be required to wear leaf hula skirts, chant "bum for Scrum", and bow before the mighty Scrum lord for salvation.

Sadly, if you replace Scrum with any fad/buzzword/new tool probably you can relate the story to someone you already know. The PHB's are more common (and more weird) than I'd like to admit.

The task of a manager is to work with a team of people who have different ideas and view points, being able to align these varied perspectives towards a common goal, and facilitating the achievement of these common goals.

A real danger of having religious fanatics lead the pack is that they'd imagine the problems (goals for the team) that do not exist and then fit their religious practices in to solve the imaginary problems. If it weren't so sad, it would be amusing to see how disconnected from reality these fanatics can be. I've seen a manager working hard to improve productivity (and karma) of his team by forcing them to convert to vegetarianism.

If the manager has adopted a religion, how would s/he be able to appreciate and respect different ideas and view points? They'd end up ignoring valuable and enriching inputs that could have solved real problems effectively. Even if these inputs are not directly applicable they still serve a very useful purpose - stimulating a discussion and getting a stronger buy-in from the stakeholders by eliminating doubts in their minds.

Some managers get seduced by the seemingly easier way of getting the required alignment by forcing the entire team to convert. The only bigger blasphemy that a manager can commit than adopting a religion is to force his team to convert. An easy way to rationalize this approach is by convincing yourself that you know best and eventually the less knowledgeable team members would see the advantages once the benefits start pouring in. Having been on both sides of the fence, I can tell you from experience that it never works. This forced conversion violates the ideas and principles that team members truly believe in. They are never motivated enough to put their heart and soul in their work and consequently the imagined benefits never pour in.

Another issue with forced conversion is dealing with voices of dissent. Force conversion requires that one way or the other, these voices should be silenced - whether by reassigning them to grunt work, or by lowering their ratings, or taking them out of way of the implementation of new practices/processes. This might push the smartest (even if they are not the voices that were silenced, they are smart ;-) ) of the lot out of the organization - they'd always find a better job no matter how tight the market is. In knowledge industry, losing human capital can be a major setback, esp productive smart people sacrificed on the altar of experimenting with a fad to solve a problem that does not exist is a criminal waste.