For years, I had a job that I hated. I was supposed to rank everyone in my organization. If I ranked everyone as a 5, HR would push back and tell me I couldn’t possibly have that many stars. I did, but they didn’t buy it. If I ranked everyone as a 3, I couldn’t get the money I wanted for raises. I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Then we moved to agile in the form of flow. I gotta say, I was blown away when every team’s throughput increased because they now had WIP limits and they worked as teams. Blown away. What was I going to do about the compensation?

I brought HR around on what I called “a walking tour” so they could see how the teams worked. Sure, people were still developers and testers, but they gave each other feedback and coaching. They found and fixed problems before any of the managers could help.

And my managers? Wow, now they were coaching and giving feedback about the really difficult problems. We’d been doing flow for about 14 months, and everyone had stepped up their game. It was time to bring HR into the mix.

HR decided we could try giving teams a rank. I explained that ranking a team didn’t make sense either. Each team worked on different work. We had to stop with ranking people against each other and talk with them about their careers and what they wanted to do. You should have heard the “Oooh.” We’re experimenting with results-based approaches. We’re trying to create double-loop learning as an organization.

I wouldn’t say we have rewards and compensation totally knocked. Each manager sits with a person to create that person’s personal results in terms of her or his career. In addition, teams are responsible for results. We stopped ranking people last year, which makes everyone feel happy. We’re on a path to reasonableness, which is what anyone, including me, wants.