Stewardship

Stewardship is a key function that is often lumped in with project-specific management, but which really need not, or even should not, be. It may be extremely beneficial to disentangle an individual's project-specific concerns from the concerns for that individual’s well-being. Since Stewardship is not project-specific, it need not be provided by someone on the same team, or even by someone with any kind of “management” designation. For instance, some engineer may not want formal “management” responsibilities for a project but may have very strong emotional intelligence and be willing to, with say 20% of their time, play the Steward role for a small handful of other employees, regardless of what they work on in the company.

In this way, Stewardship can be distributed throughout the organization so the role can be played by the people most suited to it, without confounding it with project-specific management functions. Some fraction of the company, say 20%, who are most suited for the role, should be explicitly and continuously trained in Stewardship and provide, say, 20% of their time as Stewards for other employees. One of Informal's engineers reflected on their experience with the stewards program in their blog post.

In our experience, it was helpful to bootstrap the Stewards program by engaging experienced coaches to serve as initial Stewards for everyone and to help train people internally to take over stewardship roles.