Cool article... very dense... A lot of info you've been studying.

I'm huge into making my team the best. I find that I consistently end up being the team's cheerleader. People are not machines, and I think they need a lot more encouragement than most managers are willing to give.

Sometimes I think when management wants to put teammates into a spreadsheet, assigning roles according to some formula that they've studied, rather than focusing on the hurdles of a project, and then they want to press a button and start asking "When you gonna be done?"

Understanding roles is important, but only if that role and those expectations are clearly communicated to those who are supposed to take up the role--and then the teammates actually step up and take them on. Otherwise it's just going to be one more assignment that's as poorly defined as the project itself.

When that happens I find my loyalty to a project wanes.

Another trouble to defining team roles too rigidly is that people change over time--especially as the project becomes better defined. Even I've felt times when my enthusiasm is numbed, especially when my ideas are not given validation.