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Everyone wants to work with amazing people and teams. Why? What does it mean for a team to be awesome?
Teams are the foundation of organizations. Today it is more than proven that we need to give autonomy to those closest to the work, the product, the service, the customer – this is a basic principle of agile. If you have an amazing team, you will have more chances of success.
For simple reasons:
People make culture. When we hear someone say about a proposal for change, “this is not going to work here because of our culture”, we can translate that to, “it’s not going to work here because people don’t accept change, they fear the new, they look for culprits and not they recognize that everything can be better or different and thus achieve better results”.
For these reasons, to establish a business-friendly culture, we need to develop people around “healthy” and stable teams in an environment or system suited to each reality and purpose.
A team is a community where people meet, share, learn and grow together. How can someone belong to something that doesn’t have a name, image, purpose and values?
Maybe the purpose and values of the organization are too big for the team, they are inspired by the purpose of the organization and its values, but they need something closer, more personal and personalized.
We start shaping a team’s culture by defining its purpose. Every team needs a personality, a name, a brand and a reason to exist, that is, its purpose.
It is also important for the team to determine their values, principles that guide them in achieving their purpose.
Finally, it is vital that the team is clear about the roles each person should fill and their responsibilities (PO, Team Lead or Facilitator, Agile Master/Scrum Master, and a technical lead).
These elements are the basis for the formation of culture. Establishing culture must be a constant and tireless process, with the participation and collaboration of everyone.
Practices represent the way the team operates. How they plan things, how they organize themselves, how they deal with blockages and difficulties and how they demonstrate their work through metrics and process visibility.
We cannot doubt the power of practices. Teams that organize well around practices are amazing teams.
Teams must have what the Tribal Unity book calls MVA (Minimal Viable Agility), the minimum practices for a team to function, which are:
Incredible teams do not have practices as their goal but they continuously optimize and improve their processes using practices as successful tools, with continuous inspection and adaptation.
Incredible teams have a lot of clarity about their Value Stream Mapping. That is, where the demand arises and where and how it is delivered and to whom.
From this flow, the team creates a framework that gives visibility to each step of this flow. The framework associated with some techniques will help the team to identify bottlenecks and continuously improve the process. Incredible teams think with each cycle how their flow can be leaner, simpler and better, delivering more value.
Some of these techniques associated with flow are:
Another important characteristic of incredible teams is their natural ability to dominate their products, services and demands. They are able to easily “break” activities at the ideal level in order to facilitate their predictability of delivery and start to have more assertiveness in their metrics efficiently.
Building amazing teams is a big challenge. This construction needs to be aligned with strategy and other structure initiatives throughout the organization.
Creating culture, establishing practices and flow are ways to build really agile teams with the right temperature to deliver value to the business.
The role of managers is essential to generate a system or environment that favors the development of teams and how to work hard on all issues so that the team feels safe to carry out its work.
The leader of each team has a key role in this process, connecting and leveraging these 3 characteristics of incredible teams.
Quoting the words of Seth Godin (writer and speaker), “a team is a group of people connected to each other, connected to a leader and connected to an idea.” This illustrates the importance of teams in developing truly agile organizations.
The management platform has some agile practice tools on its platform that will help the manager to perform routine tasks focused on managing people and results. Discover and learn how some tools can help you on the journey: Moving Motivators , Niko Niko Calendar , Personal Mapping, and more!
