Focus on Teamwork
The idea behind gathering people together to work in teams is that we are stronger together - we are able to pool our combined strengths and are therefore likely to achieve more together than we would do apart. But that is not always the case as we sometimes produce better results working apart than together and, when we do come together, there are likely to be things that hold us back from functioning effectively as team.
In a Nutshell
As humans, we have the ability to carry out work by ourselves and as part of a team. Working alone allows people to focus without distraction, working with others allows us to pool resources and knowledge. The wrong activity in the wrong hands can lead to frustration, inefficiency and discord. On top of this, teams take time to form and, even when they do, some dysfunctions can remain. There are three areas where a rigorous and disciplined approach to team development can help.
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Adam Grant, the best selling author and organisational psychologist, says that the key to getting the best out of teams is understanding what is best done by the team and what is best done by individuals. Muddling the two leads to lower levels of motivation and productivity. We can think about how we support team time and alone time in the way we structure or days and weeks and also the way we design our workspace. A number of organisations use the Caves and Commons approach. Here, the team has a central area where they come together for team-based activities - the common - and have peripheral space dedicated to lone working - the caves.
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Bruce Tuckman way back in the 1960s demonstrated that when you bring a group of people together they are likely to go through several stages of development before they become a high performing team.
On top of this, teams rarely remain unchanged and therefore are always developing.
Disciplines that help the team understand its purpose, and how each person can contribute, can help the team form, manage changes, and move towards becoming a high performance team.
You can read more on team development stages in our Ideas section.
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Patrick Lencioni, the author of The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, states that in order for a team to work effectively they must:
learn to trust each other
engage in constructive conflict
deliver on their commitments
create accountability
focus on results.
These things rarely happen by themselves and it is not fair to expect the team to achieve these with willpower alone. Instead we can put disciplines in place that support all the factors named above.
Learning to trust each other and learning how to navigate conflict constructively should be key elements of team reviews and retrospectives.
Stakeholder reviews, if done well, can help the team deliver on their commitments, and continually improve on the commitments they make and the way they are delivered
Planning and prioritising activities need to focus on creating accountabilities and helping everyone focus on results.
Practices
Teams are encouraged to evaluate their own team health using a set of objective criteria. These criteria may be shared across multiple teams. Regular assessment of team health supports the analysis of trends. Individual trends typically reflect work undertaken by specific teams to resolve issues. Trends seen across multiple teams may also reflect the effect of changes made organisationally.
A Team Charter is a tool a team can use to express their purpose and the environment they require and provide a point of reference to commit to creating this together. It is a living declarationstatement that servesacts as the North Star describing why the team exists, their principles, what they do and how they go about their work.
New teams climb a steep learning curve and must progress through the stages of the group development model. Existing teams may experience periods of reduced performance, turbulence or conflict. These are circumstances in which it is desirable to support the team with coaching. Coaching helps guide the team as it acquires new knowledge or as it navigates its problems.
The Sprint Retrospective is a Scrum event. Its purpose is to allow the team to inspect and adapt its way of working, the functioning of the team, the working context and all other factors which may impact the team’s ability to deliver its goals. Some factors the team have direct control over, other factors will require external influence to change.
To deliver and support the product the team needs a full range of skills to avoid reliance on other teams, experts and other potential points of failure. The team needs to sustain its abilities in the face of inevitable changes in membership. It also needs to take account of developments in the technology it already uses and of the need to adopt new technologies that may be forecast in the product’s roadmap.
A Team Charter is a tool a Team uses to check that their behaviours and ways of working are in line with their purpose and the environment they want to create together. It is a living declaration that provides a point of reference for inspecting and adapting what they do and how they go about their work.
Pair working
Review team performance
Team formation