Focus On Team’s Culture
Focus On The Team’s Culture
The team’s culture will influence how they work, particularly the practices and behaviours they adopt and their adherence to them. Culture works for us to enable success or works against us to hamper success. We promote a team culture that will foster the behaviours that will enable the team to be successful.
In a Nutshell
Culture is a powerful force in determining the success of your strategy. In smaller organisations and teams, Craig Larman observes that in tiny young organisations, structure follows culture. Culture is created wherever people interact. It becomes the way of life in the group - the way it is around here. Peter Drucker observed the power of the people factor in an organisation, noting that the success of the strategy will be determined by the culture that surrounds it.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”
We have responsibility for helping the team’s culture align with the organisation’s “target” culture. A culture that fosters self-organising teams, who have a clear purpose, is a key component for organisational agility. The team’s behavioural norms are determined more by the culture they create together than by the team’s structure, systems and processes.
We ensure the team creates and sustains a healthy culture. We promote psychological safety and encourage good rigour and discipline as a behavioural norms for autonomous high-performing teams. Teams commit to create and sustain a healthy culture by adopting principles and practices that contextualise the organisation’s culture. This provides a reference to hold themselves accountable to the behaviours they have agreed together.
We must be intentional about creating an environment that permits healthy team cultures to be created. Leaders model the behaviours for the team to adopt and provide a link to the organisational culture and a context to help the team contribute to wider organisational purpose.
New people joining the team will be expected to conform to the culture. The culture is passed from one generation to the next. When people in the team do not conform to the culture, it disrupts the team. The individual must move in the direction of the team's culture, and the team's culture must also moves towards the individual. Leaders respond to cries for help and help the team resolve conflict.
We encourage teams to build capability - both culturally and functionally - to adapt and respond quickly to change without intervention from managers. We ensure the conditions exist for team members to grow and extend their domain mastery so that teams will improve capability, resilience and performance.
For teams to move towards high performance, a culture that fosters psychological safety is necessary for people to share ideas, problems and errors without fear of ridicule or punishment. Psychological safety promotes trust within the team, which is the foundation for the openness, information sharing and robust debate needed to establish rigour and discipline. A commitment to rigour and discipline can realise a willingness to self-organise around the work.
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.
Blameless Post-Mortems are adopted as part Google’s Site Reliability Engineering framework. The concept has existed for sometime as part of traditional Service Operations. Its use within SRE shows its adoption in "DevOps” too. In this context, post-mortems are used to analyse the causes of operational failures and to decide how to improve the situation.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Workshops are a significant investment of the time and intellect of the stakeholders involved - team, customers, leadership and others. It is essential that we strive to get the best outcomes we can achieve from every workshop that we execute. Effective workshop planning can give us a sequence of activities to lead participants from problem to solutions and prioritised actions.