Sustaining The Team
High Performing Teams are our most precious resource when we work with anAgileMind. We strive to sustain the teams that we build so they can realise their full potential to the benefit of themselves, our customers and our entire organisation.
In A Nutshell
Teams are made up of individuals and we care greatly about each colleague in our teams - this is the heart of human centred design. As we sustain our teams, we support the colleagues who work within the teams and give them the opportunity to demonstrate and build mastery, benefit from autonomy and realise the purpose of their work.
Working in a team requires that colleagues surrender some of their personal autonomy, adopting the culture and ways of working of the team. Some individuals are challenged by this need to be a part of something greater. Ultimately the inability to integrate successfully may threaten the team. This is a challenging and difficult problem to resolve and leadership must always be available to support teams threatened in this way.
Specific Practices
Sustain Team Learning
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.
If we claim to have anAgileMind we should actively seek out feedback from those around us. Feedback helps us to improve our performance by reinforcing our strengths and giving us the opportunity to overcome our weaknesses. Feedback is emotionally and physically costly to those who give it. We should respect the act of receiving feedback from others by taking care to act on it.
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.
Frequent, effective feedback is central to the agile mindset - it is at the heart of how we inspect and adapt in order to get better at what we do. Personal feedback is one of the most valuable ways of improving our agile performance. It is also one of the most challenging aspects of anAgileMind. It is challenging both for those who give the feedback and for those receiving it too.