Agile IQ®

Developing People and Teams

Influencing Behaviour. Secondary Factor.

Overview

All agile team members must continuously improve agile practices to increase the benefits and adapt as new challenges arise. Scrum Masters often fulfil coaching roles to serve this outcome.

Through team development, team members will have opportunities to build rapport with a foundation of acceptance. When people trust one another, they’re more likely to share ideas, collaborate effectively and make the right decisions for everyone and what they deliver.

Team development is easy, in theory

Those leaders who are capable of building and developing effective teams have amassed a critical advantage over others. When delivered correctly, team development can create an innovative atmosphere that encourages cooperation, teamwork and trust among its members.

But as most leaders know, team development doesn’t just happen; there’s a lot involved in turning a group of people into a functioning and productive team. At its core, team building is a considered process of transitioning separate individuals into a cohesive group. A group that is at once working interdependently and cooperatively to accomplish a specific set of purposes and goals.

In theory, the concept of team development is simple: amass a group of talented and engaged individuals and task them with completing a specific goal. In reality, the effort and planning that goes into team building is strategic.

Team development in context

When applied in real-world contexts, team development can get tricky, fast. However, there’s one point that continually emerges in studies and research as pivotal for leaders to understand: when a team’s cognitive, motivational, and behavioural resources are appropriately aligned with task demands, the team is effective.

This powerful alignment between a team’s intention and the task can be noted in a variety of everyday contexts. In a general sense, we can regularly witness effective team development in the sporting arena. The most successful sporting teams are driven by this alignment of motivation to work in unison to achieve a singular goal – defeat over their opposition.

The sports analogy can also be readily applied to the workplace. The most successful teams are those that connect, communicate and collaborate towards the achievement of a singular goal or task. It’s the role of effective leaders to know how to develop these individual strengths and direct them to realise the results that lie in wait within their collective potential.

Key focus areas

Ensure that each person truly understands their role and how it relates to other roles, including expectations of working as a team.
Provide training, and access to coaching and development tools.
Step away and let them self-manage according to the guardrails established by leaders.
Empower the Scrum Master and capability leads to meet with team members to discuss goals on a regular basis. Integrate this into the inspect/adapt cycle for teams and quarterly for the program.
Create a coaching plan for growth. Align individual and team-level growth to the capability needs of product delivery and the enterprise.

A manager's role: Build capability. Don't task manage.

As leaders promote self-organisation through establishing guardrails for delivery and decision-making, their focus shifts to:

Establishing agile operating models.
Using metrics to understand the effectiveness of their operating model.
Investing in capability development to enhance the effectiveness of the operating model.

Scrum Master's role: Build cross-functionality and self-organisation

Scrum Master’s aren’t delivery managers, but they are responsible for building the team capability that supports good delviery. Their focus:

Incrementally introduce self-management, the practices that can help it thrive, and the measures that help one determine if a team is able to be empowered to self-manage.
Coach and mentor to help people get better at their work, deliver more value, or resolve a conflict or problem.

Ensure people understand their agile roles

Key shifts for organisations is away from project structures toward product management. This requires people to understand:

How to work in long-lived, cross-functional teams.
Product management governance structures.

Invest in good team design

Cross-functional teams are the backbone of agile product management. This requires:

Time, planning and training how to work in a team environment over a task-driven/delegation work group structure.
Identifying skills and capabilities needed for each team to deliver increments of work without relying on other teams.
Shifting management control from managing functional team structures to understanding the effectiveness of the operating model and enhancing it.

Use Agile IQ® to understand gaps in the operating model capability

Agile IQ provides 27 behavioural factors that measure the effectiveness of agile operating practices.

Assess teams – What’s their Agile IQ?
Identify gaps – What are the lowest areas of agile practice according to Agile IQ?
Create change plans to invest in capability development to strengthen and enhance these areas.

Capability development: use Backlogs to focus teams on improvements