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.