Many job descriptions focus on skills—usually technical skills. Interpersonal skills may get a passing mention—“strong communication skills,” “collaboration,” or “teamwork.” But when you are filling a team position, you have to think both more...
In response to a tweet on the benefits of stable teams, someone asked whether I’m against changing teams (aka re-teaming) in response to business needs. I am not. I’m against churn. There are plenty of good reasons to re-form teams to meet organizational...
Do you want the benefit of the team effect? Engagement Creativity Results that are greater than the sum of the parts Great teams aren’t the result of some magic and mysterious chemistry. While you can’t guarantee that a group of people will gel...
Managers who have invested effort and money in training teams in Agile methods want to see team improvement–reasonable enough. I describe a handful of measures that indicate the organization is improving over all in posts( here and here. Some of these...
Hiring new people for a team should always be a joint decision that involves team members. After all, who has more at stake than the people who will work with the new person day in and day out? Consider what happened when a well-intentioned manager decided to hire...
Last week, I posted a mind map that shows the benefits of the team effect. But what about the costs of a team that is not doing well? A team that isn’t working well doesn’t have a neutral effect. A struggling team costs the people and the organization in...
A while back, I posted a little mind map about business costs of a struggling team. But what about the benefits of the team effect? What does a business gain when teams thrive?
Agile methods depend on effective cross-functional teams. We’ve heard many Agile success stories…at the team level. But what happens when a product can’t be delivered by one team? What do you do when the “team” that’s needed to...
Many companies have policies that govern the selection and hiring process for new employees. Not a bad thing. But I’ve noticed that in many of the companies I visit–especially the big ones–the guidelines put far less rigor around hiring people for...
A managers role regarding effective teams starts long before the work actually begins. It starts with team designing and forming the team. The 60-30-10 Principle J. Richard Hackman, studied teams for decades. One of his most significant findings is that 60% of the...
Many of the companies I work with want the benefit of the team effect in software development. The managers in these companies recognize the enormous benefits teams provide to the company–creativity, engagement, learning. They want to support team-based work....
“A talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while there is determined by his relationship with his immediate...
How can managers support teams to truly support team responsibility? In the early days of Agile, some pundits (and developers) declared, “We don’t need no stinking managers.” They asserted that if teams were self-managed, management work was waste....
What’s the purpose of team values, norms, working agreements, and simple rules? Bob Sutton posted a piece on Team Guidelines that got me thinking how team values can be shaped and influenced. The guidelines–all Mom and Apple Pie–were handed down by a...
Conflict is inevitable at work. Sooner or later, people will disagree. Might be about what to test or how to implement a feature. Team members may disagree about what “done” means, or whether “always” means 100 per cent of the time or some thing else. If...
InfoQ picked up my post, Team Trap #1: Messing with the Membership, and contrasted it with Mike Cohn’s advice that a PO, manager or scrum master who observes that the team is too homogeneous might stick a couple of new team members to increase diversity on the...
A team is a social unit, a group of people who work collaboratively to accomplish some goal. Every team is a group of people, but not every group of people is a team. I hear the term applied loosely–describing anything from a collection of individual...
“These part-time people just aren’t accountable,” a manager complained. “I need people who will be accountable.” “Part-timers just don’t seem to fit in with the team,” another manager declared. “I do everything I...
The answer is (of course): “It depends.” Self-management is a spectrum, not a point. How much self-management is right for a team depends on that team. I see many teams in small companies and start-ups who self-manage. They set product goals, make...
I talk with many managers–and some coaches–who complain that their teams can’t function without a leader. “Leader,” in these conversations, usually means someone who set standards, assigns work, tracks progress, tells people what to do. That is not...
