Agile Leader Patterns for Building Awesome Agile Teams
The patterns are not obvious.
A change in leadership behavior is key to building Awesome Agile Teams. We have built many misconceptions over time on what makes a stellar team.
This collection of posts debunks the myths and provides the realities of what ingredients are necessary to build awesome teams. Six supportive Agile patterns are outlined:
- Encourage Different Perspectives: Contrary to popular belief, teams work best when there are disagreements amongst the members on the best path to solve a problem. In the presence of different opinions and some constructive friction, the solution will be more innovative.
- Stabilize Teams: In contrast to our typical instinct, keeping a team intact for a long period of time will increase the team’s performance. Furthermore, the team will continue to improve the longer they stay together.
- Small is Big: This third post in the series debunks the thinking that larger teams are more effective. Smaller teams promote easy attainment of shared understanding, collaboration, expendient flow to done, and rapid learning.
- Encourage Face-to-Face Interaction: Face-to-face communication is key for enabling optimal team communication and collaboration. This remains true in spite of today’s advanced remote technology.
- Enable Self-Organization: Self-organization is not easy to achieve, but it is the best thing you can do to set up a team for success.
- Serve the Team: Serving the team is not a manager’s first instinct. Often a manager feels the best way to serve the team is to direct them and ensure they do not fail. This actually works against the power and capability of a team by shutting down innovation and self-organizing behavior.
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