Today we take on Chapter 7 of Great Big Agile, An OS for Agile Leaders by Jeff Dalton. In three more weeks, we will begin Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems (it is time to buy a copy).
Chapter 7 tackles teams with the Performance Circle: Teaming. Every team across the organization, whether it’s comprised of executives, middle-managers, or practitioners, can leverage the ideas in this Performance Circle. Team structure and behavior is the heart and soul of agile. As with all human behavior, having role-models is an important tool for creating and anchoring change. In agile transformation, all levels of leadership teams need to exhibit agile behaviors if they want other teams to adopt that type of behavior. Leaders that think agile and teams are just for people doing the day-to-day work make change difficult (if not impossible). When leaders act agile everyone in the organization knows it is safe to act that way (assuming HR gets the memo). This Performance Circle includes three holons. They are:
- Organizing,
- Growing, and
- Governing.
The organizing holon is sort of the precursor to any team-level activity. In this grouping of ideas, Jeff has organized the actions needed to generate a self-organizing and self-managing team. There are 11 performance level outcomes. When organizing teams, one idea to consider when creating teams (or reforming teams) is to spend the time to create a team agreement and then to regularly retrospect on that agreement. In that way, the team understands how they should behave toward each other and how to deal with conflict. Understanding how a team will make decisions is an often overlooked discussion when a team forms or changes. When this is not addressed teams are often dominated by a single individual who shapes the team structure his or her needs. This might work for a short period of time, but in the long run, is less effective for most teams.
The idea of self-organizing, cross-functional, and self-managing teams are some of the hardest ideas to implement for agile teams. One of the things early on is to recognize that just because you self-organize and self-manage doesn’t mean that you can do anything that you please; there have to be ground rules there. One of those ground rules is establishing a shared vision. All too often organizations say well we can’t be agile, can’t do self-organization, or can’t organize to establish cross-functional teams because it is not their culture. This is a cop-out, it’s not their culture because they choose not to behave that way. Generally, it is “someone” that doesn’t want to behave that way either because they are afraid or they have decided it does not support their goals. Understanding where the barriers is a critical step in the change management need to actually get to agile a team or organization to be agile versus being “agilish.” The latter provides far fewer benefits.
The three holons start with creating the team and structure, then growing the capability of the team, and finally governing the team. The growing holon makes sure people understand how to deliver work and how to use agile to deliver value. In a recent interview (soon to be on the SPaMCAST) with cyber-security expert, Dr. Eric Cole pointed out that when people are undertrained in the frameworks they are going to use the best they can do is follow what they are told without understanding. This leads to checkbox behaviors which are only effective until the environment changes (it does that a lot). Agile is no different.
This is the last of the performance circles. Next week we’ll jump to Chapter 73 and discuss the chapter on using the Agile Performance Holarchy. We are jumping over Part 3 of the book which contains a boatload of agile techniques. Part 3 is worth the price of the book alone. I used to carry my copy of the book to every client engagement (now it sits on the desk).
Remember, buy a copy and read along.
This week’s installment can be found at http://www.tomcagley.com/blog
Previous installments:
Week 1: Re-read Logistics and Front Matters – https://bit.ly/3mgz9P6
Week 2: The API Is Broken – https://bit.ly/2JGpe7l
Week 3: Performance Circle: Leading – https://bit.ly/2K3poWy
Week 4: Performance Circle: Providing – http://bit.ly/3mNJJN7
Week 5: Performance Circle: Envisioning – https://bit.ly/2JEVXdt
Week 6: Performance Circle: Crafting – https://bit.ly/3ntsX69
Week 7: Performance Circle: Affirming – http://bit.ly/35OvFgC
