Make serving the team your first instinct.
This post completes the analysis of J. Richard Hackman’s article, The Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork1. This sixth pattern in the series focuses on the criticality of demonstrating Agile Leadership through serving the team rather than managing the team. In conjunction with the first five patterns, Serving the Team completes the ingredients that, when taken together, produce awesome teams:
- Encourage Different Perspectives
- Stabilize Teams
- Small is Big
- Encourage Face-to-Face Interaction
- Enable Self-Organization
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 works against the power and capability of a team by shutting down innovation and self-organizing behavior.
Pattern 6 – Serve the Team
| Misperception | Reality |
|---|---|
| The benefits of teamwork happen automatically. Just put a group of talented individuals together, and sit back and watch the magic happen. | Leaders of teams must define why the team exists and what they need to accomplish while serving and supporting them in achieving that goal. |
Simon Sinek has an excellent book, Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action2. Most noteworthy, the book outlines the criticality of defining why before even thinking about how you build it and what you build. To illustrate, he uses the Golden Circle as shown in Figure A.
In summary, once you have a compelling why, the team will self-organize around the how and the what.
Putting It Into Agile Practice
First, provide clear direction to your team on why they exist. Work with them to define their purpose and the vision they are striving to achieve. Additionally, formulate a common understanding of why it matters to your customers and your business.
Second, determine what your team should focus on to achieve its why. Define the objectives in achieving the vision. Work with the team to clearly define their responsibilities and what capabilities they provide to solve the problem. Encourage a continuous improvement focus to iterate and innovate on what the team is building to achieve its why.
Rather than hand your team a definition of their why and what, involve them in the creation of it. Accordingly, connect your teams directly with their users to gain a fundamental understanding of user workflow and user needs. As a result, this will energize creativity in your team, and the team will bring their ideas to the table. The wisdom of the team will craft a better solution than you could form on your own. Most importantly, since you have collaborated with them to converge on a solution, they will have ownership of the solution.
Third, remember that How is squarely in the team’s court. With a shared understanding of the Why and the What, your team will self-organize around How to build the solution if they have the capabilities to do so. Often, your team will need new skills to self-organize around the How. For instance, perhaps they need to learn a new technology, gain domain knowledge, or learn Agile-related behaviors. As a leader, you can provide them with the appropriate training or coaching and cultivate a culture of growth. See the prior posts for more guidance on this.
- How a Stable Team Grows in Capability
- Can Coaching and Self-organizing Behavior Co-exist
- Overcoming the Fear of the Incapable Team
Finally, as in Pattern 5—Enable Self-Organization—if you can switch your focus to helping the team remove waste that they cannot remove themselves, you will serve your team well. See the prior post, How to Shift Gears to Become an Agile Leader, for an in-depth discussion on this topic.
Conclusion
Concluding our series, the sixth pattern—Serve the Team—demonstrates how you can collaborate with your team to set their purpose. Connecting them directly with their users will ignite innovation and will bring forth the power of the team in collaborating and converging on a direction. Also, you should promote and support a culture of growth to allow your team to gain new capabilities. Lastly, shifting your focus to removing waste that they cannot remove serves the team and sets them up for success.
The six patterns presented in this series reprogram our thinking as leaders on how to optimize Agile teams for success. By practicing these patterns, we will move towards true, effective teamwork and build awesome Agile teams.
I hope you have enjoyed this series as much as I have. It reconnected me with why Agile is so effective at building great teams. It is reassuring that the Agile values and principles are aligned with the research on successful teams performed by Richard J. Hackman.
Other Posts in the Series
- Agile Leader Pattern 1 for Building Awesome Teams: Encourage Different Perspectives
- Agile Leader Pattern 2 for Building Awesome Teams: Stabilize Teams
- Agile Leader Pattern 3 for Building Awesome Teams: Small is Big
- Agile Leader Pattern 4 for Building Awesome Teams: Encourage Face-to-Face Interaction
- Agile Leader Pattern 5 for Building Awesome Teams: Enable Self-Organization
Related Posts
- How to Shift Gears to Become an Agile Leader
- Overcoming the Fear of the Incapable Team
- How a Stable Team Grows in Capability
- Can Coaching and Self-organizing Behavior Co-exist
References
- The Six Common Misperceptions About Teamwork, Robert J. Hackman, June 7, 2011
- Start with Why – How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek, October 29, 2009
Todd Lankford unlocks Lean Leverage in organizations to cultivate powerful, engaged product teams who maximize outcomes and impact.
His articles share his experiences and learnings along the way. Join the mailing list to get them in your inbox.