Teamwork - Becoming a high performing team

Teamwork

Hi guys, some time ago I discussed how important it is for a company to have a vision, here you can find more about it. In this post I would like to discuss about the same topic but on a team level.

Currently I work as a Coach for teams that are performing really well and they are delivering a great business value, yet I think we could do better. I have been thinking in several ways how to help them to a next step and how can I help them as a coach to make this happen…

This post covers examples of what I want to try with teams and I would like to get your opinion on this topic. These team members know what they need to do as a team which sounds great, but as a coach, I believe I can help them to achieve more… I feel they the team doesn´t have a vision nor a purpose, they do their daily job without knowing where they want/should go. My job is to help them to become a high performing team. What I want to try has three parts:

1) Set the Product Vision

In my humble opinion, the first thing that we must ensure in order to have a successful team is to establish a common goal for all team members. In my case, I am referring to a development team, therefore I believe the common goal is to deliver a high quality product to a customer. In this situation, a Product Owner has a key role as a master of the product vision and a responsibility for sharing that vision as well as making sure that everyone understands how product should be built. I am going a bit further by saying that the Product Owner is ultimately responsible for creating the common goal for the team.

“Vision without action is just a dream.
Action without vision just passes the time.
Vision with action can change the world.”
by Joel A. Barker

A possible exercise would be to ask the Product Owner to prepare a press release and then to present it to the team. With this exercise, the team will be able to see a big picture and understand WHY they should work in the team and WHAT they need to accomplish as a team, but be careful PO should not define HOW the team should work, that is team’s reponsability. In my opinion, this exercise is important because of two reasons: on the one hand, if everyone in the team knows what they need to do, the exercise is reaffirming the common goal, while on the other, if the team members do not have a clear idea what their common goal is, having this exercise will help them to create the necessary common goal.

2) Help a team to define their definition of awesomeness

It´s extremely important to help the team to find their own definition of awesomeness, help them to create a “dream team”. To do that start a brainstorming session asking everyone what is the meaning of “awesomeness”. If they think about an “awesome team” what that represents for them… You might want to break the topic into smaller pieces, for example:

• Technical awesomeness: Being able to release in every check in, 100% test coverage, 0% manual testing, ATTD Gurus, etc.
• People awesomeness: The best group of individuals in the world, the team that have more fun, the team that helps each other at every moment of the day, etc.
• Innovativeness awesomeness: The most innovative team in the world, the team always come up with new cool ideas, etc.

There are more other examples, I´m sure you will have plenty of ideas. Be DEMANDING with yourself.

After this exercise, you will have plenty of ideas about what an awesomeness team means. Help the team to create their final version of their “Awesome Team”.

3) Help a team to select their values

I believe everyone acts based on their values, therefore defining team values is an extremely important activity. This is a powerful exercise that brings people together. Defining values is a way to select a behaviour of people in some circumstances. For example, if you define a humour as one of your values (one of my previous teams did it) it means they want have fun during working time. Every time things were getting boring they referred to this value reminding them that something was missing and they would have needed to do something about it in order to bring some fun into a daily work. This is just a small example, you can come up with thousands more.

In my opinion, if your team is a Scrum team you should remember Scrum Values:

Focus: Because we focus on few things at a time, we work together well and produce excellent work. We deliver valuable items faster.
Courage: Because we are not alone, we feel supported and have more resources at our disposal. This gives us the courage to undertake greater challenges.
Openness: As we work together, we practice expressing how we’re doing and what’s in our way. We learn that it is good to express concerns so that they can be addressed.
Commitment: Because we have great control over our own destiny, we become more committed to success.
Respect: As we work together, sharing successes and failures, we come to respect each other and to help each other become worthy of respect.

The team does not need to adopt Scrum values but adopting and referring to them frequently helps to improve a scrum team. On top of these values I would select two or three more to help the team to create their own identity. Here you can find a big list of values to serve as input.

Go and Try it
I am thinking of doing this with several of my teams. I do not know what an outcome will be but I am quite excited to see how they will react. What do you think about it? Any cool ideas to help here?

I would love to get a star rating for this post: