Agile Foundations: Trust

There is a lot of great documentation out there on how to build an agile team or an agile company. However, there is a bit of irony in many of the articles as they tend to focus more on the process, rather than the more important underlying agile foundation characteristics. The foundation of any agile firm is well explained in the Agile Manifesto (https://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html).

When looking to build an agile team think more about it more in terms of building an agile culture rather than building agile processes. I cannot say what is the most important agile characteristic to start with, but the one I recommend teams look at first is TRUST. The agile manifesto on trust:

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

Over the years it has gotten a lot easier for me to quickly tell if an organization or team has a good sense of trust... or rather what has gotten easier is to quickly see the red flags for when there is a lack of trust. You can do this by asking yourself, 'when a problem arises do we band together and start looking for solutions or do we start looking for someone to blame?'

When the sh!t hits the fan and everyone starts ducking for cover and starts pointing fingers your team is moving away from being solution orientated and indicates that there is a lack of trust. In my experience this doesn't come from the team members themselves, but rather from leadership.

This culture comes from a history of leadership looking for someone to blame when something goes wrong... and stuff will go wrong (sometimes they disguise the term blame as accountability) . As soon as you have any finger pointing trust will start to quickly erode within a team.

If you have a lack of trust within your organization
you will not be able to move towards an agile team.

To address a lack of trust leadership must first look at their own reaction to problems/challenges when they arise. An agile approach is to first try and understand the issue and determine the root cause of the issue. This will require getting all of the stakeholders together to discuss the issue and to discuss options for how the problem could have been avoided and what solutions might keep it from happening again. In my experience 9 out of 10 issues actually arise from poor communication and often the problem can be solved by open dialogue and adjusting the existing process to make sure it will be difficult for this issue to happen again.

An important thing to note about the above approach is that it has trust built into it. By starting with an open discussion of the issue and potential solutions, leaders are indicating to the team they trust the team to solve the problem.

Trust is not something that you can just say you have or don't have, it is something that is indicated by a person or team's actions. By acting collaboratively and with solution orientation leadership can start building trust.

Early on your road to building an agile team you must ask yourself the question do we currently have a solution orientated culture, which indicates a high level of trust or do we have a culture of blame, which indicates low levels of trust. If you answer yes to the later then you need to address your trust issues first before moving on. If you answer yes to the solution orientated culture, you are already building an agile team.