Agile Performance Management for Teams
When a meeting of software developers met in 2001 and created the Manifesto of Agile Software Development with its twelve principles, much of it was based on their experience working on software development teams. It’s important to note that managing team performance can be substantially different from managing the performance of an individual.
Teamwork 101: Building, Leading, and Managing Effective Teams
Scholarship and popular writing about building effective teams is still a relatively recent field in the world of management. There are, however, three books that can serve to get you up to speed on foundational concepts in building and managing teams:
When you’ve gained an understanding of the foundational concepts in those books about teams, then you’ll be ready to digest and make sense of some of the more recent scholarship and research about building and managing effective teams.
Empowering Teams with the Right Amount of Autonomy
Let’s revisit one of the twelve principles from the agile manifesto: Self-organizing teams produce the best results. It suggests a high level of autonomy be granted to teams. This doesn’t mean, however, the team isn’t managed or coached. It does mean the team should be coached in a way that allows for the emergence of how teamwork will manifest in the team. Recent research suggests it’s not a matter of always granting maximum autonomy. If fact, teams given full autonomy don’t perform as well as those with limited autonomy. Getting the “just right” amount of autonomy will take some experimentation with each team. You can explore this topic further in the Harvard Business Review article, When Autonomy Helps Team Performance — and When It Doesn’t.
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Factors Affecting Team Performance
While the right amount of autonomy is clearly a major factor affecting team performance, other critical factors include diversity, trust, collaboration, and friction. Perhaps one of the more shocking conclusions of recent scholarship on teams is how having a diverse team doesn’t automatically result in better team performance. Why? Because it must be carefully mediated with trust and collaboration and spiced up with a bit of friction as well.
A homogenous team would mean everyone has the same fully shared knowledge. If you make the team diverse, there will likely be only a small amount of shared knowledge, which will hinder the team’s performance. By injecting trust into the mix, the team should be able to move from being merely diverse to inclusive, wherein a diverse store of knowledge is fully shared throughout the team.
There is more to diversity on teams than what most people think of, such as gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, and so on. There are other types of diversity that can be helpful, such as working style diversity as noted in Differing Work Styles Can Help Team Performance. Another excellent article about how diversity can hurt team performance not managed well is Lessons on Team Diversity. Collaboration doesn’t mean a team will or should be free of all friction. Think about how President Abraham Lincoln put people on his team explicitly to hear what he knew would be opposing viewpoints. He did this to make sure he considered all viewpoints before making decisions as described in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals. Learn more about how this applies to workplace teams in Can Harmony Hurt Team Performance?
One thing to watch out for is what can go wrong when you put a star performer on a team. If not managed well, it can create resentment among the rest of the team, who might even undermine or sabotage the star performer. Expert coaching is needed in this scenario to ensure everyone knows undermining high performance will not be tolerated, to get the team to understand how high performance benefits everyone, to tame the egos of high performers, and provide plenty of positive support to all team members, not just start performers. Explore this topic more in When One Person’s High Performance Creates Resentment in Your Team.
Team Performance Improvement with the Agile Retrospective
Agile management of teams must include meetings at regular intervals. It’s a kind of group performance review discussion called an “agile retrospective.” Trust, openness, and honesty are the name of the game to deal with challenges as well as recognize successes. The discussion is typically prompted with various questions such as 1) What’s working? 2) What’s not working? 3) What can be improved? 4) What can be added to the process? And 5) What can be removed from the process? Learn more about different ways?to run an agile retrospective in 3 Popular Ways to Run a Productive Retrospective, How To Run An Effective Agile Retrospective Meeting, and The Ultimate Guide to Agile Retrospectives.
Critical Tools for Agile Team Performance Management
When your organization or business is making the shift to agile performance management, two important tools that will help are a good learning management system (LMS) for training employees on agile methods and a performance management system (PMS) that both seamlessly integrates with your LMS while facilitating agile performance management. I invite you to explore eLeaP for LMS, especially knowing there will also be an agile performance management platform to go with it.