Learning, Teaching, Sharing, and Helping to Get **it Done: A Mantra for Building a Strong Team Culture

In today's fast-paced and dynamic work environment, fostering a strong team culture is crucial for achieving success and maintaining a competitive edge. As an Agile practitioner, one phrase that has become a cornerstone for me in building awesome teams is "learning, teaching, sharing, and helping to get the work done" (LTSH). This mantra encapsulates the essence of collaboration, growth, and support required by the Agile framework. The Agile manifesto, created in 2001 prescribed four values and twelve principles that emphasize relationships, communication and iterative value-driven processes that have become essential ingredients in enabling highly effective teams. In this article, I will explore the significance of the LTSH mantra in building a cohesive and high-performing team culture, and delve into practical strategies that I have discovered over my career for implementing this mantra effectively.

Nurture a Culture of Learning

Learning should be a continuous journey for every team member. By fostering a culture of learning, you create an environment where individuals are encouraged to acquire new skills, explore different perspectives, and stay up-to-date with industry trends and best practices. By promoting a learning environment, team members not only enhance their own skills but also foster a sense of self esteem which encourages participation; and gives them a sense of accomplishment which increases job satisfaction.

Learning that is relevant to a team’s current work magnifies these benefits for individual members and the team as a whole. A learning-centric team has increased adaptability and improved problem-solving capabilities. Teams with a learning mindset can gain critical skills just in time to solve new problems or incorporate new technology, increasing its ability to get the work done.

Should your team have downtime, say when teams are between projects, that can be a great opportunity to up-skill and prepare the team for what is to come next. Team members remain productive while waiting for the next project to kick off and are ready to hit the ground running when it does.

Embrace a Culture of Teaching

Encouraging a culture of teaching is a proactive approach that empowers team members to share their knowledge and expertise. Teaching reinforces learned skills and helps “raise the bar” across the team. When team members are able to contribute their expertise they feel a sense of engagement and appreciation for what they bring to the team.

At IDEO, a company renowned for creating innovative products, teaching is a key practice of their product development process. As highlighted in the ABC Nightline interview of IDEO's founder, we learn that each team member conducts in-depth research on different aspects of a project. At the end of each day they report back to the team what they learned. The learning culture at IDEO is fun and engaging and keeps their employees committed to the company (2).

Foster a Culture of Sharing

Effective collaboration relies on the willingness to share ideas, insights, and best practices. Sharing fosters a sense of trust, respect and collective ownership by bringing team members along, helping team members to understand and appreciate new ideas or changes to their current thinking.

No one person has all the insights nor necessarily the key insight to achieve success. We know from sociometric studies that teams with a higher density network of communication are more likely to perform better than teams with a lower density network of communication.

“[A] dense web of third-party relationships in a cohesive network reinforces learning since it allows the same information to be presented using multiple perspectives, creating better understanding. …cohesive networks are most effective for work performance when transferring complex tacit knowledge is important.” Pentland et al. 2008 (3).

Cohesive networks refers to a network of knowledge workers focused on the same or similar objective. Density refers to the number and duration of interactions via different mediums like face-to-face, email, phone, etc. These make up the nodes and edges, respectively, in graphing communication between knowledge workers. When thinking about Agile teams, I correlate cohesion to a sprint goal. And I correlate density to include the kind of engagement: learning, teaching, sharing and helping. I believe LTSH increases density of the network and the effectiveness of the communication within a team and across teams.

Cultivate a Culture of Helping

In Agile teams, mutual support and a willingness to help one another are vital for success. Teams that actively engage in a wholistic approach to achieving a single goal have increased team cohesion, improved morale and higher productivity. I have seen a team of junior developers who were curious and took a mob programming approach and constantly sought help from many sources performed better than a similar team of “rock star” developers who divided up the tasks and then worked on their individual tasks in isolation.

Getting help just-in-time in the moment of need keeps team members focused, guards against counterproductive work, creates opportunities for teaching and learning, and reduces unproductive time. For example, a developer encounters an issue they have not seen before and their analysis leads them to make a “fix” in some other, unrelated area of the code. If the developer could have gotten help to identify the root cause, unnecessary code changes addressing the symptom could have been avoided. Thus, asking for help is also a critical skill and should be reinforced by creating a culture of helping.

We often see the power of helping when getting all-hands on-deck during a critical production issue; and the sense of relief we feel when the ad hoc team figures out the issue and identifies the fix. This kind of help-rally during critical production outages might be avoided by enabling team members to focus on helping each other during development, when and where the work is being done. An incomplete implementation of a requirement due to a developer working in isolation and who does not get the perspective and help of the whole team during development, is likely to require more expensive remediation efforts after the code is released to production than any investment we might make upfront to engage the whole team.

A culture of helping fosters goodwill and encourages collaboration, like pair programming and mob programming and other valuable team behaviors, which can significantly improve code quality and code reliability (4).

Enable a Culture of “Get it done!”

I had a technical manager who would insist during a meeting, “let’s do it now!” Rather than waiting, he would use the meeting to do the work; not talk about doing the work. This was one of the best and most informative experiences I had working with this manager. Not only did I learn from my manager but the tasks we engaged on together were always higher quality and completed significantly faster. Together we made all the micro-decisions needed to complete the task. So there was never an opportunity for second guessing how a task was done or wether it was in fact complete. I have internalized this style of managing and try to replicate it where I can.

Enabling a culture of “get it done” in the spirit of collaboration infused with LTSH drives productivity and code reliability. I have seen this empirically over my career and propose the following hypothesis: pair programming and similar team behaviors produce significantly higher quality and more reliable code faster than does asynchronous peer review alone.

Implementing the Mantra

The LTSH mantra can be a powerful multiplier for teams, but how can existing teams navigate the challenges of integrating new behaviors and priorities? The following strategies were effective for implementing the LTSH mantra and I hope they give you some ideas on how you might get started.

Find Downtime for the Team

Formula 1 race cars need pit-stops, as do high performing teams. Encourage, systemic down time across all the teams to allow teams to recharge and prepare for the challenges and opportunities ahead. Many organizations have hackathons and during the holidays delivery schedules are often reduced. These times might present opportunities for team down time.

Recruit the Right People

When interviewing candidates for a position on my team, I ask for feedback on the mantra. I ask the candidate how they imagine working with a team that embraces this mantra. This often leads to useful insights about the candidate.

Onboard Rapidly with a Goal to Improve

When a new team member is onboarding, I provide a mentor and detailed onboarding instructions. Because the tools and processes for onboarding new employees change over time, one of the first goals assigned to the new team member is improving the onboarding documentation. The newest person to go thru the process becomes the resident expert and is ideally suited for improving this process. I remind them that they will become an onboarding mentor for a future new person which incentivizes them to make the documentation better.

Use What You Already Have

Use the tools you have to their fullest potential. For example, the GitHub pull request (PR) process is ideally suited for asynchronous knowledge sharing. One of my onboarding tasks for a new team member is a reading assignment. Some PRs are chock full of feedback, project knowledge and wisdom that is ideal for a new team member wanting to learn about the project and the codebase. I keep track of informative pull requests just for this purpose.

Setup Formal Time to Share

Remind teams about any learning resources your organization provides and help individuals find resources that meet their unique needs and interests. Encourage teams to organize regular knowledge sharing sessions, either as part of their current team ceremonies or in addition to them. The retrospective meeting is an Agile ceremony ideally suited for sharing knowledge, experiences and lessons learned that is designed to help teams continuously improve.

Lead by Example

As a tech lead responsible for code quality, I must review a lot of code change sets. I use the review to discover and track errors and their fixes; and then share key findings during regularly scheduled team knowledge-sharing ceremonies. And given my personal interests in Test Driven Development (TDD) and React programming, I host a weekly meeting to teach TDD and React, which has significantly increased the breadth and depth of my knowledge of these topics and has helped to improve these skills across the organization.

Help Team Focus

When team members work on too many disparate tasks in parallel they have less cohesion; that creates task isolation and knowledge silos, which introduces risks to the project. If team members work in isolation then the quality of the team’s output is the least common denominator, the weakest link in the chain. But when a team is committed to LTSH and has high cohesion the quality of the team’s work is consistent across all of the team members.

A team should be singularly focused on a goal. The LTSH mantra encourages a shared-responsibility for the team’s success.

Ask For Support

I ask every team member for feedback on the mantra and invite discussion about what it means. After some consensus about what the mantra means I ask for support to use the mantra as a team practice to help us improve. Creating team agreements around how the team wants to work is critical. It gives the team a sense of control over how it works; as the team knows best how to improve itself.

Conclusion

A strong team culture acts as the foundation for Agile teams to thrive in today's ever-evolving business landscape. By embracing the mantra of "learning, teaching, sharing, and helping to get the work done," you are creating an environment that fosters collaboration, growth, and support.

Nurture learning to improve adaptability and skills.

Embrace teaching to improve engagement and retention.

Foster sharing to improve camaraderie and trust.

Cultivate helping to improve focus and reduce unproductive work.

Enable a “get it done” mindset to improve code reliability and time-to-market.

As an Agile leader, it is your role to cultivate a strong, supportive culture and empower team members to embody these values. Doing so, you not only elevate your team's performance but also create an environment where individuals can unleash their full potential and achieve remarkable results together.

Remember, the power lies in your team's commitment to embracing this culture, and it starts with each team member's dedication to learning, teaching, sharing, and helping one another on the journey toward success.

How might the mantra “learning, teaching, sharing and helping to get the work done” help your team?

I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

-- Doug

Special Thanks to Corey Fedde for his insightful and thoughtful feedback to improve this article.

Footnotes

(1) The graph is adapted from the diagram in "MINING FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION NETWORKS USING SOCIOMETRIC BADGES: PREDICTING PRODUCTIVITY IN AN IT CONFIGURATION TASK", Wu, Waber, Aral, Brynjolfsson, Pentland, 2008. I was invited to hear Pentland speak. He showed two network of communication graphs and asked the audience which one we thought was the more successful team. The group’s answer was obvious and unanimous. He went on to describe why the denser graph was a key indicator of successful teams.

(2) ABC News Nightline Program "The Deep Dive, The IDEO Shopping Cart" episode first aired in 1999; for more information see: https://www.ideo.com/post/reimagining-the-shopping-cart#

(3) "MINING FACE-TO-FACE INTERACTION NETWORKS USING SOCIOMETRIC BADGES: PREDICTING PRODUCTIVITY IN AN IT CONFIGURATION TASK", Wu, Waber, Aral, Brynjolfsson, Pentland, 2008; a copy can be found here: https://archive.nyu.edu/bitstream/2451/27756/2/CPP-05-08.pdf.

(4) Conventional wisdom supported by many studies over the years show that pair programming improves design quality, increases code maintainability by creating a better, shared understanding of the codebase, and quantifiably reduces the number and density of defects in the codebase. For examples, Google "pair programming studies in CS" you will find results for studies by Williams et al. (2000); A Cockburn et al. (2001); and Hanks et al. (2017); among many others. For more information about the benefits see: https://madewithlove.com/blog/how-efficient-is-pair-programming-will-it-work-on-your-team.