Motivating teams to choose their Way of Work (WoW)

Helping teams to choose their WoW can be met with a lot of resistance if not properly executed. Sometimes I personally don't like using the word "change" but rather use "improve" simply because people become very comfortable with their WoW such that they will try to oppose any kind of change even if it implies changing for the better.

Influencing people to choose their WoW involves taking your time and effort to get to know the strengths of the teams and try to establish the best way for the team to adopt new techniques. It’s not always easy to motivate the team to experiment and possibly adopt a new WoW.

John Boyd's Observe, orient, decide and act rule comes in very handy. You need to watch how people work for a while (observe), and reflect on what you think is going on well and what is it that's not working, all this through the lens of "The Agile Manifesto" and but not limited to "lean" development.

Your main goal should be to build a solid purpose for motivating the team to choose a better WoW. It is obviously going to be easy for you to then introduce effective retrospectives; which will result in the team deciding and acting once you have a solid purpose.

Yes, it is all about purpose.

To succeed in motivating or influencing teams, you need to know "your purpose". If the purpose doesn't resonate within the team, then it’s probably not value driven. Just because something is prescribed in the agile book, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s exactly what should be followed in all agile environments. What are your reasons for wanting to help them choose a WoW? Examples might be visibility to their work or blockers to improve on delivery, sometimes it might stretch down to team alignment which if not properly dealt with constantly causes delays in dependencies. These are just few of the many different reasons that may exist.

The best way to influence a team is to make sure that you give them the value they are looking for from taking a route or create a value which they are not aware of (that could possibly help them). It is always best to create a sense of experimentation within teams, which will help them to become truly agile - in terms of trying new things. I always encourage my teams to stay experimental, so there are frequent changes to processes to iteratively achieve a more productive/efficient version of the existing process. Raise the discussion to one about value and purpose. Talk about the fantastic future you are building together. Align around purpose first, then you can have the discussion about expectations for each other and about what is currently blocking your collaborative value creation. In that context there is room to raise the question if any of the agile techniques may be helpful.

People tend not to resist change, but they pretty much strongly resist "being" changed. Command and Control approaches will not get you agility from a team. You can influence transformation by helping to surface root issues and discuss them transparently in Team Retrospectives.

If the Team does not agree there is a problem to solve, then they might be right, or if you strongly feel they are not right then you should get better evidence. If you still get crickets and tumbleweed, then you can certainly propose known workable patterns but one thing remains, the team needs to agree and own the process. One technique to converge on a decision is to suggest Lean-Agile Change Management techniques, which are incremental and iterative. So, propose a change for a time-box period, after which the team will revisit the process again (in another Retrospective). And then have the leadership integrity to follow through on that promise.

In conclusion, always remember that teams should choose and own their WoW. Otherwise there won't be much benefit or optimum agility to the entire process.