What stops Agile teams from being great and 5 things you can do about it!

High performing Agile teams are a powerhouse of delivering quality products with long term scaleability and usability. At the same time the teams gel like David Beckham’s hair do and have fun like Pink on a night out. 

Our high performing Agile poster children like the REA Group and Spotify show us the way to a future of what is possible for all of us aiming high.  

Yet so few teams ever reach this level of engagement and passion. 

There are cultures where disruption happens at leadership level and they have moved from good to great - and the results are astounding. 

1. Good is not great

“Good is the enemy of great”, says Jim Collins, author of the book, Good to Great. 

What is great and how would you recognise it?

How do you achieve great? 

Good leads to ordinary, a slip in standards, which leads to no standards.

What we want is excellence. We want to be able to recognise it, to measure it, to set a benchmark for excellence. 

Is it worth it? Hell yeah!

When something is great, is truly outstanding, we all expand and become better. We produce something that matters, with truly outstanding people. That is meaningful work! 

Think about the companies I mentioned - it’s their culture of excellence that creates those results. 

2. A culture of discipline 

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Without a great culture, your strategy is not worth the paper it’s written on. 

The goal is to build a culture of discipline - rigorous, determined, demanding, consistent, focused, accountable and responsible.

These qualities keep coming up when I discuss with leaders what they want from a team. It’s what we admire in other leaders who deliver results.

Mix a culture of discipline with the ethic of entrepreneurship and you have yourself a mix of steel like focus on the goal coupled with innovation.

The idea is to build a culture of freedom and responsibility. In this culture you never have to remind somebody of their responsibility. Once it is theirs to run with - they do exactly that. 

3. Relentless innovation and progress

People want to work in an environment that is part of the fun - at the forefront of a new movement. There is more opportunity for innovation than at any other time in history.

We can access any idea, anywhere in the world, get free digital marketing advice, interact on social media sites, attend networking events…in fact staying boring and without innovation is what the real challenge is! 

Everyones favourite is disruption - the innovation that doesn’t just improve delivery, but changes the industry forever. We all know Uber and Airbnb. 

Who would not want to be part of something like that? 

4. Persisting, Believing, Prevailing 

Challenges are inevitable. 

They are going to happen, so be the person you need to be to handle them! 

If, in the face of a challenge, you get calmer, more determined, more focused and more disciplined, then you are a leader. 

You can say what you like about leadership, it’s about inspiration, about making decisions…in fact hundreds of books have been written about leadership. 

There is only one measure of leadership that matters - how they perform under pressure. 

In Agile, self-directing teams demand that everyone is a leader. No-one sits there and waits for the leader to make a decision. Each individual in the team is required to step up and face the challenge. It’s the ones that demonstrate this quality who ultimately shape the culture of the team. 

Why not everyone of them? 

5. Standards and Expectations 

Standards are the personal levels of expectation we have for ourselves. 

Expectations are the personal levels of standards we have for others. 

Standards are for you. Expectations are for others. 

We want Agile teams to be high performing, we want them to be innovative, we want them to have fun. We want them to come to work engaged, ready contribute above and beyond. 

For that we need to set standards and expectations. Expectations are no other than the values, the cultural standards.

Communicating them to make sure everyone is aware and can live them, sets the team on notice, that its for real. We mean it! 

This sets the responsibility to live the values firmly with the team. Speak up when someone lives the values. Speak up when someone does not. 

Think this - if a team leader or individual doesn’t speak up - then the whole company loses. 

Great cultures are relentless at ensuring their standards and expectations are met. 

High-performers - the ones you want to attract and keep - love this as this is the reason they were attracted to your company in the first place. 

In my next article I will share with you how to determine your standards and how to adopt them in your team to create a high performing culture of excellence. 

Information in this article is taken from the Disruptive Leadership program and book developed by The Coaching Institute and facilitated by Christiane. 

Christiane is a Senior BA, Mentor, Coach and Visual Facilitator. Always a keen student of human behaviour and fueled by a thirst for knowledge about leadership, she decided to join The Coaching Institutes’ Professional Master Coach Program in order to gain the skills and knowledge to build a centre for leadership – The Inspiring Leadership Institute. Her current focus is on building great teams and she works with leaders and individuals on developing the mindset for Agile. You can follow her on Twitter under @chriscat69 

https://www.theinspiringleadershipinstitute.com/