The What, Why, and How of Agile Teams

What are agile teams? Why do we have agile teams? How do we recognize if our teams are performing? 

To be an effective Scrum Master or Agile Coach, it’s important to really understand Agile teams at their core. So let’s break them down and examine some common misconceptions!

If you’d rather watch a video than read, check out my youtube video on this topic:

Agile Teams, what are they?

The basic definition of a team is a group of people who trust each other, aligned around and collectively committed to a clear goal. This is also true of an Agile team. 

You can’t just put a group of people together and call them a team, especially if you want them to reach a high level of performance. They need all three key elements of clear goals, commitment, and trust. If you are missing even one of these, you don’t have a team. 

When you think about it, it’s simple: If I don’t understand the goal from an aligned perspective, I’ll go with my own motivations, and if I don’t trust you, I won’t share my ideas.

Why teams?

Teams are great because they have the potential to produce outcomes that we couldn’t achieve on our own. 

Teams enable:

1. Collective accountability: Team members trust each other and know that they can combine their strengths to rise to the occasion. 
2. Better problem solving: Two heads think better than one! If teams have multiple perspectives, they have more creativity and better solutions. 
3. Faster learning: Similar to better problem solving, because team members trust each other, they can challenge each others assumptions without fear. They can recognize that it is the ideas that are being challenged, not the person.
4. Healthy risk taking: Teams allow for bolder risks and bigger assumptions because of the trust factor. They allow for averaging – you don’t win alone but you don’t fail alone.
5. Awesomeness and sense of belonging: Teams allow for the sense of pride of being part of something bigger. Winning as a team can bring higher satisfaction because you have a shared experience of the struggles and the successes. This is really about good business! Studies have even shown increases in job performance, as well as decreases in turnover and sick days.

How do we recognize team performance?

There are 6 indicators that you can look out for to help you determine a team’s performance:

1. Achieving goals: The team hits the mark and delivers what they set out to do. Members have the capacity to work together, understand their capacity, and commit accordingly to achieve their goals.
2. Healthy conflicts: This is a great sign of maturity! Members disagree and vocalize it, but they do so with respect. It’s about the ideas and is not personal. This shows the diversity of thought and psychological safety. 
3. Positivity: A positive team likes to work together, and what they work with/on. They are invested and motivated.
4. Minimum process: The team has their process simplified to work for them. They have removed the inessential and made it their own. Every team’s process will be unique. 
5. Collaboration: The team has respect and trust and members look to each other. As a coach, you can’t teach it, you can only foster it. 
6. Lateral leadership: Different team members will take on the leadership role based on their experience and what the situation requires. 

You can read a deeper dive about agile team performance in this post.

Remember that we judge performance on a gradient – it’s not that teams are either performing or not. Teams may be stronger in some than others, but scoring 5 on everything is better than having one indicator be super high and the other be super low. It’s about calibrating and finding balance. 

Mythbusting

Although Agile started in the world of software development, it has since become wide spread across other fields and with that come lots of opinions and misconceptions.

Here are a few misconceptions that I would like to straighten out:

1. Teams don’t need a scrum master: It’s true! Sometimes companies have a problem to solve and they hire a scrum master to fix it, only to find out when you get there that they don’t even use scrum. In which case, they don’t need a scrum master. They may also not need you as a coach. In this case, you have to find how you can help amp up the team’s performance. 
2. Individual performance does not define team performance: Putting a team together of all the top minds may seem like a great idea, but it may just result in a battle of egos. It does not usually make for a high performing team. Conversely, all junior members may be excited and motivated, but don’t have the experience to get results. Diversity, whether that be in age, culture, background, seniority, etc., is key. 
3. Team members don’t need to be collocated: Teams can produce amazing work whether they are remote, hybrid, or collocated. One isn’t better than the other, although if a company decides they want to go hybrid, the remote first approach is optimal to avoid info inequality. 
4. Teams don’t need T-shaped people: Your team can have people with specialities and still be high performing. Not everyone wants to be T shaped and you can’t enforce that. What you need is cross-functionality which means as a team, you have everything you need. That doesn’t mean that everyone knows everything. You might need different mechanisms to manage the work when you have specialized people, but it works.
5. Self-organization is not the same as no boss: The best self-organized teams recognize their managers, bosses, or stakeholders as a part of their team. When teams self-organize, their boss will give clear boundaries and the team will self-organize within that.