We always talk about the characteristics of a great scrum team and how to build a scrum team. Daniel Sloan, enterprise agile coach and professional scrum trainer, describes how does it feel to be a part of great scrum team, in his recent blog on “what does a great team feel like?”
Daniel says that a great team feels like a family. They work and grow together, share knowledge and take co-ownership of the work.
Glenn Llopis, Leadership Development, Business Strategist and Chairman of Glenn Llopis Group, says that leaders must build a family environment to achieve excellence, in his blog.
At a time when organizations are looking for new ways to build high-performance teams, perhaps they should be considering a family approach to business that emphasizes trust and values. A team work environment where camaraderie means having each other’s back and not judging one another. A workplace culture that celebrates opportunities, transparency, and the opinions of all to enrich conversations and diversity of thought.
Reed Hastings,CEO of Netflix, introduced in a famous presentation on his company’s culture. Hastings stated:
“We’re a team, not a family.” He went on to advise managers to ask themselves, “Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix? The other people should get a generous severance now so we can open a slot to try to find a star for that role.”
Glenn describes five ways a leader can build a family environment to achieve excellence in the workplace:
- Give Your Team a Sense of Ownership
- Everyone Must Protect One Another
- Instill Values to Enable a Trusted Culture
- Encourage People to Speak-up
- Develop a Succession Plan
Daniel says that a great team feels the emotions of success and failure together. Great Teams understand their work and their craft astonishingly well, but they also know how to channel the emotions of success and failure to their advantage. They continuously improve in an effort to reach the next goal on the horizon.
Daniel mentions that great teams feel excitement by sharing its knowledge and skills. Great team understands the strengths and motivations of each team member and leverages those collective strengths when the situation calls for it.
Distributed agile project teams practice different types of techniques for both local and global shared knowledge creation. Pair programming, customer collaboration, Scrum/Kanban boards and community of practice are explicit practices used by the teams to perform both local and global shared knowledge.