Back in the 90’s self-managed teams were gaining popularity, but they had a high rate of failure mainly because team members lacked people skills.  These ideas of self-managed teams were borrowed by the Agile movement when in 2001 they formulated a ‘new’ way of working, based on Agile principles. These principles value individuals and interactions over processes and tools; working software over comprehensive documentation; customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and responding to change over following a plan.

For these ideas to work in practice Agile team members  must know something about teamwork and this means understanding a lot about human behavior and why people do the things they do!

Agile team members are usually composed of highly skilled knowledge workers with strong values of Independence. Some are worth more to an organization than the people who manage them!  Many software developers are quite introverted, preferring to interact with their computers rather than people.  In my experience, companies hardly spend any time on people skills and nothing on the even more difficult concept of what people need to do to ‘self-manage’ into a high-performing team.  I’ve had to learn this in the world of experience. I wonder how many readers find themselves in a similar position?

If you look at the Agile web space you’ll find that the emphasis is on ‘engineering best practice’ and tasks, rather than team processes.  Many project managers, too – are used to old-school leadership where they are more comfortable with control and the power that goes with it. So for Agile IT teams to become high-performing it’s essential that, right from day 1, time is spent in helping the team to initiate the process of adaptive learning and this requires a focus on behavioral skills.

Rather than let agile teams try to reach high-performance by trial and error it seems to me that the first thing to do is for everyone to understand the behavioral characteristics of their team members. One of the important features of this is measuring individual work preferences and harnessing these to the tasks that need to be undertaken.

To help agile teams prepare for the road to high-performance Bright Green Projects has  teamed up with the Team Management Systems organization to provide a free 8-page assessment of what you think about your current (or future) agile team. We think it’s really valuable, I hope you think so too.

Have a go at the Agile Team Performance Quiz.