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?