The next time you plan to build a Management Team, you may take some time reading about what the “Agile” literacy has to say about team-dynamics. Agile Management techniques have come a long way in the past seven years and come handy when time is scarce and uncertainty is a given (which is often to be the case when building new teams).
Once again, and as you would expect, Akof’s goal isn’t to bring your attention on “yet another team-building framework”, but to provide you with an alternative approach to “classic” team-building techniques… so just consider it before recovering your copy of Belbin’s books on Management Teams or organizing your next ‘off-site’. No doubt you’ve got all the “raw materials” to build your team. You’ve got all the “candidates” for the job in mind, there’s much to bet they “fit the bill” each in their respective roles… but the last thing you want is a Management Team that fails to recognize the benefits that teamwork provides, to the risk of fostering the symptoms of a dysfunctional organization.
Indeed, and as you are aware, in Management more than for any other discipline, what makes a Team successful is the ability of its members to work together. And this is the main challenge. “Gelling” strong, bright and self-confident middle-managers together. You need to forge “rock-solid” foundations and empower this “soon-to-be” team with the ability to kill “in the egg” emerging ’silos’ and personal agendas. No doubt that you’ll remind them that several times, starting with your off-site… but you will not be there forever.
So what you long for is a self-motivated and self-organized Management Team… and fortunately, this precisely where Agile Management frameworks can help you.
You may have heard of “agility” relating to other disciplines than Management, maybe from the (now famous) “Agile Manifesto“. If not no worries, the few core principles governing agile frameworks are universal enough to make them eligible to other domains of expertise… including middle-management.
Agile principles implicitly provide a good bed for team Values; Agile teams must harness change instead of reacting to change. Agile teams are empowered (by you) to get the job done, deliver results frequently… with a preference to the shorter timescale. Agile teams are focused, they get together daily and privilege face-to-face conversation. More specifically, Agile Management teams undertake and curve-out managerial initiatives in “Projects”. Results are delivered in “Sprints“, a week-long and intense effort, leading to a clear and tangible result. To this effect, Management Sprints are a way to bring your Management Team through a journey of successive… well, sprints, each having a clear purpose and a length set-in-stone.
So now you get it… in the Agile Management world, team-dynamics emerge from:
1. Focused Teamwork Execution
2. People’s Close Collaboration and
3. Shared accountability on the Frequent Delivery of Results.
Every week, your newly formed Management Team achieves something TOGETHER, and each week, the team builds itself a bit more.
So you’re cool with that? You want to give it a try? This is quite simple really, let’s begin with… Sprint Zero!
This cryptic name characterizes what will be in fact your initial brainstorming session. Nothing too complicated here. Get your Managers in room for a day (go off-site if you feel like it) and optionally bring a facilitator. Ask your guys to write on ‘posts-it’ the topics that matter to them the most, then re-group these on ‘thematic’ boards. As a rule of thumb, anything dear to their hart should be fine by you. Don’t filter, don’t push back. Be open-minded …you’re looking for ideas.
Your leaders will submit to your attention a substantial list of what they think your organization (and their team) should focus on. It can be about strategic intentions like it can be about infrastructure issues or people management… at this point anything is good enough.
…but DON’T PLAN (yet) and avoid setting milestones! Resist to the temptation of setting-up timelines. You may die to put things in shape at this point in time, but one of the promises of Agile Management frameworks is to “manage chaos“, so give it a chance and leave things at that. Your first job is simply to close the initial Sprint. At the end of this exercise, your Management Team has built its first tangible deliverable: an “Objectives Backlog“. The size of this “Backlog” may scare you a bit… but try not to think about how the hell your guys will ever get to the bottom of it.
Don’t prioritize the backlog on their behalf, and don’t set the main Objectives of your organization on their behalf. They’ll have to get to this point BY THEMSELVES, and that’s the purpose of the following “Sprints”… and the purpose of our following Post: “Sprint One to Many, Act on It!”, so stay tuned.
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