4 Strategies for Leading Your Agile Team from Storming to Performing

Gil Broza specializes in increasing organizational agility and team performance with minimal risk and thrashing. Dozens of companies seeking transformations, makeovers or improvements have relied on his pragmatic, modern and respectful support for customizing agile in their contexts. His book "The Agile Mind-Set" helps practitioners go beyond process and adopt a true agile approach to work. His book "The Human Side of Agile" is a practical book on leading agile teams to greatness. These days, several of the world's largest organizations are having him train hundreds of their managers in technology and business (up to VP level) on practical agile leadership. Get Gil's popular 20-session mini-program "Something Happened on the Way to Agile" free at OnTheWayToAgile.com.

  Agile   Leadership  

Agile teams bring both challenges and rewards, and the rewards don’t happen at the click of a finger. Leadership is required.

First, the good news. All agile methods are predicated on strong teamwork. This is not an agile invention: bringing diverse skills and viewpoints to bear may indeed increase overall performance. And, from an agile standpoint, teams are also useful because human beings make mistakes. In fact, one fundamental belief of agile is that collaboration in self-organizing teams lessens the risk of employing humans more so than the risk of managing them. Thus, teams both increase the upside and mitigate the downside.

Now for the bad news. Before a team actually starts acting like a team, it will be in the storming stage of team evolution which, in technology teams, may take months. Storming is characterized by members mostly looking after their own interests, working on “their own” tasks, tiptoeing around others, experiencing unhealthy conflict and occasionally disengaging. In this stage, their productivity is likely less than the sum of individual outputs.

Although storming might be uneasy, it’s a normal stage for teams. Unfortunately, graduating out of it is not guaranteed, and many teams get stuck in it. Some teams clearly don’t work …

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