Understand how you can contribute to a more cohesive and collaborative effort from your scrum team
Tip 1: Create a common cause
By this stage you’ll have already established the purpose of the team. Now it’s time to create a single, meaningful goal for each agile sprint. This is a good way to motivate the team and migrate them away from siloism.
If the team achieve their sprint goal then this should be celebrated. If they don’t achieve the goal then this is an opportunity for the whole team to figure out where they went wrong and improve iteratively from there. As long as they commit to the work as a single unit, they will begin to bond over the work and collaborate with greater fluidity.
Tip 2: Work out the workflow
Another great way is to incentivise collaboration is to create an awareness of the general workflow.
The team should be able to answer the following:
- How do they create value together as a team?
- What are the contributions from each member?
- Which direction should the work flow for maximum impact?
When you create a workflow, do it consciously and transparently. There’s a common misconception within early adopters of agile scrum that everybody is immediately in sync. This is not the case, so take the opportunity to give team members clarity on the roles and expectations of their fellow teammates. This way all passive assumptions and subsequent misunderstandings are kept to a minimum.
Tip 3: Scrums like team spirit
When you ask people, “what is required for a team to work well together?” some people will say a strong sense of “team spirit”. But what does this mean? Is it just some pie in the sky idea or could it actually represent something greater?
As it turns out, team spirit is a combination of trust, a willingness to help each other, and an understanding that team success is more important than the success of an individual. Once the team have this, it will work to keep morale high. Something you can do as scrum coach is encourage them to offer help to their teammates–not just on the odd occasion, but relentlessly. This is often a sign of a high-performing team and it’s how you build team spirit.
I hope the video and tips above help you to find the factors that encourage your team collaborate more effectively. This will only improve the team development, which has a positive impact on the pace and quality of work for each sprint iteration.
If you have any questions or topics you’d like me to cover, leave a comment below or send me a message through my website. Thanks for reading. See you next time!
Here’s the full transcript:
-Hi, Georg Fasching here, helping you unlock your team’s genius. In this video I’m going to share my three top tips on improving team collaboration. This is another video in The Power of Three series where I’m spending three minutes to share my three encouragements on any one particular subject. So let us put three minutes on the clock to talk about team collaboration and we’ll start with that right now. So the first thing that I would like to offer to you as a tip that helps you move away from siloism as an example of a lack in team collaboration is to actually rally the team around a common goal. So of course you will have already identified the purpose of the team but it is also important for the team to have one goal after another that they can aim to achieve together as a team. If they set a goal for, say, a two week planning period or a sprint and they achieve it, fantastic success for the team. If they set the goal and commit to it and they don’t achieve it, then they have an opportunity to learn together as a team from that lack of achievement, from that failure and benefit from that learning opportunity. And it is very important when it comes to team goals that the whole team commits as a team together and with that the team has something that they can bond over for that period that they know they need to achieve together and is not achieved by any one individual succeeding and others lagging behind. It is the team together that needs the rally behind those team goals. The second thing that I’d like to offer to you as an encouragement is to ensure that the team actually has a very strong awareness of their general workflow. How are they able to create value together as a team? What are all the contributions that each team member gives as part of the workflow as they are creating value together as a team in the pursuit of those team goals. And when you develop this workflow together, do it actually conscientiously. There’s a common misconception that everybody simply knows what everybody else is doing and how it all fits together but if you do that exercise to actually describe the workflow together you will discover that usually everybody has a different perspective on what the workflow of the team actually is. And with that also comes the requirement for clarity on the roles and expectations of each other. And want to let everyone’s contributions to the pursuit of the team in the fully achievement of the team’s goals. And the third thing that I would like to talk about is generally what is required for a team to be a good team. And that is the mystical team spirit. And it’s actually not all that mystical, right? A team comes together when they develop trust. A team comes together when they help each other, when they understand that the success of the team is more important than the success of any one team member. And it is that what then helps you to get the team to form this team spirit and develop this team spirit. And the key to that is to keep encouraging the team members to help each other out. Help each other in the pursuit of the team goals and help each other be better at their work. Help each other as they go through the day to day. And with these three tips, I am confident they can already make a lot of progress in team collaboration and help the team become an even better team than they already are. And with that our time is up. Thank you very much for your time and energy. And I wish you all the best for the practice with your team. If you found this useful please like, share and subscribe. If you have any thoughts on the video or any ideas for future videos, please share those in the comments. And until the next video, all the best to you, thank you and goodbye.
