Agility in the business and tech world isn’t a mere buzzword. Believe it or not, an agile team can be the difference between staying ahead of the curve and falling behind. But if building an agile team is such a big deal, how do you go about creating one that excels as a killer team? The answer is — by following a few straightforward strategies.
The Anatomy of an Agile Team
Firstly, think about what an agile team looks like. A first-class agile team is self-directed, has talent across a spectrum of disciplines, and fosters genuine communication among team members and leaders.
For a team to flexibly adjust to the prevailing conditions and come out on top, it needs collective, combined skills among its members and open dialogue. There isn’t any one-size-fits-all method, top-secret formula, or tried-and-true technique for becoming an incredible team — this idea lies at the heart of agile. After all, it’s supposed to be different and constantly changing according to each particular group and its environment.
Organizational Stability
There is a strange paradox at play here: to really make agile and robust changes, your organization needs an underlying foundation of stability.
Leaders should be ever vigilant to spot pitfalls that would disrupt basic processes or erode trust in the team. Psychological safety among coworkers is the only way for a project and company to overcome challenges. After all, uncertainty and anxiety may just be the biggest detriments to getting anything done.
Team leaders can manage this by encouraging ideas, using mistakes as learning opportunities, and avoiding passing blame. Change and upheaval cause stress, so positive contributions deserve credit when due to keep morale high. Be honest but optimistic when communicating with your staff — over-promising won’t help anyone in the long run, and neither will catastrophizing.
Start with the End of Mind
Once you decide to put together a team to reach a goal, begin by weighing up what it will take to get there. What skills, technologies, and hours are necessary for it to work out? Once you have this clear in your mind, you can look for the right team members for the job.
The team could include customer service specialists, legal minds, or software engineers (or others, depending on the industry) — anything necessary to complete the task. You may need workers across different time zones who can extend the working day or people who prefer to work from home and won’t mind odd hours.
No matter where everyone is, set up a space where team members can collaborate and keep track of progress. A progress and productivity tracking tool may assist in this and present a clear end-goal roadmap that each team member can follow.
The Pivotal Feedback
It doesn’t matter how technically efficient your work is or how quickly you can produce a product or software if you’re not creating the right thing. The right product means one that customers will want to invest their time and money into and keep using in the future.
The only way to really know that you’re on the right track is to get a lot of feedback. Successful agile teams have routines and methods in place to get their creations out to customers as quickly as possible. This way, they can get feedback early on and incorporate it into the product.
Also, great teams are completely open with each other. They don’t try to sweep problems under the rug. They stay completely honest and view mistakes or roadblocks as chances to learn more and eventually improve. Doing retrospectives is another way to learn and improve.
Training and Ground Rules
A strong and enduring team needs someone to guide it in the right direction. Depending on the organization’s culture, some employees may be reluctant to voice their ideas, delegate tasks, or ask for help. Inevitable psychological and social roadblocks frequently make it difficult for people to express themselves and present their opinions without collaborative and responsive leadership and guidance.
Team leaders and trainers must not be overly authoritative to discourage members or, worse, propagate combativeness. Rather, they should maintain a respectable position of knowledge and dependability. Such team leaders and trainers bring trust and confidence to the table so members can feel comfortable following their instructions and contacting them over any confusion.
Along with guidance, for a team to self-organize and regulate, there must be clear, easy-to-follow ground rules. Establish a strong foundation by setting the basic rules early on. But let the team know that things could change and there isn’t one set path to reach the goal. Working together as a unit, being flexible and open-minded, reporting regular progress updates, and leaving any ego at the door are the foundations of success.
Technology as a Catalyst
In-person meetings have a valuable place in striving for successful projects. But working from home offices can increase productivity, provided the right technology is in place. A project needs collaboration tools like video conferencing, screen sharing, digital whiteboards to brainstorm, and chat rooms where team members can exchange ideas.
The right technology can make people more responsive to change. Some strategies include setting up on-schedule and ad hoc meetings as needed. Automated project management reminders can assist, too, so that everyone on the team shares their progress in real-time instead of working independently of each other.
Embrace Failure, Reward Success
Agility is the power to move swiftly and easily. Mistakes shouldn’t hinder agile teams. They should accept that they will happen, sometimes multiple times, during the project. On occasion, they may even carry over into the next project to some degree.
It’s actually beneficial as it helps team members learn and become better. Furthermore, when breaking a project into smaller pieces, it becomes easier to identify and address errors. Good leaders use mistakes as helpful lessons.
While making mistakes can be good, the ultimate goal is always success. Business owners, managers, and employees must think differently about what success looks like. For example, your company may decide to employ a new, up-and-coming technology (such as AI, the blockchain, etc.) to speed up and optimize certain workloads or product delivery. However, since these technologies are new and everyone has limited experience with them, mistakes are almost unavoidable.
It may be that their implementation is lacking or makes a product harder rather than easier to use. Welcoming feedback (as stated earlier) and learning from these mistakes propels the team and company forward rather than let it falter under pressure.
Rewarding success matters just as much. While mistakes shouldn’t be punishable, recognizing the growth from mistakes certainly warrants rewards. However, these rewards mustn’t foster an overly competitive atmosphere in which team members begin to see each other as opponents rather than collaborators. Moderation is the name of the game in this aspect, perhaps more than in any other.
The Secret Sauce — Employee Engagement
Never underestimate how effective work practices that engage every employee can be. Agile-embracing companies experience lower internal risks: when team members feel their work is important and take collective responsibility for delivering good results quickly, morale is high, and staff turnover is low. That means better customer satisfaction.
You get loyalty from customers when your team members are responsive to them and show genuine care and investment in their products and customers. Employees are more engaged when they’re happy, producing better-quality work faster, reducing the chance of costly errors taking months to spot.
Change happens all the time, which means employees must be ready to handle it well. That’s why an agile company that values its employees’ views and listens to their input can achieve amazing things.
Embrace Change
Change management aims to get the company to its desired destination. To do so, you have to break it down into three parts: testing changes, implementing them, and then seeing the impact.
Business is constantly changing — especially now, with new innovative partnerships cropping up and technology forcing companies to stay in the corporate race or be left behind. Plus, global demographics and economic trends are shifting rapidly so agile companies need the power to act fast and respond quickly in emerging markets.
That isn’t to say, however, that every change is always good change. Hence, a team needs to prepare a strategy for tackling change and be ready to reverse the alterations that didn’t reach the envisioned results or customer satisfaction.
Be More Agile
Building a killer agile team isn’t a one-time thing. Rather, it’s a continuous and laborious process. It starts with a stable organizational environment, then comes a clear vision and the right mix of skills. Toss in some cutting-edge technology, a dash of employee engagement, and a heavy dose of customer-centricity, and you’ve got yourself a team that’s not just agile but killer at it.
It may be risky, things may not always go exactly as planned, but take the chance and build a killer agile team to propel your business forward.
