Previously, we talked about the 5 phases of a team. After writing it, we saw a lot of traction. People mentioned they didn’t know about it. Others recognised the different phases. Some questions also arose on the role of leadership in all of this. Being a leader cannot be an underestimated role in group dynamics. Whether you are team lead of a digital product team, or a manager of a management team, the essence is the same: you are leading a group of people towards a common goal. In this blogpost, we’d like to offer you more insight into the role of leadership by giving you some practical tools to lead your teams through its life cycle stages.
“The wrap”
Group Dynamics
”The gift”
Practical tools to help you guide your team
As we discussed, the first phase a team goes through is forming. Whether you, as a leader, decide who works together, or you are assigned a new team of people you don’t know yet, it makes no difference. In the forming phase you need to lay out the groundwork for what is about to come. People need to get to know each other. They need to be guided towards that common goal. You have to be very clear about when success will have been reached as a team. As promised, we’d like you to show some very practical tools of the trade we all use to help teams cross this lifecycle stage. To help you get started with a newly formed team, we’d recommend doing a Team Canvas exercise. Inspired by the Business Model Canvas by Alex Osterwalder as described in their book “Business Model Generation”, Alex Ivanov and Mitya Voloshchuk created the Team Canvas. Just like a new business, a new team has some specific questions they need to think about. What are the activities we will need to perform? Who are the people on the team and what roles do they have? What are the values we hold dearly? And what are the needs and expectations of each of the team members?
At the start of your journey together, we’d recommend doing a workshop in which you go over this canvas and talk together about all of these things. The conversation is the most important part of this exercise. The model itself is just a useful tool that can help you facilitate it. A second exercise that can accompany this is the personal history exercise. One example can be found in the book “The Five Dysfunctions of a team” or via the website of The Table Group. What we particularly found useful is drawing a timeline. One by one, let everyone add a date of birth, and 3 events they found particularly impactful or interesting for them to mention. People mention things ranging from their parents divorce, to their own wedding, to the birth of their children or when they graduated. Immediately you see proverbial walls coming down, and psychological safety nurtured. One big recommendation is to always start this exercise yourself. Lead by example. Show you can be vulnerable and you’ll immediately see people follow along.
Another workshop we suggest is one about roles & responsibilities. Although the basics are part of the Team Canvas, it can be useful - and often necessary - to dive a bit deeper as a team. List all of the responsibilities that need to be covered in the team. Create columns of all the people or roles in your team. After that you could use a model like RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed), DACI (Drive, Approver, Contributor, Informed) or any alternative to discuss which role or person has an impact on which responsibility. This will help to set clear expectations, learn the team to honour commitments and in general support them in going through the next phase: storming.
When storming you really need to be on the foreground as a leader. Be ready to encounter difficult moments with your team and its members. It takes some courage to grow from a group of individuals to a solid, well oiled team. You will need to be present. In the foreground. Pushing buttons the team does not want you to push. Having conversations the team does not want you to have. One of our favourite retrospective techniques from our mental toolbox is the classic 5 whys. Start with a challenge you see happening. It could be anything really, from work items ageing in your workflow, to commitments not being honoured, to people not being available when necessary. You probably encounter tons of things you can work on towards that all-star team we all want to have. Pick one and start asking the question ‘why’.
Repeat it 5 times until you agree with the team you have landed on the root cause, which in its turn you can design a solution for. Be careful not to stop too early, or point fingers. As a leader, you must facilitate this exercise carefully and not be afraid to push through if necessary. That might mean you’ll open a box of Pandora when you press some buttons that agitate some of the team members. If you do this right, and you guide people through all of this, the result will be more openness, more trust and way more psychological safety as the team learns they can have difficult conversations without being afraid they will fall apart. To help you in your journey on facilitating good retrospectives, we recommend “Agile Retrospectives: Making good teams great”, by Esther Darby and Diana Larson. Facilitating good retrospectives, recognising the absence or presence of safe spaces and psychological safety will be key throughout your journey as a team.
Once you come out of the storm phase, you are probably already well on your journey together. You’ll have had your share of difficult discussions and probably have iterated over several ways of working together. Which is a good thing of course. Time for you as a leader to go a bit more to the background again as you approach and reach the norming and later the performing stage of group dynamics. Just as raising children, at a certain point in time your involvement is not needed as much anymore. Be there when they need you, but give them room and space to find their own way. Keep holding up a virtual mirror from time to time to indicate room for improvement. One excellent way of doing this is the squad health check, first described by Henrik Kniberg at Spotify in 2014. It is an excellent way of having the team discuss how it is going and find specific trends on topics they discuss. These topics could range from ‘are we having fun’ to ‘how is the quality of the product we are building’. Select 10-ish topics that are relevant for your company or team and do a quarterly check with the team to see if any trends are emerging. Extremely important to highlight is that it is an exercise for the team, not for management to micromanage what the team is doing or not doing. The output of this exercise is the proverbial mirror the team needs to tweak their way of working. If you see a team successfully taking up points of improvement, celebrate them. Put them in the spotlights. If you see them struggling a bit, be their guide along the way and be supportive whenever you can.
If the team ceases to exist, you have one final task as a leader: make sure the team can put their common journey to rest, learn and make themselves ready for the next one. Our go to closing workshop is definitely the post-mortem timeline. At the top of a timeline, write the several phases a project went through. Team members can stick post-its of things that went well or didn’t go as well as they’d hoped for. At the bottom of the timeline, underneath the ‘x-axis’, you can let them plot the feeling (happy - neutral - sad) they had during the phases at the top. This way, the team can both learn from the specific challenges they’ve met, but they can also give some thoughts to the feelings they had. Take your time for this exercise, as it can be quite big and heavy for the people involved, but you’ll learn it can be of a very relieving nature for the team. Close off with highlighting the team's successes for the broader company.
In our previous article, we showed how Scott Grafius displayed the performance of a team on a timeline. We’d like to add something onto that graph, and that’s the involvement of leadership. As you can see it follows an almost opposite curve. The first 2 phases require a leader who is present, who is able to help and push the team towards success. In the following two life cycles, the leader must be a lot less present. Doing otherwise can even harm the group dynamics. Last but not least, don’t forget to guide the team towards the end as well with more of your presence again.
The leader of a team needs to have a broader mindset and skill set. They need to be present at the right time with the right set of principles and tools and with the correct leadership style. This requires a lot of experience and can be very daunting at times. You’ll notice once you’ve been through some of these phases over and over again and you are getting the hang of it, watching a team grow and eventually fall apart again is extremely rewarding. If you’re looking for help setting up any of the mentioned workshops, don’t hesitate to reach out to us via theagilemindset@substack.com!
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