Earlier when we discussed the ScrumMaster's role is fostering a self-organizing team, I mentioned that the ScrumMaster needs to be self aware of her individual skills development journey and understand at what level of expertise she is at and work on moving to the higher levels so she can effectively help the team as a whole.…

We’ve seen how individuals acquire skills; how teams go through different development stages; how leaders need to adjust their leadership style based on the skills of their followers and the stage of their team to establish the necessary attributes to foster a high performing self-organizing team. A good tool to use to help in fostering this…

A self-organizing team needs to have these 7 attributes to be successful. Supportive Context: The team needs to have some basic foundations like Infrastructure including a physical space suitable for team collaboration along with modern technical tools and infrastructure to perform the needed work.Information including access to necessary people and data to better understand the work…

So what's the ScrumMaster's role in getting a team to a high performing state? There are two parts to it. First, the ScrumMaster herself needs to be self aware of her individual skills development journey and understand at what level of expertise she is at and work on moving to the higher levels so she can…

Allan Drexler and David Sibbet developed a team performance model framework for understanding team development that has similar concepts to those covered by Tuckman. In the Drexler/Sibbet model, there is a concept of a bouncing ball where team building begins with a lot of freedom of imagination, openness and aspirations and then slowly becomes more and…

Now that we’ve looked at individual development, let’s look at team development. The most known model is Bruce Tuckman’s stages of group development from forming, norming, storming and performing. A team goes through these stages as they transition from coordinating to cooperating to collaborating to hyper performing. These phases are all necessary and inevitable in order…

In Situational Leadership, the emphasis is on changing the leader’s leadership style and approach based on the type of follower you are working with. By considering high/low competency and high/low commitment, a follower can be Situational Leadership - Learner Type Enthusiastic Beginner - Low Competence/Low Confidence and Commitment. Eager to learn, ready to take on new…

The Dreyfus model of skills acquisition by brothers Stuart and Huber Dreyfus covers covers a similar concept as the 3 step ShuHaRi but uses 5 stages instead from novice to expert. The stages follows a progression from rigid adherence to rules to an intuitive mode of reasoning based ontacit knowledge. Michael Eraut summarized the five stages…

Alistair Cockburn made the analogy to Aikido (Japanese martial art) in terms of how we learn a technique and get better at it from beginner/novice, to journeyman, to master. There are 3 stages of gaining knowledge: Shu – Beginner stage In shu, we repeat the forms and discipline ourselves so that our bodies absorb the forms…

Before we talk about how teams mature, let’s first discuss how individuals grow. After all, a team in composed of individuals and to understand how to get a team to a certain level we need to understand how individuals learn and grow. We'll look at 3 models: Shu-Ha-Ri: an adaptation of the Japanese martial art concept…

This series focuses on a few values and principles from the Agile Manifesto. The value of Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools https://agilemanifesto.org/ and the principles of Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.5th Principle from the 12 Principles Behind the…

Before we look into self-organizing teams, let's first take a look at common misconceptions about teams, self-organization and self-management. It’s common thought that if you bring a group of people together, they will form a team. However, that is just a group and not a team. Simply giving a group a name or having them work…