Relationships

Have you ever heard, "People do not care how much you know until they know how much you care!"

The self-organized team means that the team members understand the importance of being interdependent and have an emotional binding towards common goals. This understanding is when a group with individual goals becomes a team with a unified goal.

The effective project team should continuously focus on the following:

1) Relationships with each other

2) Relations with the team leader

3) Connection to the external groups including clients, suppliers, vendors, and other governing bodies

Self-Awareness

Every member of the team has to periodically assess and understand individual's and team's strengths, competencies, and challenges. The team can evaluate themselves using

1) Measuring performance against preset standards and analyze this quality data

2) Conduct regular customer surveys

3) Recognize team excellence where performance measurably exceeds team's commitments and values

4) Review Lessons Learned. Agile favors retrospectives at every iteration similar to experienced project managers that don't reserve lessons learned sessions towards the administrative closure. Team Leaders should encourage self-assessments to improve individual capabilities, skills, and competencies.

5) Retreat. Remember that a Tiger pauses and retreats before rapidly charging forward. This calculated pause provides the necessary self-awareness to unleash the right strategy based on reflecting on environmental factors and lessons learned.

Empathy & Respect

People execute projects. Whether they are strategic or tactical, people deliver results. Even the robot, featured in the movie Wall-E, connected with others through emotions. It is no wonder Steven Covey preferred, "Seeking to understand first" as the first effective habit.

Effective Teams discard the bias and prejudices over dialogical communication where people state their position even while disagreement exists. This approach promotes solution-oriented thinking.

Effective Teams practice active listening by using verbal clues and non-verbal communication, by acknowledging other's views while staying neutral, by paraphrasing and reflecting to seek to understand and then to be understood, and synthesizing with their thoughts to promote innovative thinking.

Team Norms

Tuckerman emphasized the team go through various stages. The effective team agrees by consensus to establish norms that will assure the integrity of the team's identity to the external organization and ensure progress towards team's goals.

These norms could take the form of the processes to agree on decisions, specific etiquettes for meeting attendance, agenda preparation, and distribution of action items. Additionally, these norms could also extend to the particular behaviors deemed appropriate, the process of identifying, escalating and resolving conflicts, the process of integrating changes, and the measures to use for resource conflicts and prioritization.

Remember that the real power of significant quality initiatives like Six Sigma is coming from the combination of People power with Process power. So, having established processes will pave the foundations for people to follow structured thinking. One cannot expect creativity when there is no formal thinking similar to how one can only override the rules if they first exist.

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Lateral Thinking

Often, thinking is the systematic way of a logically breaking down ideas. While this analytical and hierarchical thinking is right, it will not generate creative ideas. Only using hierarchical thinking, would Schumpeter have predicted the "Creative Destruction" of brick-and-mortar organizations opening up to eCommerce during a period of industrial automation that followed scientific management principles? Alternatively, do you think Clayton Christensen would have envisioned the "Disruptive Innovation" with data-driven insights that drive innovation of new entrants to the market challenging even established companies?

Lateral thinking is generative, says de Bono, similar to how Agile promotes generative behaviors through the prescriptive processes. The "six hats" method is an excellent way for the team to practice lateral thinking. The team is provided as much information available as possible for consideration. This information set is called White-Hat. Eliciting emotional reaction to an issue or decision represents the Red Hat. Looking at the negative and positive side of the alternatives presented represents the Black Hat and Yellow Hat respectively. Promoting new ideas represents the Green Hat, and finally, the operationalization of the concept by working the execution through the workflow process represents the Blue Hat.

Team Trust

As the team begins to gel, the trust will develop. Team members must think of the trust as cash in the bank. It evolves. If continuously developed, it pays interest. If broken, it seeks penalty.

So, entrust the team member with clear responsibilities expected of their role in the team. The team norms and team's self-awareness come to the help here. The team leader can make continuous improvements by monitoring and evaluating the competencies in the team to meet the overall team’s objectives.

The "Trust Cash" always starts low as the team leaders need more assurance. Therefore, the team leaders often follow the "Run it by me first!" approach. As tasks progress where the leader witnesses a demonstration of competency, the "Trust Cash" increases in value where team leader prefers to "keep posted on the developments" approach. As team members reinforce this knowledge with repeated success, the "Trust Cash" maximizes in value where the team leaders seek "to get involved if help is needed" approach. All earlier habits are integral at this stage to close the gap as the team develops strengthen the team relationships.