Key takeaways
- Forming teams is expensive, so Co-op starts small with discovery teams and grows long-running product teams rather than staffing a year ahead.
- A multi-day inception that covers how the team wants to work, not just the work, pays off; revisit the agreements in retrospectives.
- Communities of practice are the best tool for finding skill gaps across teams.
- Keep OKRs few and alive, and make sure stakeholders describe success the same way.
- Psychological safety, where people speak up about what is not working, matters more than the mix of skills; pick one team problem at a time.
About this episode
“The more you think about how things look to other people and how might they see the world, the better you're going to work together as a team.”
There’s a lot that goes into making a team work well together. Of course there are those magical instances where you get a group of talented people together and it just works. But more often than not, you have to take a measured approach to make the magic happen. In this episode, Brett interviews Neil Vass, an agile delivery manager for Co-op Digital, about the complexities of leading teams. The conversation is productive and full of tactics and resources, and covers:
- Practices for staffing teams
- How to identify a teams’ strengths and weaknesses
- How to get teams aligned around organizational and project goals
- Ways to motivate team members, even when you are not a line manager
- Exercises to help with team building
- Low-effort, high-impact practices to help you keep the team feeling positive and productive
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
- Co-op Digital's blog
- More on the role of a delivery manager
- Resources on building empathy and communication in teams: A user manual for me by Cassie Robinson and Our Empathy Survey Says - Awesome Retro by Stephen Mounsey
- The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle
- The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth
The quote Neil mentioned, which was by Dr. W. Edwards Deming