Within months of going agile, the new teams had agile names, agile meetings and agile boards. Many of them weren't teams at all.
The bank went big bang into agile, and it went early. Every team had the new labels, the new ceremonies and the new boards. On a status report, the transformation was on track.
Underneath the new labels, the old software lifecycle was still running. An analyst finished a piece of work and threw it over the fence to a developer, who threw it over the fence to a tester. These were groups of individual contributors who happened to sit together.
We had changed the vocabulary. We hadn't changed the structure. Richard Hackman's research pointed to why: whether a team performs depends less on the talent of its members or its leader's style than on its conditions. Is it a real team, with clear membership? Does it have a compelling direction? Does its structure enable the work?
Hackman's conditions for team effectiveness became a team assessment covering what defines a high-performing team: a common goal, role clarity, and how success is measured.
The assessment ran on flipchart-sized cards, with everyone taking part. Nobody handed the team a report about itself. The team built its own picture, and the gaps became visible to everyone at once.
Goals, roles and measures, the team's true north, and what success would actually look like. Agreed by the team, for the team.
A single intense day for a single team, so every minute is spent on that team's real situation rather than on generic teamwork theory.
TeamLab became the partner to Servant Leadership. Servant Leadership did the heavy lifting for individuals, through the ground rules and the tape. TeamLab did it for the team, by changing what the team agreed it was for and how it would work.
A team that can see its own gaps will work on them. A team that is told about its gaps will defend against them.
Read the conditions before you read the people. A group without clear membership, direction and structure will look as if it has a people problem, and no amount of training will fix a structural one.
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