What makes a team coherent? - 3 pillars of strong teams.
Often we think of our roles as a job we do to just help teams function better, with helping them with the process of Scrum and the Principles and Values of Agile. We sometimes forget that the people we work with, just like us, do their jobs to put food on their tables and happen to have a skill that can enable them to do that.
It is my personal belief and philosophy that, any relationship, whether personal or professional, is rooted with 3 things. Trust, Communication and a Sense of Humour. “Humor” for my American friends ;) I believe our role as Scrum Masters, Coaches or Change Agents, we need to work on these as the first things (and continually), for our teams to be effective internally and across the organization.
Trust
This is the foundation. This is essential for any relationship to exist, and eventually grow. Trust is built over time, shared knowledge and experiences, and when there is belief that a person means and wishes the best for us. As Scrum Masters of new teams, this is the first thing we need to work on with the team. Getting to know the people you are going to be working with, what interests them, what they worry about, their families, what do they do outside of work, what kind of food they like etc. I use "favourite smell" as a funny little ice breaker. You can use anything you prefer.
“Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.” – STEPHEN R. COVEY
Communication
I refuse to apologize
for my direct communication skills.
Communication is the 2-way street that gets you to trustworthiness. People communicate in many ways and they communicate differently with people they trust versus people they don’t. Without communication, families break, teams break and any change/growth isn’t possible. Communication is built into the Scrum framework, but really built into the Values of Agile too, i.e. “Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and Tools”. As Scrum Masters, we must embody this value of transparency and constant communication with honesty and integrity. We can not establish and maintain focus, growth and trust in our teams and organizations without communication.
Sense of Humour
AKA “Don’t take things too seriously”. Just like our families, the values and beliefs between its members may be common. However, our families, just like our teams are comprised of unique personalities and perspectives. As you know, as human beings, we make mistakes. Team members, including ourselves, are bound to make mistakes. As Scrum Masters, how we react to these mistakes makes a huge difference in the previous 2 things I discussed - Trust and Communication. Laughing off small errors and having a sense of humour about errors/faux pas really disarms the team and creates a comfortable space to make mistakes and learn from them. This has really worked for me in the past. A coder in the team, incorrectly abbreviated Alberta to “AL” instead of "AB". This broke the Age of majority Date of Birth calculation/validation in our application. We joked about him really wanting to go on vacation to Alabama, or a girlfriend in Alabama etc.
Instead of reacting with “I can’t believe that happened” or “Seriously?” I reacted with a laugh and the team, just like friends and family, have been yanking the coder’s chain for a whole week for the little typo.
A sense of humor judges one's actions and the actions of others from a wider reference. It pardons shortcomings, it consoles failure. - Thornton Wilder
We laugh together, we stress together and we practically live together, just like a family, and probably more than we spend time with our own families. In my opinion, these 3 pillars are absolutely necessary to establish within the team, and it starts with you.
“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.” – THEODORE ROOSEVELT
