Harnessing High-Performance Teams Through Agile Principles

Imagine, you could change your organization towards High-Performance Teams yourself – without any external organization, freelancer, or consultants.

Would you hesitate?

If so, what is holding you back?

Based on our experience in the past 10 years, many organizations fear to change the way of working or implement new tools because of one of the following reasons:

• The investment is too high to just follow a trend such as “Agile”.
  Suggestion: Ditch the word “Agile” from your vocabulary. Rather think, how it’s values and principles help you to create responsive and resilient organizations.
• You do not have time for change right now, as you have to release a new product on the market.
  That is totally fine: Do you find any principles, which help you to sooner deliver them to the market? Does it make sense to meet regularly and discuss improvements to be better in achieving those targets?
• Your way of working is already Agile and there is no point to just implement a new process or framework.
  Cool: Amplify those Agile values and principles. Make them transparent in your organization, so everybody can benefit from them. Use the principles to enable decentralization, where individual nodes of control are fragile.
• Your staff is afraid of change, and they would rather not be “empowered” to be self-organized. They want to be managed.
  Surprise: Self-organization is already the status quo in your team. You do not need to empower anybody. If they do not act as expected, then there is a systemic flaw in your organizational system. Focus on removing the flaw instead of pushing people into uncomfortable situations.
• Self-Organization & Agile is Chaos, and we need structures; otherwise we do not get anything done. We need Authority.
  One of the biggest misconceptions is, that the opposite of Authority is Anarchy (Niels Pfläging). But this is not true. The opposite is democracy. Whereas authority requires rules and control, democracy focus on principles and guidelines.
• Do you see anything else, that holds you back to start now? You are welcome to comment on this post.

There is a pattern to all the above statements. It is how we as Company Leaders look at the change from ourselves. But change does not happen, if we as corporate owners or leaders do not believe in it. We need to believe in what we preach; we need to be the change, we want to a see in the world. Remember, the famous story of Ghandi and sugar.

Why Agile Transformations / Change Management fail

One of the most important flaw is how we look at how we change. As already discussed in an earlier article, our traditional approach to change management is flawed. It does not take today’s complexity in mind. And more often than not, we just follow wrong individual assumptions for the future.

Our belief system is based on biases, which became the norm for us, but are scientifically unproven:

• We define a future outcome to which we plan detailed on how we could achieve that. Even, when we have no certainty, what might happen in the future.
• We believe that we as company leaders need to control how the change looks like. We are therefore imposing our way of working without any involvement of our team.
• We believe that the team is inherently resistant towards any change. So we need to use carrot and sticks.
• We as company leaders do not believe in the change completely or think, that change is only for others.

And this is one of the recurring patterns, we see in most Agile Journeys to high-performance teams. It is an exclusive top-down decision how we want to change. The practices and tools we use follow a very antique and over 100-year-old view on team dynamics.

The different theories on how we understand our high-performance teams

Douglas McGregor published already in 1960 a ground-breaking book titled “The Human Side of Enterprise”. Most of the people have already heard about or even read the book. It basically defines two different views on people (there is more to it, but we keep it simplified):

• Theory X describes a view, in which individuals need to be incentivized / punished to improve their performance. This view sees individuals as basically better-smelling horses, who need to come to work, so they can survive.
• With a theory Y world view, we believe, that people are self-organized by default They come to work because they look for fulfillment and actually enjoy the work.

In workshops, we sometimes do a test and ask participants, if they believe, they are Theory Y-ers or Theory X-ers. The most people would think about themselves as theory Y-ers – especially in complex and creative environments. When asked about their team or staff, some of them would actually move and say, their staff would be Theory X-ers.

This is an interesting view: We usually see ourselves as Theory-Yers and sometimes others as Theory-Xers.

But here is a surprising truth: According to McGregor: Theory X-ers do not exist and never did.

But still, most organizational systems and structures is taking a world view into account, which does not exist.

Our Change to High-Performance teams starts with our view on our teams

When we want to bring new ways of working or any change into the team, we wonder, why people do not execute this change, are lost / overwhelmed or quit altogether.

If we are looking at management and organizational dynamics, change is much more effective, if we are changing our view on people:

• Thinking, we need to motivate and empower people is a condescending view on people. Nobody starts a new job not empowered or demotivated. It is our system, and the organization, which demotivates the people.
• Self-Organization is a status quo. If it does not look like you want it, then there is a reason, why. Maybe change your approach to the system, so it invites people to be more proactive. Invite, instead of pushing things on other people.
  For example: Do not expect any teamwork, if you have individual and competitive bonus programs.
• The future of your organization will always look, how itself makes best sense of the context. It never follows exactly, how you planned it earlier.
  So don’t try to plan for the future.Discover and explore the future and define a sense-making mechanism for your organization. Be able to respond quickly; do not plan for every eventuality.

Principles over a plan

Every organization (team, department, company, etc.) is a construct of human interactions (see also Conway’s Law). So, if you follow a plan or recipe from other people, we need to be aware, that this is always based on a different context. You can get inspired from other companies, but we recommend not to blindly copy & paste.

Every company need to find their recipe. A recipe, which exactly fits the context and purpose. Henrik Knieberg’s two-part video on Spotify’s engineering culture is a great example. Many companies believed, they can just follow the elements mentioned in the video. But they did not understand the principles and values behind those decisions. Even Knieberg himself mentions that the presented framework is a mix of who they are at that moment and who they want to become.

As a company leader, invest into identifying the principles you would like to follow. It could be the 7 principles we discussed in earlier articles. It could be the Beta Codex principles. Or it could be the heuristics from Allen Holub.

Then do not plan a final state of an organization, but think about elements in your organization, which are actually preventing you the most from getting closer to those principles. Remove those elements. Then, inspect and adapt as a team. Improve slightly to get closer to the principles.

You could do this on a company leader level. They have the power to change. However, this is imposing your way of working on other people and would reflect a theory X view on people.

Better is to let the people who are working and understanding your organization to start working on the principles. Be open to be surprised, what could happen.

For that, it is important to set up a frame, which guides the team to better autonomous decisions. The above-mentioned principles help, but more significant here is also making the Corporate Values visible and feasible: A value called “Teamwork” does not mean anything, if nobody knows, how we imagine teamwork in the company.

Example of fully autonomous high-performance teams based on principles.

One company, we are working with, started using Scrum. To observe and control Scrum compliance with the right tools and practices takes a lot of time. Often compliance to policies and rules is wasted time.

So, they changed their approach: They realized that it is not relevant whether they do Scrum or not. Every team can decide their own way of working. If one team wants to do Kanban, it is fine. If another team would like to go to “Waterfall”, also ok.

They only had one principle (besides Corporate Values): They cannot change for only local optimization. If they intend to improve something, for example, change something in their process, they need to ensure that they optimize for the flow of all teams. They cannot become or build new bottlenecks.

Interestingly enough, most of the more than 30 Teams are actually using a Scrum-like way of working. Now they are collaborating team-internal and across teams, on how they can deliver software sooner, instead of checking f every team does their Daily Scrum. This is how we should build High-Performance Teams. Focus on the bigger picture of what we want to deliver. Not the individual flaws.

Do you want to know more? Read in a future article, what role management needs to play. If you want to be able to coach high-performance teams based rather on principles instead of checklists, come to our Academy for Agile Coaches.