Though we want out businesses to be a steady trajectory of strength on strength, we all know that that in reality it can be peaks and troughs. Goals sometimes missed or delayed. I think we have all seen environments that become toxic under these pressures. With finger pointing and fear permutating the culture, progress slows even more. If you build resilience into your teams, then it encourages the team to stick to the values of collaboration, determination and adaptability under any weather.
Collaboration actually enables ownership rather than erodes it
In a truely collaborative culture, people are able to freely ask for assistance and feedback at the moment they need it, receive feedback free of criticism or opinion, and then decided what to take on board or not. With everyone doing the same type of sharing, we each individually move the whole forward.
Do different teams in a company have different cultures?
Does it then present a challenge to create a shared culture across the company that everyone can buy into while still supporting the individual needs of each team? Part of the solution can be to do more cross-functional projects where people can focus on shared outcomes together. These need to be strategic, prioritized and must also be useful.
Millennials are the grown-ups in the room too!
Millennials are adults in the workforce, even if at times they are sometimes tentative about stepping into their own power. The rest of us, who have been here longer, should remember the old management adage that if you treat your team as if they are children, they will act like children.
Remember that teams are made up of individuals
It’s important to understand how your team works individually and as a whole. Being a person with a core value of fairness, it was a surprise to me when I learned that being fair meant that you don’t treat everyone on a team the same way. To get the best performance from individual team members, you have to understand how they function independently as well as in the team.
Customer-facing implementation teams have always been Agile
When Agile and Scrum first disrupted the IT industry, they were thought of as something that changed how we managed software development projects. Over the years it has continued impacting the other teams that work in technology based companies – implementation teams and operations teams. Albeit at times in a blended fashion, where some agile concepts are adopted or morphed variations have emerged. Such as the emergence of DevOps, an Agile practice that focuses on collaboration and cooperation between development and service operations teams. Still, I find it ironic that the origins were in development, while in truth the other teams are probably better suited to an Agile philosophy.
