Influencing Teams

Problem Domain
Self-managing teams are very powerful, but they can also present challenges in terms of how to effectively influence them without being disruptive.

Discussion

• To effectively influence a team you need to become part of the team, one of us as opposed to one of them. If you're one of them, an outsider, you actually have very little influence.
• Gaining credibility is key. If you're accepted as part of the team you inherently have some credibilty, but if you're an outsider then you have to find other ways to gain credibility.
• If you're an outsider, an effective way to gain credibility with a team is to work on relationships with team members. To do this effectively you need a lot of skill and flexibility with how you work with folks.
• One-on-one meetings with team members is a useful tool. These are a good way to gather information that can then be fed back to the team via retrospectives.
• A possible process for working with teams as an outsider:
  • Information gathering and communication
  • Retrospectives - raise topics identified via information gathering
  • Take on actions or assign them to team members
  • Follow up information gathering for tracking and accountability on actions, feeds back into retrospectives process
• Project (P) vs. Production Capability (PC) - refer to Stephen Covey
• Who's responsible for improvement at the Individual level?
  • Manager/team lead
  • Human resources
  • The team
  • No one
• Who's responsible for improvement at the Team level?
  • Team - retrospectives, standup, burndown
  • Product vision - understand work
  • Scrum Master - process and team dynamics
  • Manager
  • Director or Gold Owner
  • No one
  • Every one
  • Coach
  • Metrics
• Who's responsible for improvement at the Organization level?
  • PMO
  • CTO/CIO
  • No one
  • Every one
  • Lean coach