Exercises for Building Better Teams

The article uses Blake and Mouton’s leadership grid as a base for looking at teams through two dimensions: positivity and productivity. It argues that self-organized teams still need leadership, only distributed across members, and that ScrumMasters can use this balance to assess team dynamics and guide improvement.

It then presents exercises for defining team values, assessing the team’s current and desired state, and reassessing values over time. The exercises ask teams to surface agreements, identify strengths and gaps, discuss behavior and expectations, and choose a small set of actions to try next.

Reading notes

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• Leadership style is presented as influencing teamwork, and the article uses a grid with concern for people and concern for results as its starting point.
• Self-organized teams are described as still having leadership, but spread among team members instead of concentrated in one manager.
• Team positivity is defined as spirit and joy of work, while team productivity is defined as effectiveness in delivering results.
• The article lists positivity factors such as trust, respect, communication, interaction, camaraderie, optimism, and diversity of values.
• It lists productivity factors such as goals and strategies, alignment, accountability, resources, decision making, proactivity, and team leadership.
• One exercise is meant to create a common set of values that can support working agreements or help resolve hidden conflicts.
• In that exercise, the team is first energized, then asked to discuss values, classify them, and agree on a prioritized list of behaviors and rules.
• The article says team-made rules are easier to follow and change than rules imposed from outside.
• Another exercise asks a team to assess its current state and desired state on a two-dimensional grid and discuss gaps between them.
• That assessment can reveal different views inside the team, concerns about productivity, or the need to generate ideas for improving team spirit.
• A third exercise revisits values and competencies after earlier retrospectives to see whether the team has changed.
• In the reassessment, the team works with a radar-like layout, identifies strong and weak areas, and generates proposals for action.
• The article closes by saying team values change over time and that the right values are the ones the team agrees on.