6.2: Agile Culture and High-performing teams - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now let's talk about agile culture</v> and high performing teams. A popular misconception about agile is that it is a collection of practices and processes. This is not true. In fact, agile is a mindset. What do we mean by a mindset? Is there a way for team members to communicate? How do they respect and support each other in agile and how they together grow and become better? To understand how it works in practice, let us review an example of company called Menlo Innovations. Menlo Innovations is located in Ann Arbor, Michigan and it provides information technology services. This mid-sized company founded in 2001 designs and builds software. It provides other software programming services as well. Menlo Innovation serves customers in the state of Michigan and has a very distinctive way of making custom software. For example, all programmers work in pairs and people actually pay to take tours of their office. To summarize what makes teams high performing, let us reference Google's research, known as Project Aristotle, which is a tribute to Aristotle's quote, "The whole is greater than the sum of its part." As the Google researchers believed, employees can do more working together than alone. So the goal was to answer the question, what makes a team effective at Google and overall? The research is found that the most important parameters of a successful team are as follows, psychological safety. It refers to an individual's perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant and competent, negative or disruptive. If a team has high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They can ask questions that may show that they'll acknowledge, they can confess that they need to grow their skills, they can tell they don't understand what was discussed, and so forth. Why? Because they feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea. The second one is dependability. On dependable teams, members reliably complete quality work on time versus the opposite, trying to move responsibility to someone else. Structure and clarity. An individual's understanding of job expectations, the process for fulfilling those expectations, and the consequences of team's performance. This is all important for team effectiveness. Goals can be set at the individual or group level as we saw from our framework and have to be specific, challenging, entertainable. As we know, Google uses (indistinct) or objectives and care results framework to help set and communicate short and long term goals. The next one is meaning. Finding a sense of purpose in either the work itself or the output is important for team effectiveness. The meaning of work is personal and it can vary, financial security supporting their family, helping the team succeed, or self-expression. It's different for each individual. And then there is impact. Impact is the result of one's work. The subjective judgment that your work is making a difference, it is important for the team and for the customers. Seeing that one's work is contributing to the organizational goals can reveal huge impact.