Tip #21 - How Agile Executives Should Engage Their Teams

This Tip on Agile Leadership comes from our experience with a company where half of the Agile Team members resigned after executive Leadership added one toxic person to the newly forming Team.

It involves a mid-size services company with an agile Team that had just started getting into a cadence of delivering. However, they were still forming and only partially through the Tuckman team formation stages. Without talking to the Team, one executive leadership member demanded that a new person join the Team in a mid-senior role. This demand happened at 9:30 AM.

The new person was known to the Team and was considered toxic. As a result of the change, by 2:00 PM on the same day, two of the senior Team members resigned. Since the project was already behind, these resignations only compounded their problems and further delayed their time to market..

In short, the Tip is this, even if the Team is still forming and there is trust among them, they will decide how to deal with situations they encounter. And that is what you want because that is how you scale and get things of value done faster.

What would have been a better approach?

If a team member needs to be added or replaced, it is up to the Team to decide how to handle the change. The Scrum Master may facilitate the process and provide guidance, but ultimately it is the Team’s responsibility to ensure that it has the right people with the right skills to achieve its goals.

By involving the Team in the decision-making process and providing the necessary support and resources, agile leaders can help ensure that the Team can continue to succeed despite any challenges that may arise.

In this example, the Agile Executive could have brought the problem he was facing to the Team, perhaps even as a User Story, and put it on the backlog for discussion and solutions.

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