Leaders across all industries and geographies are continually being asked to “Do More with Less”.  While this reality isn’t new, it’s definitely not going away anytime soon. The question, then, is how do you empower teams to consistently deliver more value in sustainable ways? 

How do you empower teams?

The good news is that Agile and Business Agility practices can do just that—help your teams deliver more value, faster, on a consistent basis. 

While there’s no silver bullet to tackling this challenge, there are definitely patterns that work. The most effective approach we’ve seen at AgilityHealth® is to:

Accurately and consistently measuring team health and performance can be a tricky business, as can establishing agreed-upon levels of maturity for teams throughout an organization. 

When we initially launched the TeamHealth® Radar in 2014, the assessment questions described the positive/highest level behavior for each competency we were assessing and asked the teams to rate themselves using the Tuckman model of Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. We noticed many teams, especially those who were newer to Agile, ranked themselves too high using this scale. Teams didn’t know what they didn’t know and most of the team members felt they were doing great, which was subjective. This led to some of the data not accurately reflecting their true team health and maturity.

It’s certainly true that teams go through the Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing stages and that Coaches should tailor their guidance based on the current stage of each team. But from a maturity perspective, we felt there was a more applicable scale and additionally, we wanted to easily provide all teams in an organization consistent guidance on how to build an actionable roadmap for growth.