Succeeding with Agile

Build Trust by Emphasizing Early Progress

Critical to creating a coherent team is building trust among team members. This is much more difficult on a distributed team. In Mastering Virtual Teams, Deborah Duarte and Nancy Snyder discuss the difficulties in trusting people whom we are unable to see physically.

In face-to-face settings, a number of familiar clues help us determine whom we should trust and whom we should not. We are able to evaluate people’s nonverbal communication and observe their interactions with other team members. Part of the way we judge trustworthiness is through our perceptions, over time, of the other person’s reliability and consistency. (2006, 85)

Unable to rely on repeated, frequent face-to-face communication, distributed ...