The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

Team Dynamics

AUDIENCE

Whole Team

by Diana Larsen

We steadily improve our ability to work together. Your team’s ability to work together forms the bedrock of its ability to develop and deliver software. You need collaboration skills, the ability to share leadership roles, and an understanding of how teams evolve over time. Together, these skills determine your team dynamics.

Team dynamics are the invisible undercurrents that determine your team’s culture. They’re the way people interact and cooperate. Healthy team dynamics lead to a culture of achievement and well-being. Unhealthy team dynamics lead to a culture of disappointment and dysfunction.

Anyone on the team can have a role in influencing these dynamics. Use the ideas in this practice to suggest ways to improve team members’ capability to work together.

What Makes a Team?

A team isn’t just a group of people. In their classic book, The Wisdom of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith describe six characteristics that differentiate teams from other groups:

[A real team] is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. [Katzenback2015] (ch. 5, emphasis mine)

The Wisdom of Teams

Arlo Belshee suggests another characteristic: a shared history. A group of people gain a sense of themselves as a team by spending time working together.

If you’ve followed the practices in this book, you have all the ...