Learning Mode
Once a team has some slack time, the team leader's job changes from making the decisions to growing people: challenging them to learn new skills and to solve their own problems.
The goal is a self-organizing team that no longer needs the leader to solve its problems.
These articles cover the learning and self-organizing stages of a team and what a leader does in each.
- The 3 maturity stages of a software team and how scrum fails to identify them
The chaotic, mid-life and mature stages of a software team, the leadership each one needs, from dictator to coach, and why Scrum Masters miss them.
- New chapter: "Learning" in the book "From chaos to self organization"
A new Learning chapter is added to From Chaos to Self Organization on Leanpub, split out of Notes to a Software Team Leader, with a two-book bundle link.
- My team keeps breaking their promises. What can I do?
How a team leader can teach a team the language of commitment, spotting words like I'll try, setting end dates and flagging slips before deadlines pass.
- Burst your team's bubble - stop protecting them from the surrounding organization
Why, in learning mode, a team leader should stop shielding the team from the organization and let sales, marketing and support push their growth.
- The Bus Factor - Why your ‘best’ developer is your biggest problem
How to spot a bus factor of one in your team and reduce it with standups, pairing, code reviews and knowledge sharing, including the team leader as one.
- Two Techniques to Avoid the Bus Factor In your Teams: Push and Pull
How push based and pull based learning help a team remove bus factors, told through an architect who fixed a search server without learning anything.
- Grow your "feature teams" into just "teams"
Why feature teams built from specialists carry a bad bus factor, and why team leaders should grow them into teams where everyone can do each other's work.
- Should you grow even a short-term consultant in your team?
Why a team leader should still grow short-term consultants and temporary team members, treating everyone they lead as if they would stay forever.
- How to be an effective code coach
How a technical team leader can coach developers through pair programming, writing less code, asking leading questions and letting them solve problems.
- You're not self organizing if you have a go-to architect
A quick test for self-organization: if a team must ask an outside architect to finish its work, it is not self-organizing, and the architect should teach.
- The architect as a leader, and other specialists
Why an architect or any specialist on a team is a bottleneck, and should act as a coaching leader who spreads knowledge until they are no longer needed.
- Leadership and the mature team
Mike Burrows responds to the three maturity stages, arguing self-organization goes beyond self-management and mature teams still need leadership.
- How to deal with bad decisions made by the team
How a team lead can steer a self-directing team away from bad technical decisions by asking hard questions, based on Mike Cohn's Succeeding with Agile.
Every post in the category Learning Phase (25) · Other topics: Survival Mode, Team Leader Manifesto, Scrum Master · All articles