Originally published on the Bradfield CS Medium blog.

How can you tell if a team is operating as a team or a group of individuals? Drop by their stand-up.

“Yesterday I debugged some performance issues and was pulled into a heap of meetings. Today: same.”

Rinse and repeat around the circle. Yawn. This is a team in name only, going through the motions. The very format encourages individualism and undermines teaming. Each individual takes a turn to speak, usually to the manager, in order, with no regard to the greater purpose of work. These kinds of stand-ups are why people hate “Agile”; boring status reports to the boss that distract us from working.

The stand-up of a high performing team is completely different: it’s focused on the team commitments. What did we say we were going to do this week? Are we going to get it done? Why not? Anything we’ve learned in the last day that could derail us? The meeting happens because they couldn’t function without it, not because the boss said so. They’re talking to each other, not reporting up. They are working as a team.

Team Commitments

The most important idea for effective teams is that the team commits to work, not the individual. The team succeeds or fails on that commitment together. For people to feel comfortable working in a team, they need to trust their peers and their manager, and that trust can take time to build. Luckily, working together on a shared commitment is a great way to build trust!

When groups of people start operating more effectively as a team, morale tends to improve. It’s exhilarating being part of a team! Also, counter-intuitively any performance issues surface quickly. When peoples’ performance is more intrinsically linked to the team and the team is committing as a group, they are more likely to proactively raise (and help solve!) any problems.

Here are some ideas for helping your team work as one:

• Reduce the number of projects a team works on in parallel.
• Treat work commitments with respect, and hustle to get them done. Planning should be the process of figuring out what the team is prepared to commit to, rather than a full accounting of every hour they spend at work. This necessarily means under-planning for a week, which is a new way of thinking for many teams. Any slack time will be filled with polishing, learning, or getting a head start on the next set of work.
• Always have stand up in-front of your work plan (e.g. agile board), to help focus discussion on the work and whether the team is on track to meet its commitments.
• Celebrate when the team hits its commitments through demos to stakeholders and peer teams. This also helps ensure commitments are providing business value.

By default, people will tend to work on their own projects. It’s easy to do and doesn’t require talking to people. Over the long run though, working by yourself tends to be both lonely and bad for the business. You end up chipping away at the same thing day in day out, without any sense of progress. Nothing ever ships. You lose sight of the bigger picture. You don’t feel like you’re having much impact. Making commitments as a team is the antidote to this malaise.