Implementing Lean Teams
Lean organizations start with teams as their basic organizational building block. They recruit and hire people who work well on teams and are flexible. They have team goals and their compensation systems have a big team component. They emphasize teamwork and team problem solving.
Implementing lean teams is an effort, not only in redefining organization, but developing a new culture, new habits and new skills. It requires discipline and motivation.
The leadership team of an organization must take responsibility for actively managing the process of improvement.
To be an effective team leader or member requires the development of new habits and skills. When these become the norm in the organization, you have changed the culture.
Effectively implementing Lean and sustaining results requires solid teamwork, led with discipline and reinforced with positive feedback.
The creation of cross-functional lean teams is one of the first process improvements most organizations make to remove bottlenecks.
Cross-functional teams reduce the amount of partially done work that has to wait for a specialist or has to be transferred to another team to be completed. This is important because delayed work results in delayed feedback, delayed feedback increases the potential for rework.
One of major benefits of implementing a Lean approach is to reduce cycle time between beginning work on a feature and getting feedback. Faster cycle times reduce the possibility of changed minds, feature drift or scope creep and external events intervening to delay delivery.
In a perfect world we would be able to compose a self-contained cross-functional team that would be able to perfectly meet the needs of current projects. We could then easily imagine how a team could evolve and grow to meet the needs of future projects. We can imagine these scenarios because they can and do happen more and more often. However years of specialization and architecture choices sometimes make creating self-contained cross-functional teams difficult. For example, it would be cost prohibitive for an organization to have a highly specialized security architect on each team. They wouldn’t have a lot to do on every project and are expensive. Each team will need to make compromises, however the core team should be composed to make it as cross functional as possible, rather than perfectly cross functional.
The process of learning to work together effectively is known as team development. Research has shown that teams go through definitive stages during development. Bruce Tuckman, an educational psychologist, identified a five-stage development process that most teams follow to become high performing. He called the stages: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Team progress through the stages is shown in the following diagram.
Most high-performing teams go through five stages of team development.
Forming stage
The “forming” stage takes place when the team first meets each other. In this first meeting, team members are introduced to each. They share information about their backgrounds, interests and experience and form first impressions of each other. They learn about the project they will be working on, discuss the project’s objectives/goals and start to think about what role they will play on the project team. They are not yet working on the project. They are, effectively, “feeling each other out” and finding their way around how they might work together.
During this initial stage of team growth, it is important for the team leader to be very clear about team goals and provide clear direction regarding the project. The team leader should ensure that all of the members are involved in determining team roles and responsibilities and should work with the team to help them establish how they will work together (“team norms”.) The team is dependent on the team leader to guide them.
Storming stage
The storming stage is the most difficult and critical stage to pass through. It is a period marked by conflict and competition as individual personalities emerge. Team performance may actually decrease in this stage because energy is put into unproductive activities. Members may disagree on team goals, and subgroups and cliques may form around strong personalities or areas of agreement. To get through this stage, members must work to overcome obstacles, to accept individual differences, and to work through conflicting ideas on team tasks and goals. Teams can get bogged down in this stage. Failure to address conflicts may result in long-term problems.
Norming stage
If teams get through the storming stage, conflict is resolved and some degree of unity emerges. In the norming stage, consensus develops around who the leader or leaders are, and individual member’s roles. Interpersonal differences begin to be resolved, and a sense of cohesion and unity emerges. Team performance increases during this stage as members learn to cooperate and begin to focus on team goals. However, the harmony is precarious, and if disagreements re-emerge the team can slide back into storming.
Performing stage
In the performing stage, consensus and cooperation have been well-established and the team is mature, organized, and well-functioning. There is a clear and stable structure, and members are committed to the team’s mission. Problems and conflicts still emerge, but they are dealt with constructively. (We will discuss the role of conflict and conflict resolution in the next section). The team is focused on problem solving and meeting team goals.
Adjourning stage
In the adjourning stage, most of the team’s goals have been accomplished. The emphasis is on wrapping up final tasks and documenting the effort and results. As the work load is diminished, individual members may be reassigned to other teams, and the team disbands. There may be regret as the team ends, so a ceremonial acknowledgement of the work and success of the team can be helpful. If the team is a standing committee with ongoing responsibility, members may be replaced by new people and the team can go back to a forming or storming stage and repeat the development process.
Internal conflict can have a major impact on Lean team dynamics and cohesion. As a Team Coach, learning how to deal with these conflicts can become a major part of your everyday job.
On the other hand, conflict is natural in any vibrant Lean team. A fear of conflict in a Lean team is not a good sign and can signify team apathy. Patrick Lencioni, author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable, names “fear of conflict” as one of the five dysfunctions. A Team Coach needs to learn how to coach the team to navigate conflict rather than avoid it.
In my previous experience as a technical coordinator, before embracing Lean culture, I didn’t have to go into the face of conflict very often, because team members in conflict had to deal with their issues by escalating them to their managers. I’ve realized that what need is a “conflict management workout”: a number of simple practices to keep in mind when trying to navigate conflict effectively.
Below a summary of those practices, as stated by Carl Robinson in his 13 Steps for Navigating Conflict Effectively:
1. Be proactive. Head off problems before they snowball. Ask your peers or subordinates, “How are we doing? What can I do to improve the effectiveness of our relationship?” Those questions can be kept in mind during a retrospective facilitation.
2. Establish a set of working agreements for resolving conflicts in advance. In truly creative settings, conflict is inevitable and necessary, so plan for effectively managing conflict. Think of the working agreements as ground rules for behavior within and outside the team. Don’t wait for the conflict to happen before establishing ground rules for navigating conflict.
3. Deal directly with others. Whenever possible, don’t bring in a third party (generally one’s boss). This is called triangulation. Triangulation is an attempt to avoid responsibility by using the third party to join your side on an issue. Triangulating keeps people from resolving issues among themselves.
4. Keep a private disagreement private. Making private disagreements public increases the tension around the issues, because people become more defensive the more public an issue becomes.
5. Discuss the issue only when those involved are present. Stop the discussion immediately if someone brings up an issue that involves another team member not at the meeting. The team owes it to the missing team member to postpone further debate until he or she can be present.
6. Focus on the facts. Everyone involved in a conflict needs to be prepared to discuss the issue armed with the facts. Being prepared encourages people to debate critical issues based on data rather than on feelings. Ignorance is not bliss. Encourage informed discussion of critical issues.
7. Generate multiple options/alternatives when conflict arises. Consider four or five options at once — even some you don’t support. Having multiple alternatives helps diffuse conflict and reduces the chance that team members will polarize around just two possibilities.
8. Create team alignment by attending to and clarifying four specific areas:
- Lean team vision
- Team roles and responsibilities
- Working agreements and user stories’ definition of done
- Understanding and accepting differing personal styles of interaction
9. Hold sessions with your team about alignment. Determine your teams’s clarity about the four alignment areas from the previous tip. Provide any necessary information to remove ambiguity.
10. Diversity helps. Develop the capability to understand and respond to differing personality styles. People respond best when they feel they are understood and not looked down upon. Develop tolerance and respect for differences. Diversity of opinions and styles breeds a better outcome — just as diversity in nature does.
As Robinson further states, “Most people wait until contentious issues escalate and become a bigger problem before attempting to deal with them. That’s called conflict avoidance, or burying your head in the sand. An effective Team Coach should help the team become adept at navigating conflict. Imagine a vibrant workplace where people debate important issues in a civil manner. It doesn’t happen by accident. It takes practice and discipline.”
Mediating is another way to help reduce conflict on the team. The Team Coach is the ideal person to model conflict management in a positive way. Ryan Hedstrom, in his article “Coaching Through Conflict: Effective Communication Strategies,” lays out the following four principles to draw upon when you’re in the position of resolving conflict among team members:
1. Active listening. There are several recognized ways to show that you’re really listening.
- Display a willingness to listen can help alleviate conflict.
- Encourage the speaker by asking questions and showing interest.
- Validate the speaker. You can still show interest in the person while not necessarily agreeing with her or his point of view.
- Restate the speaker’s message by paraphrasing main points.
- Center the conflict by trying to find the key points of the message.
2. Nonverbal communication. A cold shoulder, eye roll, or clenched jaw can go a long way toward communicating a point without your saying a word. In fact, 70 percent of our communication is nonverbal in nature. Be open and consistent in your body language; it will help defuse emotion.
3. “I” statements. This technique is centered in the belief that if the speaker takes responsibility for her or his statements, others will be less likely to simply react and put up a defense. When comparing the following statements, the first puts the receiver of that message on the defensive due to the blaming and accusing nature of the statement, and the second shows the speaker taking ownership:
- “You hurt the team when you don’t show up to conditioning on time.”
- “I’m frustrated when you don’t show up to conditioning on time.”
4. Avoid common communication obstacles. It’s easy to fall into several traps when dealing with conflict. Some common obstacles that get in the way of effective mediation are:
- Advising: “Well, I’ll tell you what I’d do . . . “
- Diagnosing: “Your problem is that you . . . “
- Discounting: “Cheer up, it’ll work out.”
- Lecturing: “How many times do I have to tell you . . . “
- Threatening: “This is the last time I will . . . “
- Preaching: “You ought to know better than to . . . “
Hedstrom also names some clear do’s and don’ts, as follows:
Do . . .
- Convey the value of your relationship with the person.
- Go slowly with what you want to communicate.
- Try to understand the other person’s position.
- Listen to what the other person is trying to communicate.
- Confront the situation, not the person.
Don’t . . .
- Communicate the solution; it is better to focus on the problem.
- Stop communicating.
- Use put-downs or sarcasm.
- Rely on nonverbal hints to communicate; be direct and forthcoming.
- Discuss the problem with others not associated with the conflict.
Conflict is a double-edged sword. Some amount of it is natural in a creative team. On the other hand, too much, left unmoderated, can hinder that creativity and damage team members’ working relationships. The Team Coach’s responsibility is to manage conflict: Learn to spot it, handle it positively, and defuse it when it becomes negative.
References
Adkins L. Coaching Agile Teams. Boston: Addison-Wesley. 2010.
Fisher R. and Ury W. Getting to Yes. New York: Penguin Books. 1991.
Gross B. and Zimmerman G. Mediating Interpersonal Conflict. North Manchester, IN: Education for Conflict Resolution. 1997.
Hedstrom R.A. and Lauer L. Resolving conflict: Effective mediation tools for coaches. Adult learning module for the MHSAA coaching advancement program. East Lansing, MI: MHSAA. 2006.
Hedstrom R. Coaching through conflict: Effective communication strategies. Association for Applied Sport Psychology. 2012.
Lencioni P. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable. Wiley. 2002.
Robinson C. 13 Steps for Navigating Conflict Effectively. Advanced Leadership Consulting. 2009.
Toropov B. The art and skill of dealing with people. Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall. 1997.
