Presentation Details

Agile teams strive to create an atmosphere where people can do excellent work and have fun doing it and at the same time do the work in a way that is profitable and makes good business sense. Getting a team to a level where this is possible is often a struggle, but with management support most agile teams reach a high-performing, rich mix of fun and accountability and are able to out-deliver their peer teams.

What happens in this case is that the company culture influences individuals across the board, setting the baseline. A high-performing agile team is tight knit. They have worked hard to become a cohesive unit and have developed a bond and they start to build their own culture which tangents from the company. This chemistry can be thrown off balance when someone is added to the team in the middle of a project. It does not matter how flexible, capable, or agile savvy the new team member is. If they have not been involved in the care and nurturing of the team’s culture and is not invested in the same way that the other team members are. Some people in the company have a stronger view of the overall company culture and, when mixed with the newly created team culture, can have devastating effects.

So you can see how adding a new team member carries risks—even when this person enters with the best of intentions. And those risks dramatically increase when a new member out-and-out deviates from the established culture and behavior of the team. Even the most solid team can fall apart.

Change is inevitable—especially when it comes to people. How can teams embrace change and still keep it together when someone new enters the picture?

Put simply, a social deviant prevented the team from getting back to a high-performing state. Deviance in society can be defined as acting or doing things in a way that violates the established cultural norms. Cultural norms apply on many levels, from personal to family to work to society, and teams.

Outline

This talk will explore and the following (timings in minutes)

• 0 - 5 - Introduction
• 5 - 25 - Story of a social deviant in a team - We will look at how the team built itself and the impacts of the performance once the social deviant was introduced.
• 25 - 60 - Why the social deviant had the impact she did. We look at the culture of the team and how it compared to the culture of the organization. We will explore Tuckmans model of team performance and Robert K. Merton’s Strain Theory and how they related back to the project
• 60 - 75 - Techniques for identifying the social deviants in teams and how to handle the (often uncomfortable) situation
• 75 - 90 - Questions and answers