Let’s start the year 2019 with this slogan originating from the French Revolution, which is answer to so many social questions: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. And the question I will be answering with it is: What is the secret of successful teams?
If you think I am making this up and the answer sounds to simple, take a look at the studies about what enables teams to be something more than a mere group of people working more or less towards the same goal. One of those studies has been conducted by Google and the results are published here: What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team.
What the studies in their core say is, that you have to provide equality between the team members. The team also must have the liberty to make its own decision. And not everyone has to become like a sister or brother in the team, but feeling social security and freedom to speak about the most secret and crazy ideas is crucial. Just as when you talk confidentially about most intimate questions with your sister or brother, or someone you feel as close.
Agile frameworks can make your team live up to the above slogan faster than any other. Just keep in mind, that they are tools to achieve freedom, equality and trust inside a group of people. Implementing agile inside a team cannot be a goal by itself. If you happen to try to heal the team by just “making everything agile”, you are bound to fail. Go for the French Revolution using agile and you and your team will thrive.