Team Bogged Down and Struggling to Improve? Give Them a Challenging Goal
Photo by Jeffrey F Lin
Two of my colleagues spent over 100 hours recently creating a technical proof of concept that ended up impressing developers, architects, and managers alike. The crazy thing is that it took them only about 20 hours of hands-on coding. The rest of the effort was spent working through organizational policies that restricted their access and the ensuing confusion of figuring out who to ask for what and going through the various systems and approvers to finally get what they needed.
They could’ve given up at any time and chose not to because they wanted to create something to improve developers’ lives. No one else on the team had considered creating something like what they developed, and leaders hadn’t realized previously how difficult it was for developers to do their work. Everyone was used to the ways things were, even as they struggled to deliver. Everyone except my colleagues who’d recently started working with the team.
This could be an argument for bringing in outside experts for a fresh set of eyes. However, there’s also an argument for pursuing challenging goals. My colleagues are in pursuit of enabling the team to deliver value rapidly, and they are relentless in removing points of friction.
A challenging goal provides a meaningful destination for teams to work towards. Simon Sinek explains the need for a clear destination in this short video:
Tomorrow (Monday, July 12th), I’ll be presenting on Coaching Winning Agile Teams as part of the Best Agile Articles Online conference. Tickets are still available, and recordings will be available afterward. I’ll be sharing models to help define challenging goals and coach teams to make progress towards achieving them. I hope you join me for it.
