How to lead your agile team to success?

A lot of businesses are trying to become agile, but fail to really implement it’s core principle: building things in small chunks, learning, and then iterating. Therefore I am going to share best practice on how to do that and how it relates to leading an agile team.

How does an agile leader help the team be successful? The main responsibility for a leader is setting goals (objectives) and direction (strategy). Setting goals helps direct us as individuals and as a team. This means you need to know what your team is working on and how it aligns with the goals of the company, department, or project. In addition, goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound.

Build only what is needed and when it is needed

The next thing that an agile leader needs to do is ensure that we’re using a lean and agile approach to the work. This means that we should be building only what is needed, when it is needed, while also preventing waste.

The lean approach helps us do this. We must also make sure we understand and embrace the agile mindset, which is about collaboration and communication in everything we do. We want to make sure we’re building a culture where everyone has a voice and where everyone can shine to help the team reach its goals.

5 ways to implement agile approach in your team

There are many principles and practices of the agile methodology. Implementing these will help you build high-quality, working software in short cycles with rapid adaptation to change.

1. Manage by facts 

Providing an environment where everyone can access the information necessary to do their job removes ambiguity and wasted work. This requires transparency, which is the practice of sharing information with the entire team, not just those that work on a specific project.

2. Build projects around motivated individuals

The best way to motivate people is to give them interesting things to work on and trust that they will get it done effectively. This means you should not assign tasks to people but instead let them decide what to do at the beginning of each sprint.

3. Give purpose to each sprint 

The outcome of a sprint is something we can be proud of while providing value to the client or customer. This helps people feel good about what they’re doing instead of just checking off tasks on a list.

4. The best solutions emerge from self-organizing teams

The people who do the work are in the best place to know how it should be done, so they have a responsibility to set their own goals and manage themselves to reach them.

5. The importance of retrospective meeting

At regular intervals, the team should reflect on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts. This is a retrospective meeting where the team checks in on the process you’ve been using and whether it needs to change.

And last but not least – be aware of the agile mindset! The agile approach provides a culture of more openness, collaboration, and continuous improvement than most traditional environments. It requires trust in your team members to do their jobs without constantly supervisors breathing down their necks. Trust me – the results are worth it. 

Want to experience what it is like to work in an agile team? Feel free to contact us!