Focus Intensio: Focus on the team giving them the space they need, and confidence in their ability to do. The manager will take care to be sincere in the goals that he will entrust to the team.
Give them the environment and support the team needs and trust them to achieve what they are responsible for. This is the fifth principle of the Agile Manifesto.
Across the Atlantic, the business expresses itself as much as the creativity of the employees in a relaxed environment, colorful, alternating convivial spaces where we play and collaborative space. Therefore, job offers express the flexibility offered to employees to organize themselves as a major asset in joining them. Driven by motivated individuals, new leadership models are emergingThe open-space disappears and invites flexibility in the offices.
The individual may feel tired or need to work from home such as slouching on the couch. It’s now allowed.
Our colleagues across the Atlantic who already capitalized on collective intelligence and saw the relaxed aspect as a change in the way we work in the 1980s.
In France, we worked late and against the grain by developing playful and collaborative spaces in companies.
We have a tendency to translate this principle by a development in the companies of playful and collaborative spaces. Spaces that arrive often before a change of mentality. Managers control everything. Autonomy and transparency remain an empty word. The change is wanted but the elements necessary for the change are absent bringing confusion and growing frustration as the change plans operate unsuccessfully …
And yet the manager’s toolbox does contain the different elements listed below
Since the 2000s, French companies have deprived employees of the meaning attached to their work. Processes have compartmentalized organizations and then the individual himself, reducing work to a simple task. They cut the motor of pleasure at work.
The colorful spaces, comfortable inviting employees to express themselves as at home is suddenly a trap, almost infantilizing …and collaborators are wary of it.
Yet this pleasure could be translated by Explorer, experimenting, learning – this is how we are supposed to live and work. Humans are curious and sociable. The company can thus build its performance around motivated individuals, who find pleasure in working together. This is the purpose of this principle 5, of the Agile Manifesto.
Build projects around motivated individuals
Team motivation: introducing Agile values and high added value delivery brings meaning to everyone’s contribution when the responsibilities and autonomy necessary for end-to-end achievement are given to the team.
Motivated people first have confidence in themselves and then trust others. They are focused. They dream of infinite possibilities and organize their lives by seeing in big. They are extremely satisfied with their life. And life smiles on them. They are the first to receive an increase or to get the dream project. They will maintain longer relationships and be promoted or recruited more than their unmotivated peers.
They learn continuously, and work an experiment, a metaphor at the service of collective intelligence.
“The will to win, the desire to succeed, the desire to reach its full potential … These are the keys that will open the door to personal excellence.” –Confucius
When personal excellence is achieved, group excellence is possible. The individual is detached, open, eager to cooperate and expand his vision. He wants to go further. To challenge oneself by engaging other key skills and then to learn from the contacts of others. On this topic, see also the series of articles on the 4 levers of success of your business transformation.
A motivated team
The change starts with a team that wants to collaborate. Positive confrontation becomes possible. A slight change of gaze, the authorization to question oneself individually allows the emergence of the collective.
Once the change has begun, management must be more discret. He will have to provide the necessary support and the appropriate working environment.
In 2001, the published Agile Manifesto recalls the success factors of a team that performs through four basic principles: the interactions between individuals, a common goal carried by a software that works and as the only means of interaction with our team. This communication centered on a common goal can accommodate change.
The Leadership Model Exposed in This Book by Sheldon Bowles and Kenneth H. Blanchard, Gung Ho !: Turn on the People in Any Organization (The One Minute Manager) provides additional insight into the expected role of the leader, and puts the team at the center of the system. This book tells the story of an American factory that revives profit by creating the break by re-introducing three values from metaphors of the animal world:
1-the squirrel. Its source of motivation and its energy are in collecting for the winter what to feed. This gives the purpose of all these actions.
2- the beaver. Its motivation source is to maintain the water level. First by building the entrance below the water level and a dam to keep the water at an acceptable level. If the dam is destroyed, the colony will rebuild it. Every member knows its role and trust reigns. Nobody questions the common goal.
3- Geese: Geese organize the flight and encourage each other, to keep each of them mobilized without exception.
The 3 values of the animal world are: A common goal driven by peer trust and whose individual efforts are supported. It is another way of seeing support for individuals.
Ken Blanchard, A few years after the publication of this book has become a fervent advocate of servant leadership, whose main role is to help teams win.
This article was conceived and written by Dominique Popiolek, leader and professional coach transformation.