The Garage - Team Working Agreements: Greater Than the Sum of the Parts

In this Season 2 premiere of Agile Driven Impact, hosts Diane and Erich open up The Garage to tune up the engine of any great initiative: the team itself. They dive into how uncovering and celebrating the unique, individual skills of your team members transforms a group of people into a high-performance unit. Learn how to capture these distinct strengths directly inside a Team Working Agreement to build a system greater than the sum of its parts. This episode is proudly sponsored by Agile in Nonprofits. Visit www.agileinnonprofits.com to grab their free toolkits, download team templates, and subscribe to their free weekly email packed with actionable agile tips.

Evolving your work, accelerating your impact

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Season two.

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Here we are.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Let's do it.

SPEAKER_01 0:03

We're talking about the garage today. We're not in the garage. No. No. But welcome to season two of Agile Driven Impact. We are super excited to have you with us today. We are going to be talking about if we stick though with the racing and agile uh analogy, we'll be thinking about tuning up, not car parts, but people, right, Eric? So we're gonna be thinking about what makes people a team perform.

SPEAKER_00 0:37

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Yeah. What do you think makes a team perform?

SPEAKER_00 0:41

Um, well, I think you know, let's use a little race car analogy here. You know, a car, race car is kind of it is the sum of its parts, usually, right? So you put together a bunch of parts and you have a good race car. Um, so maybe if you put put together a bunch of great people, you'll have a great team. But unfortunately, that's not always the case. So today we're talking about the idea of how do we put parts together, how do we put team members together and make it so that they aren't just the sum of their parts, that they're more than the sum of their parts, that they multiply one another, that they uh per provide added value expertise that they wouldn't have otherwise been able to do uh without something in place.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

So basically, teams are no different than race cars. And when we pull them all together, yeah, the people are gonna amplify their amplify their impact because people are more than job titles.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

So I think they are different than race cars in that in that sense, right? Because you know, a race car is not just the sum of its parts or is just the sum of its parts generally, right? You put them together, you put them together in an okay way, they're gonna work, right? Put people together, not always gonna work the way you expect. Right.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Oh no, I guess I just think about the FSAE days where some of the parts went together.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Oh, that's what didn't always work. That's great. Okay, you're saying building a race car, but that's that's that's kind of the point of where we're at, right?

SPEAKER_01 2:05

All right, all right. But when we're building a team, that's why it's me, building a race car, building a team, parts of the thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

Yeah, the complexity, right? So versus complicated, you know, it's a complex system.

SPEAKER_01 2:15

Okay, great. Now that we've worked that out, there's some similarities, there's some differences, we're gonna stick with it. So the reality is that people, you, me, our team members, were so much more than job titles. Yeah, right. Far more than that. And so it's those hidden talents and skills and things people have tried that really create a whole bunch of value. It's the folks who didn't know that it was called a logic model, but then are in program design and a grant application, and all of a sudden they're like, oh, I love talking about smart objectives.

SPEAKER_00 2:43

I didn't know that was part of a logic model, and you're like, that's a logic model is because they might still know. And probably a lot of people listening to us have no clue what a logic model is. So you gotta join a team that knows what that is.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

Yeah, exactly. But so, but in terms of like someone joining, not knowing labels, not knowing words, but having a skill, a passion for something that helps unlock that when they're all together, they're stronger, they're better. Right. Right? I think that's really yes, I use logic model a lot. I'm sure by the end of season two, all of our listeners at Agile Driven Impact will start to have a sense of.

SPEAKER_00 3:13

This is not a logic model training.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Nope, something related to nonprofit work that Diane's passionate about. That's what they're gonna know about it, which is fine. But so fine, you give us an example, not in that uh program design document space. Help us. Where have you seen this work out?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Yeah, I mean, I can give a couple examples. Maybe the most um extreme examples of this would be things like a university student-run team, like a Formula City team. So on the Formula City team, when we were on it, the Formula Racing team, we built race cars um from scratch, designed them, and we took people onto the team. We would interview these kids and they would come onto the team if they had a certain set of skills, oftentimes engineering. But sometimes you just look for that spark in someone where it was like, wow, this person may not know what we need them to know right now, but they might be able to learn it, right? And if you bring them in in such a way that they can learn enough that they can do things, then you can see what they really can do. So on that team, we had a working agreement of sorts where uh when you joined the team, you had to read about the teams that you wanted to be on, the subteams. So maybe you came in and one of these kids was an economics major. He came in and he was interested in a lot of things, and he was there with several sub-teams he could join. And to join those teams, he had to actually read the previous year's design papers and understand how the systems worked so that he could join those teams. And very quickly, he learned how to weld, he learned how to do the dynamometer work, he learned how to do all those things, and eventually uh he actually switched his major to electronic electrical engineering because he learned so much about it and he got really interested in it. So if you can figure out a way to bring people together so that they learn together and they can, you know, go beyond their original skills, that's what you're looking for. Um, in the professional space, uh, I have a couple of teams that I work with where people joined the teams that had no idea. It was a training team that did training opportunities. And some of the people on the team, they'd never done a training before. And over the course of a few months, they observed, learned, practiced, and worked together with the rest of the team members to grow their skills. And the team eventually had multiple trainers that could do much more work than they could do before. So I think, you know, what you really want to do is figure out what are the ways that teams can discover those strengths. So, how do teams discover those strengths? What have you seen?

SPEAKER_01 5:42

Yeah, I think there's a lot of different ways that folks can approach it that will feel right for them. Um, and one of the I think creative questions that I know I've seen and heard you ask is when you're trying to figure out the strength, sometimes you ask, what is it, you know, that are your new your unique skills or your rock star qualities that you bring to a team? And sometimes I I love the rock star quality one. And I'll be like, go ahead, humble brag, do it. And sometimes that opens the floodgates of people sharing. But other times it's quiet. And I know that I've seen you use a different question that gets at a slightly different way of people thinking, which is what are the tools that you are? Who are you as a tool in the team? What do you, how would you identify as a tool in your team's toolbox, whether they're gonna bring like something like a tech tool or they're thinking like formally a tool, are they a wrench or a screwdriver or a hammer?

SPEAKER_00 6:34

Right. Some people will say things like, Well, I am a set of calipers because I'm really precise, right? Or sometimes people will say, you know, I'm a pen because I really like taking notes. Things like this are ways to discover strengths in a little bit less comfortable, a little bit more comfortable way than having to tell people, these are the 10 things I do really well, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:53

Yeah, because not everybody's comfortable saying, here's what energizes me, here's what I bring that's like the coolest thing that I want you all to know I'm so great at. And so either way, we've got a few different prompts than that we, you know, two different spectrums of how comfortable the team might feel that'll get us some of those answers. But I think we've both seen that when you hear those answers and you see them, sometimes, well, we're not sure if we have everything we need, if it's gonna be the sum is greater than the parts, or if it's really just at this moment, the sum is the sum, right? So we've got to figure out we've got to figure out like, so okay, now we have this information, we know about who's in the room, we know who we have. And so what are we gonna do? What are we gonna do with that information? I think that's the question that our listeners are probably wondering. Like, I know my awesome team, I know who they are, I know what they bring, or at least I think I do. But now what?

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Well, I think what you do with that is you start to form a working agreement. And I think uh I think our sponsor can help you with that even. So who is our sponsor?

SPEAKER_01 7:51

That's a nice little segue there. So season two of Agile Driven Impact is sponsored by Agile and Nonprofits, and Agile and Nonprofits has a whole bunch of toolkits and free templates, their free weekly newsletter. And I know it says nonprofits in the name, but really it's about change makers. So it doesn't matter about your industry or your organizational structure. I think a lot of their free templates might really help you out, including maybe today's team working agreements.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

So there are lots of great templates for team working agreements out there, hundreds, if not more. Um, really important things about teamworking agreements is that they're a living document, not something that you write up and then throw away and put up, you know, into a folder somewhere. But they're a living document that you should look at all the time. Uh, they're created by the team. They should be simple, easy to understand. And by living, I mean that you want to reflect on it often. Maybe not every week, but maybe once a month, at least once a quarter, you open up that working agreement and you say, Okay, how are we doing on this? And you can use a lot of different rating systems that we've talked about in other podcasts, FISTIV, uh, consent voting, other things like this. But then by using that feedback, you can define how the team's gonna work going forward, what things are working, what things aren't. So, one of the questions people often ask is, well, what's this work doing? What should actually go in it? So, what do you put in yours?

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Right. And it's a little bit like if you start to share recipes with folks and you're like, what's in your homemade dish and what's in your homemade dish, and you're gonna find differences. And I wanted to just point that out because you said there's literally there's so many templates that are available. And so we're gonna describe some of what I think we like, right? But you definitely have to make your template your own, following some basic key ideas. There's a core like a core info you want it. Core ingredients you want to give in it, right? So whether that's purpose as the label or something that sounds like it, why is the team together? Why are we all together? What is it we're working towards? Something like I know a lot of nonprofit professionals love a template that has like it's got a heart in the center, so like heart-centered purpose because it's related to mission. And that work for all teams.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 10:06

But there's gonna be something about why are we all together?

SPEAKER_00 10:09

So if we use your food analogy, like everybody has their own maybe spaghetti and meatball recipe, but you gotta put noodles in it somehow, right? It's not spaghetti without some type of noodles.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

I mean, it could be zucchini noodles, still count.

SPEAKER_00 10:20

Still noodles.

SPEAKER_01 10:20

Still count, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

But I mean it's not spaghetti without that. So I don't think it's a working agreement, like you said, without some type of purpose or goals in it, a vision, you know, things like this that tell us this is who the team is, this is why we exist, and this is where we're headed.

SPEAKER_01 10:34

Right. And some templates that I've seen actually, I like that when they split purpose from goals, because purpose slash mission or vision keeps it super high level, big umbrella statement, a little ambiguous, this is why we're together. The goals start to get a little more tactical and then helps people to think about well, if this is why we're together and if these are the tactics that we're gonna try and achieve together, are our bigger aims, I should say, then okay, what values do we share? Because it's one thing to know those strengths we talked about earlier in this episode. Yeah. But knowing each other's strengths and rock star qualities, well, that doesn't mean that you necessarily have shared agreement about values. What are the things we value as a team? What are the things we value as an organization? So I love a template that has that in it as well. And then, and there's a lot of other headings that we could talk about, but my other one that's favorite is about like norms or rules, something that's like I like to connect those two. Yeah, how do you connect those two?

SPEAKER_00 11:32

So, like, um, let's say you come up with your two, three, four core values that you have as a team. Then you can do we value whatever it is. We value respect, therefore we will, and then you put a norm, right? So revalue respect, therefore we will uh communicate if we're going to be late for the meeting uh and not waste everyone's time, right? So you can make the norms come from the values.

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Yep. I like that connection a lot. And I think uh it's actually one of our colleagues, Avi Schneier, who I've heard talk many times when you start to talk about the norms or like the rules that are going to be in a team working agreement, that I mean, some teams can really get into having that list. Even if it's connected to values, you might end up with 15, 20 different things that people want to have listed, and we're like, maybe that's too many. And so Avi's usually like, let's stick to at least single digits, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Like and sometimes you do like a waterline approach and then you vote ones above the waterline, things like this to make sure that you don't have too many norms. Yeah, because I usually super six or seven max, you know, not a lot.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

Yeah. I I was gonna say, I think my teams right now, I think they have eight or nine, but so but tied to values. I think that's a really nice way to help people think about what would be in there. So those are like my favorite ingredients. We already had a difference about how we might talk about noodles in our spaghetti recipe. Apparently, we'll see what happens for dinner tonight. Uh, but what else? Is there something else that when you think about your favorite working agreement templates, something else that's got to be called out? Is it like, I know you talk about strength?

SPEAKER_00 13:01

Well, yeah, there's, I think there's, well, there's a number of things. I think definitely communication is something you want to have in there. You know, how are we going to communicate? That's really key. And um, then from there, I think you want to get into what are the skills and strengths of the team. So, again, what are your unique skills? Going back to the toolbox idea of what tool are you? You know, what are your unique skills, the favorite type of work you do? Uh, what are your hobbies that might even contribute to your workplace? Like, do you do something as a hobby that you really enjoy that allows you to really bring that into the workplace? So, also though, what are some areas that you want to actually grow your skills? Where do you want to be better? What where do you need support? And the idea here is that that way when you're looking at the work, you can assign the work either by strengths or growth needs or things like that within the team. And even more importantly, you can take that vision or mission or purpose that you've created and say, if this is our vision, mission, purpose, and these are the skills we currently have. What other skills might we need to get to that vision, mission, or purpose? Maybe we have no one on, maybe we're a nonprofit and we have to be out in social media. And this team's goal is to market the organization, to do those types of things that bring people in. And there's zero people on the team that have any skills with Instagram or some of the main socials. Well, that's a gap that you would identify and you would say, okay, we want to grow this gap. Who wants to learn it? Things like this. So, you know, I think that's really important.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

So well, and let's just pause on that for a second because it's I'm with you that you want to have somebody who might be excited and you find the gap, and they're like, I I do, I want to learn that. Let me do that right. But there's still that moment where you're like, whoa, but we need it now. And so something that I've seen is a phrase uh that's been used is well, what if we like had a friend of the team for a little bit? So somebody who's not maybe a core part of the team, but they're bringing that skill set that's so needed, and they're a great person to have someone shadow, somebody to be the mentor.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah, see something like this a lot in the corporate space, right? You have one something better expert and like it's needed on seven teams or something, right? So when that expert does the work, we try to advise them not to do the work, but to actually navigate the work. So, okay, let that person do the work. You're gonna be there to guide and make sure it doesn't go wrong, and then by the end, certify that they're able to do that. So that over time, instead of the seven teams needing the expert, then it becomes six teams needing them five, four, three. And at some point, the expert is just working on one team. So doing things like that, I think, can really help.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Yeah, and I love that that actually that's something that we found that's common across our two industry spaces, then with just a little quick informal chat. Friend of team, it makes it sound short-term, it makes it sound like it's not written in, it's not forever the mentorship of a subject matter expert, coaching of it. Yeah, love that. And so when teams follow their working agreement, when they don't let it get dusty on the shelf, uh, what's gonna happen? What's gonna change for teams? What do you think we see as a result of teams that follow working agreements and keep them current?

SPEAKER_00 16:20

I mean, definitely better collaboration of work, typically less conflict, less friction, less bad conflict, less conflict that doesn't move the ball forward. Conflict is actually good on teams. Conflict leads to better decisions.

SPEAKER_01 16:32

So certain times of types of conflict.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Productive conflict. Productive conflict. I mean, the five dysfunctions of a team to get Patrick Lancioni, you know, you avoiding conflict is a dysfunction, right? So we want to have conflict. Good stuff comes out of conflict. So we want to have conflict. Um, and then from that conflict, uh, we can get faster decisions. And we have to build that trust to be able to have the conflict. So I think you build trust, you get better collaboration, better conflict, better decisions, better outcomes. All those things come from it.

SPEAKER_01 17:03

Yeah. And when you talk about decisions, faster decisions. Yeah. Right? Decreased, and I love this phrase, and it's such industry jargon, but decreased decision latency. So the faster a team can get the decision, the more likely their project is to succeed. So that means they can do more awesome things. Right. Right. And so what team doesn't want that? What person doesn't want that to feel more impactful in their role? Yeah. Right. So speaking of impact, so people are using a teamworking agreement, either maybe our sponsor, Agile and Nonprofits template, or whatever one their team really jams on. So people they feel like they're making progress together. They feel like they're part of a team that has shared values, shared purpose, shared norms. They're not constantly surprised by how they're interacting. So they become stronger. That's great for everybody that's on the team, I think, right? I'm like, people are maybe not going to have like the Sunday scaries, they might be excited to be part of the team again. So great. Maybe we start to see some improved or increased outputs. That's at the team level. What about broader organization? What about leaders? Do we see what have you heard? What have you seen in terms of like leaders that comment or recognize that the teamworking agreement is impactful?

SPEAKER_00 18:17

Well, a tricky thing is, and I spoke about this uh in a conference last week, is those things which are easy to measure typically are those things that get managed, right? And that's not necessarily a good thing. So it's easy to measure lots of different metrics that are meaningful metrics. But the challenge with leadership in this context is it's difficult to see the impact of the working agreement right away. And it takes effort to create it, effort to maintain it. And if you change team members, you have to refresh the working agreement. You can't just have a team member ad and be like, This is the working agreement, follow it. It's more like, okay, let's talk about it again. So leaders that can understand that stability on teams matters, that teamwork and coordination really matter, those are the things that I think really, really matter in this case. That's where you've got to be.

SPEAKER_01 19:09

Uh-huh. That's an interesting twist on it. So it's not necessarily that leaders will see positive growth in an organization and go, oh, that was the working agreement at work. No, they won't. They won't. But they might. Let's give them credit. It's tough.

SPEAKER_00 19:22

They might. It's tough for them to see that. They believe the principle that it helps.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

Yeah, no, that makes more sense. So let's talk about that then for a second. If we're trying to think about how you want to convince leaders in the organization or even a leader of a team that the teamworking agreement is important, that it's going to make the team more resilient, that it's going to help the team actually self-probably manage and self-correct more. How do you pitch it? If you're the person in the team, like we're thinking about we always like to make a challenge for everybody. How are they going to take this and say, this is what I think we should do?

SPEAKER_00 19:55

Well, I think put some metrics on it. That's one way to do it, right? So you could um take and say, okay, before the working agreement's written, you could say, How well do we do this? How well do we do this? How well do we do this right now?

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Oh, like a self-assessment. Self-assessment. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

So retrospective of sorts of how well do we communicate right now? Um, you know, and not yesno questions, but like scales, one to five scale type thing. And then rerun that later, but also ask the team a question like, do we think that those things that we just rated are holding us back? You know, five not holding us back at all, one completely slowing us down, and get at least that feel of it from the team so that you can have this leading metric that says, hey, we did the work agreement, these metrics moved up. We expect our outcomes to improve over time. Right. So they can at least see some number that fights against the other numbers those guys were looking at because people that are in leadership roles are looking at a lot of metrics. So I think that's something that you really want to have as you do it.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

That's a really nice challenge, and I'm gonna give a real world example to help people think about what that might sound like. So was talking to a team that was having a really hard time being, they were fully remote, they were not together, and they felt like they were constantly watching their chat channels because they were so worried they were gonna miss something. They were so worried that they were holding their team members up that they were allowing themselves to be interrupted all the time. Now they had a a number of other things going on, but they had some real things they wanted to talk about for addressing some hypotheses for how they work. And so they were thinking about what it felt like, how often were they interrupted? They could look at some of their throughput time as well for how fast they were getting things out the door, getting things to leadership for feedback. So they identified, to your point, a few metrics that felt clunky to them. That actually brought those to the conversation. It wasn't an open-ended question to start, but then once they put the teamworking agreement in place, they returned to it. Just I think it was about two months later, and were able to say, wow, that really made a difference. True. And then they continued to they wanted to keep it as a working agreement that was not dusty, that was right in front of them. So everybody's challenge, I think, their results for what comes out of the challenge this week should all sound really different. But I think we need to add like a second part to the challenge if we could, real quick. What if somebody's listening to this and they're like, ah, Eric, Diane, I already have a team working agreement in place. What's my challenge? Right? Because that challenge we just issued was for folks who don't have a teamworking agreement in place. But we both know there's lots of teams that do have one. It might not be the the it might be dusty though.

SPEAKER_00 22:37

Yeah, I would say, you know, check are you reviewing it often? And you know, is it visible in front of the team? So you could ask the team members that you could ask yourself that. Um so if you do have one, how well are you using it? If you say, well, it's not working for me, but you're not using it, well then try to use it more. Uh make sure it's visible, make sure it's in front of people. And I think if you don't have one, do something really, really simple. Like just ask your team members what's a hidden strength we don't know about about you. See what see what they say. Just do it do it as a check-in question at the beginning of a meeting. It's easy, simple, and then you learn some things about the team, and then you can get to where you need to go. So I think that's our advice. So let's uh let's close out this episode of the garage, I think. So I think really importantly, you want to design not just the work you work on, but the team that does the work. So make sure that you put some thoughtful practice into designing the team. Uh grab a template and keep driving that impact, I think.

SPEAKER_01 23:38

Absolutely. That's the point of the garage, right? Keep driving that impact. And thanks again to our season two sponsor, Agile Driven Impact. Uh Agile in Nonprofits. Yeah. The sponsor of Agile Driven Impact. There we go. Uh, check out their website at agile and nonprofits.com and be sure to subscribe to their free newsletter.

SPEAKER_00 23:58

You might even find a template.

SPEAKER_01 23:59

Or more. Or more.

SPEAKER_00 24:01

Or more.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

Take care. See you next time.

SPEAKER_00 24:03

See ya.