Improving Trust in Teams – SPA Conference 2011

By Jay Alvarez on 22 June 2011

I attended a session at SPA Conference 2011 run by Rachel Davies who is an agile coach and author of the book Agile Coaching. The session was based on how to improve trust in teams and these were my notes from the session

Improving Trust in Teams

I attended a session run by Rachel Davies who is an agile coach and author of the book Agile Coaching.

The session was based on how to improve trust in teams and these were my notes from the session:

Trust is confidence to Collaborate

Lack of trust is like a tax on team interactions. Increasing ceremonies slows us down, costs go up.

Shared principles and values underlie a framework of trust.

Rachel's trust equation

T= (c+r+i)/s

t=trustworthiness c=credibility r=reliability i=intimacy s=self organisation

We were asked to work in teams to produce a force field analysis of a situation mapping the driving forces and restraining forces acting on the desired change for Improved Trust

The results revealed that greater transparency and smaller, more clearly defined and achievable chunks of work allowed for greater sense of achievement and increased trustworthiness within a team and particularly between the team and management/clients.

Obscurity and heavy, ill defined work which is not clearly communicated creates mistrust and mysticism - particularly between the developers and business folk who start to believe that the IT are doing magical things and that what they achieve is so difficult, and even more difficult to grasp the outcomes of,  that understanding breaks down and hence mistrust builds up.

From the developers perspective, big ill defined chunks of work allow lots of mistakes and bugs to be nicely covered up with big fluffy blanket which is good to hide behind - perpetuating the myth how complicated everything is. When outcomes and achievements (whether good or bad) are regularly communicated, then any problem, issue or change of status can be isolated and dealt with,  without affecting the credibility or consistency of the team - nothing is blown out of proportion.

The outcome of the session was a poster that we had to draw in the group to demonstrate what we had learnt.

Thinking back to our Aptivate retrospective the other day I wonder if we need to work on how we write down the actions in the form of smart objectives to help us to get through them and thus aid in making them achievable.

• Specific - Be precise about what you are going to achieve.
• Measurable - Quantify your objectives.
• Achievable - Are you attempting too much?
• Realistic - Do you have the resources to make the objective happen?
• Timed - State when you will achieve the objective (within a month? By February 2012?