3 Mindsets Your Team Should Have
What makes a successful team? A certain working method? Skilled team members? The working environment? … We could list a lot more valid points here but let me focus on one important point which I believe is crucial for every team: the right mindset!
Every sportsman would probably agree that with the right mindset of a team a lot more is possible. Often you do not need the best players, the biggest stadium, and the most beautiful lawn to win the game. It is rather the belief, the conviction, and the inner strength of a team that makes a difference. There are many pieces of evidence in sports history that prove this theory. Like the 2004 European Football Championship winner team Greece which kicked out all favorite teams by following its coach Rehhagel’s brilliant strategy, acting as a uniform team, and being flexible to adapt to the tournament opponents.
In Business having a great team is as important as in sports but the environment is different. Let me highlight 3 important mindsets I believe are crucial for successful teams in our digital world:
#1 Agile Mindset
As a software guy, I believe in the agile way of working since my early days. In just a few lines the agile manifesto expresses the main idea of what agile means. Although the fathers of agile like Kent Beck, Martin Fowler, or Ken Schwaber focused on software development, their principles and the agile mindset can easily be transferred to any other business area.
Agile is much more than just a method. It is a belief, an attitude, or just a truth for many of us. The few phrases in the agile manifesto are wonderful guidance in finding the right approach. It is their simplicity which makes them the perfect buddy to question all decisions in your team.
Today there are many agile frameworks (Scrum, LeSS, SAFe, …) that help to implement agile but they will not help you if you miss having an agile mindset. A framework is always helpful to start because it gives you a frame to act and guides the team but eventually the team should “respond to change” and adapt it to its own needs. Therefore agile is a mindset and not just a method or framework!
#2 Product Mindset
We are used to think in projects. A team works on a certain project. A manager is responsible for a project. A company has many projects… The term “project” is omnipresent and there are endless books on project management. While there is nothing wrong with doing projects, I would like to question if the idea of a project still fits in our fast moving digital world.
Today we need to be flexible, adapt quickly to new client needs, change our business model, or rethink our products. To achieve this we need to think from our customers’ perspective backward. Putting our customers in focus means that we need to fully concentrate on our products because this is the medium how to get in touch with our customers. A product could be anything that our customers consume; a hardware part, a software, a service, or a consultancy. This leads to the point that our teams and our business need to be customer-first focused and therefore need to concentrate fully on their products!
A product team is fully responsible for a product and does everything to improve the product and the customer experience. This total focus on the market leads to the point that the team concentrates on the things that make a change to the customers.
A product mindset is crucial for a team to build a successful product or provide a service that people love. The team can be supported in approaching a product mindset by using methods like defining a product vision and mission or coming up with a product roadmap. Another great approach in a product minded team is the usage of Objectives and Key Results (short ORKs) or smart goals.
Another helpful method which should be part of every product minded team is Design Thinking. The great advantage of a design thinking approach is its iterative manner to solve customer problems and find a suitable approach early in the product lifecycle. While a product vision, mission, roadmap, and OKRs focus on product planning, design thinking gives the team a method to be creative and find the best solution for their customers.
By moving from a project to a product mindset teams will focus on their customers allowing them to build greater products and services. It is a fundamental shift for the team and the organization. Especially in large enterprises moving to a product organization takes time.
#3 Startup Mindset
A startup is a small company to have success with a ground-breaking product to grow and scale quickly. Therefore, a startup team needs to be flexible (“there are no predefined jobs”), fearless (“no risk, no fun”), and fully responsible (“there is no other department to blame”). The dynamics and the pressure in a startup is responsible for the team acting as entrepreneurs and this is exactly what I believe is crucial for every team: You need to be in the middle of the game, fully responsible, and committed to the purpose.
This strong belief in the team being responsible end-2-end leads to better identification of the team with the product and company. It is critical to eliminate silo thinking and to build teams with T-shaped team members that can also take over tasks from others. The result is a homogeneous team that is flexible and can quickly adapt to changes.
One of the most important things for a startup is to fail fast and learn from past mistakes because there is just not enough money and time available to go in the wrong direction for too long. A wonderful method to accelerate the teams learning curve is the Lean Startup approach by Eric Ries. Take an idea, build a slim solution, and evaluate it very quickly to learn if it is worth pursuing further.
Obviously, most of the startups should already have this mindset but for many large companies, it is highly uncommon to try out things quickly. Often processes or management are hurdles that do not allow the team to act independently. This slows down inventions and new opportunities. Thus, bringing a startup mindset into a team is decisive and will be rewarded by the team.
Summary
A mindset is nothing that you can just apply from one day to another. It is something deep in us that drives us every day. Therefore, there is no easy way to bring the agile, product, and startup mindset into a team but as parents should be role models for their children, you can be the same for your team.
What all three mindsets have in common is that they are putting the people first. The agile mindset is providing a flexible and collaborative way of working, the product mindset is placing the customer in the center and the startup mindset is giving power to the team. People make up great teams and therefore we should do everything to put them into the focus.
