Building a good Agile Culture

Photo by Parabol on Unsplash

Building a good Agile Culture is so vital for overall employee growth & happiness, organization success, and customer satisfaction especially now in the Covid era.

Culture as defined in Merriam Webster Dictionary:
a) As a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization (such as a business)
b) the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic

Agile Culture involves adopting a new mindset — a way of thinking that is based on agile values and principles.

Building a good agile culture involves:

1. Top-down support — Agile promotes servant leadership instead of command and control leadership style. Traditional managers need to let go of their directive style and trust the teams to do the work. This would be difficult for a few managers who are used to giving directions and assigning tasks to the team members. An agile leader serves the team instead of the other way round & removes any impediments which hinder the team’s progress. They take care of their needs and personal growth. They communicate the overall vision to the team and let the team decide on how to achieve it.
2. Bottom-up intelligence — Teams need to be empowered to make their own decisions. People who do the work are experts and decide who will do what, how & when. Create a safe environment where people can experiment & allowed to fail, be open to asking for help & being vulnerable in front of others, dare to do the right thing, focus on goals & respect each other to be capable of solving complex problems. This fosters a culture of learning and innovation.
3. Team-based Reward system — Currently our reward system focus on hoarding knowledge which discourages team collaboration & knowledge sharing.“Individuals are most commonly rewarded for what they know not what they share” — Kimiz Dalkir. Everyone is in a rat race competing with each other. To foster a culture of teamwork & collaboration, organizations need to track and reward team accomplishments. Rewards should be based on the team’s overall contribution to the project. This would enable the team to focus on team objectives to deliver better outcomes (customer happiness) than on outputs (churning out features).