The Bill of Trust
Building teams is a tough exercise. It takes a lot of time to get people with similar skill sets but different life experiences and make them work together like a swiss watch. Tuckman's stage of group development help us navigate through the initial steps of a team though, despite of on which stage your team is, there is one key thing that a team needs to succeed: trust.
This short story I'll share with you happened (and continues to happen) with my current team.
We work in an open space with huddle tables on the center for meetings, mid sprint show-and-tell, you name it. At any given day many months ago, someone forgot a $1 bill on one of the huddle tables. Nobody knows who did it. Maybe someone from other team was there for a meeting with us, pulled the bill out of the pocket to go to a vending machine later and forgot it but we might never know for sure how it showed up there.
After few weeks seeing that dollar bill untouched we started teasing each other on who would be the first person to take it. All in all, a dollar it's a dollar!
As time goes by, the dollar bill is still there and the whole team started to take care of it. Instead of trying to guess who would take it, we started worrying that someone would take it away from the team and if it happened, it wouldn't matter whether it was someone from the team or not, the trust would be gone.
So the guys gave "George" (you got the joke, right?), our token of trust, a special spot where everybody could see it.
Net net, our team have a lot of fun together, we have bold discussions during retrospectives and grooming sessions whenever it is needed and we are always looking for means to improve and evolve as a team and as a product.
Most importantly, we trust each other. We play for the best for our project and our team. And George is there as a statement to it.
