Tuckman model Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Toby Rao: Helping a Team Go From Storming To Performing With Trust Building Strategies

In this episode, Toby shares his experience working with a once high-performing team that faced challenges after a leadership change and the introduction of new team members. The established team members, deeply bonded, struggled to share information with the newcomers who questioned team practices. The team found itself stuck in the “storming” phase of development, with trust being a significant issue. Toby emphasized the importance of creating new working agreements when a team undergoes significant changes and promoting collaboration with a “yes, and” approach. He highlighted the need for trust-building interventions, engaging retrospectives, celebrating small successes, and conducting 1-on-1 conversations to address the trust imbalance and improve team dynamics.

In this episode, we refer to the Tuckman Stages Of Group Development and TastyCupcakes.org.

Featured Book of the Week: “Atomic Habits” by James Clear

In Toby’s discussion about his favorite book, “Atomic Habits” by James Clear, he highlighted how the book transformed his perspective. He successfully encouraged team members and friends to read it by emphasizing its approach to change. The book’s principle of breaking down significant changes into small daily habits resonated with Toby. It underscored the idea that consistent small actions can result in substantial transformations. Toby also mentioned how the book influenced his coaching style, particularly by suggesting the effective question, “What’s your plan to solve that problem?” It emphasized the power of incremental changes and thoughtful problem-solving strategies.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Toby Rao

Toby is an ICF-credentialed Coach and accredited IC Agile trainer, and practices as a certified Executive coach. With a dynamic Agile journey beginning in 2007, he’s an active contributor to the global Agile community. He is based in Washington DC Metro, and speaks at Agile events worldwide and co-founded the A20 Agile conference. Toby also co-founded two thriving Agile meetups in the Washington DC area, with a combined 1300 members.

You can link with Toby Rao on LinkedIn and connect with Toby Rao on Twitter.

Amruta Beri: Building Trust and Encouraging Participation with Team Agreements

In this episode, Amruta shares their experience as a new scrum master and the challenges she faced in encouraging participation from all team members. She emphasizes the importance of building trust early in the team formation process and highlights the Tuckman model of team formation as a model that helps us understand the stages of group development. Amruta discusses the issue of some team members lacking trust and not feeling comfortable expressing their views and ideas in meetings, leading to the dominance of the loudest person in the room. To address these issues, Amruta suggests using working agreements (see Lisette’s approach to team agreements) and conducting a starting exercise around team agreements. She provides tips such as using silent writing techniques to involve quieter team members and the value of establishing rapport through one-on-one conversations. Additionally, they refer to the “1-2-4-all” method from liberating structures as a useful resource.

The inspiring story of how a failing hospital turned things around with Agile and Lean

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Amruta Beri

Amruta is an Agile enthusiast, artist, and environmentalist. She loves quiz shows, travel and sports, and is an engineer at heart.

You can link with Amruta Beri on LinkedIn and connect with Amruta Beri on Twitter.

Ruta Hardikar: Building great Scrum teams, the how to!

As part of working with teams, we must learn to grow teams, to make them feel as a group that can perform and overcome the challenges they will inevitably face. In this segment, we talk about a team Ruta was working with, and how she helped them create a safe space to share and talk about “the hard stuff”, and how we can build in team building into the Scrum ceremonies with the goal of building a great team.

In this segment, we talk about the Tuckman model of group development, and the book The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni.

Featured Book of the Week: Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry

In Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by Travis Bradberry, Ruta found different aspects we need to develop as Scrum Masters. Scrum Masters work in a people-oriented job, therefore we need to actively study and learn more about people’s defining characteristics. The book helped Ruta learn to manage, and benefit from emotions, rather than be afraid of them.

In this segment, we also talk about Start with Why by Simon Sinek.

How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!

About Ruta Hardikar

Ruta has over 8 years experience with Agile, and has taken the roles of Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Release Train Engineer (RTE in SAFe), working with GM Financial.

You can link with Ruta Hardikar on LinkedIn.