Archive for category Branding

Team DNA: how to Brand up your team

Posted by rsa in Agile, Branding, HR management, IT Management, Leadership, SCRUM, Self-organized on November 9, 2011

“People like talking about people. Makes us feel superior. Makes us feel in control.
And sometimes, for some people, knowing some things makes them care.” [HouseMD #113]

As described in earlier post in “TEAM: 7 indispensable ingredients for Together Everyone Accomplishes More” one of the key elements of a strong team is Brand.

An idea to apply known brand-building practice to team management seemed to me interesting and made me write this blog post.

So I would like to cover a useful tool that can be applied to build up your team brand…

Team Brand is essential team motivator that cannot be given to the team (by company, management, money, etc.), it needs to be build inside, owned and maintained by the team. Actually this is type of “achievement” and “idea”-motivator for a Team (here cross-functional, self-organizing teams are meant, although practice is applicable for any team of small size).

In other words, Team Brand serves as an alignment on its core values/ways to achieve, inspires team by having strong and challenging core set, while distinguishes team among others.

Team brand may be built as any corporate brand starting from key cause or a purpose, moving from core through the benefits (qualities, values) to attributes (tools, norms) supporting and transmitting them.

Well, but an agile self-organizing team needs a hint  to start thinking of themselves as a “company”, having a “brand”. A hint that envisions this mind shift would sound like:  think of your TEAM as of an entrepreneurship and your collaboration as of an inspiring challenge! Imagine you’re running business with your peers (which is not that far away from reality, considering self-organized  development team doing SCRUM).

There are 3 questions to be addressed then by Team members together to get an alignment on:
  1. WHY are we here, what we want to achieve together, what is our core, our strongest believe and our purpose? Why do we exist as a TEAM? Which core value we all share?
  2. HOW we can make this happen? What principles (benefits, qualities) support this?
  3. WHAT we exactly will do (and will NOT tolerate) to support each of the key principles we’ve agreed upon that contribute to our purpose?

A tool I recommend to use at this step to create and maintain team DNA is known “Team Radar” retrospective facilitation activity (see “Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great”  by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen for detailed explanation).

It simply suits best  this exercise.  Here it is used to gather data on team itself and perform self-assessment in the future.

An outcome applying this practice to an Agile self-organizing team may look like this:

As soon as agreed Team DNA is documented, printed out and placed in visible area (ideally at the team scrum board and/or also very usefull in retrospective room). This will serve as a point to refer/remind when choosing for right decision/action and will keep team motivated to comply everything they think, decide and do with their core.

But this “artifact” shall not be “curved in stone”. It’s living, since team is also living. So on and on reviewing it, team curves itself, making their brand stronger and more unique, by finding out deeper levels of their own common values, purposes, beliefs  and means, achieving them.

The more team does so, the more it finds it’s own distinctive way doing things and becomes more distinguished (“branded”) and valued by managers, stakeholders, POs, etc…

Good teams that value the way they perform and look, care about this and move further finding out more challenging cores, supporting principles and norms.

Besides that it’s a funny collaborative action that contributes to team building.

Brand up your Team, guys 🙂

Further reading/sources:

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