How to Build Your Teams as Communities of Practice
Many organizations, in their pandemic-driven rush to use more digital tools, have begun leaning more heavily on agile approaches. Agile approaches such as Scrum have become mainstream for knowledge workers in marketing, human resources and manufacturing. Agile relies on the idea that cross-functional, self-managed teams focusing on a problem will better deal with uncertainty than traditional, industrial approaches. Building cross-functional or other teams with all the right skills to get the job done is often challenging. In organizations with a standard skill-based human resource model, switching to an agile focus can cause issues such as:
- Needing generalists rather than specialists. Over the last 100 years, organizations have striven to build efficient, machine-like organizations with highly leveraged and efficient specialists. Project managers and processes bring together those specialists. Digital work, which requires teams to deal with uncertainty and rapidly changing understanding, challenges traditional management processes. Agile teams require team members who can turn their hand to anything necessary to deliver value.
- Skill hoarding. Career development is often based on skills and service. This can lead to a culture of skill hoarding and encourages people to do the same thing they’ve always done rather than attempt something new.
- Flattening organizations leaves a promotion gap. In traditional organizations, promotion is often connected to managing people, which encourages organizations to build very deep hierarchies. Agile organizations tend to be less deep, which creates challenges when looking at promotion and career development.
- No one has any time to help. When organizations are focused on efficiency and encourage everyone to fill their schedules with multiple meetings and be “involved” in multiple projects, there is little time to help others. That time is often at the expense of their “real” work.
So how do you build an organization that encourages focused delivery of value while providing an environment of support and development?
Related Article: Don’t Let Middle Managers Block Agile Transformation
The Famous Spotify Model
Much has been written — both positive and negative — about how Spotify organized as it grew. But leaving aside the commentary, the essence of Spotify’s approach can provide a blueprint for building a sustainable, effective, agile organization. The model's heart is decoupling work management from people or skill management. In Spotify’s case, you work in a squad as part of a tribe focused on the business domain, but you can also be part of a guild and chapter. Guilds and chapters provided skills and professional development support the tribe members needed.
Everything Changes, but Remains the Same
At some level, the Spotify model sounds much like any traditional organization, with department members allocated to a project team. Team members are allocated based on skills needed by the projects. And for effective project companies, there might be some parallels. The primary differences with this approach are:
- Teams are long-lived. To build a stronger affinity to the problem, to customers and to each other, product teams are long-lived. Team members do not dip in and out of the team based on the skills needed. This differs from a practitioner involved in multiple teams when their skills are required.
- Skill-based communities have both power and prestige. Being part of a skills group is vital to everyone's job. That means that organizations invest time and money in supporting this community.
- Incentives are aligned with the model. Incentives such as promotions and bonuses are designed to reinforce the behavior of the new model rather than to reward existing business practices.
Skills-Based Communities Take Center Stage
Though forming teams around problems and outcomes can be challenging, it’s still much easier than investing in developing a skills-based community. Historically, communities of practice are created to keep employees happy rather than to provide clear business value. Skills-based communities become more critical with the introduction and focus on building strong, agile teams. Skills-based communities provide:
Learning Opportunities
- Promotion and status opportunities. Following the age-old saying, “Ask me not what I have done today, but who have I helped today,” skills-based communities provide opportunities for teammates to demonstrate their skills and receive rewards by helping others. People are paid to do their job within their team but are promoted and rewarded for their contributions to others.
- Skills-based professional development resources. Skills-based communities provide learning assets and training opportunities to support team members' professional development. The leadership of this community will build strategic learning plans connected to skill families and roadmaps.
- Mentoring and coaching programs. The community's responsibility is to provide time and infrastructure to effectively support coaching and mentoring within the organization. Sometimes this means helping people find time to mentor others when balancing the immediate needs of the business.
- Talent acquisition and development. Bringing new people into the organization and managing an internal talent pipeline is the responsibility of this community. This requires dedicated people, a budget, and support from HR professionals and partners.
Related Article: 10 Ways to Create a Culture of Agile Innovation
Agile Adoption Is the Way to Go
As organizations wrestle with the complexity of doing business in the digital age, people remain more valuable than ever before. But success requires more than hiring the right people, having a great working environment and paying people well.
Organizations have to invest focus, leadership and, yes, money in the skills-based communities that surround their teams. But those costs are significantly lower than the cost of skills gaps, high attrition rates, and unhappy teammates. Introducing a skills-based community is complex, so it’s best to take an incremental approach. The first steps include:
- Determine what success would look like in a realistic timeframe. What is the goal of building a community? What does “good” look like? These are some of the questions to ask before you start. By understanding your goal it is possible to build the right team and incrementally make progress toward that goal.
- Build a team. Not only should this team include people from the delivery teams, but also HR and learning & development professionals. Including enough skills in the team is essential to start building and rolling out this approach. Include people from the groups that would find this approach most challenging.
- Start small and aim for incremental progress. Don’t try to do everything in one big bang. Instead, start introducing changes gradually and incrementally. Focus on a skill area that is people-constrained first, such as security, design or data, and help teams that need that scarce skill.
- Measure success and failure. Every organization is different, so ideas that seem logical or have worked in other contexts might not work in your situation. Keeping the goal in mind and reporting progress against it is essential. If something doesn’t work, try other things and empower the team to be excited by learning.
The digital age is complex and ever-changing. Building teams aligned with business outcomes, clustered around the customer with the right skills to deliver value, is the most effective way to manage the chaos. To be successful long term, though, those teams need a supporting people-centric, skills-oriented environment. By challenging traditional professional development approaches and doubling down on the idea of a professional community, modern organizations can develop people effectively.
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About the Author
Dave West is the CEO at Scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: “Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design,” that helped define new software modeling and application development processes.
Connect with Dave West:
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