Coach Dan's Blog

High performing teams are transparent with their Three Es. Take every opportunity to tell the full story of a teams effectiveness, efficiency and engagement. Stakeholders who understand the full picture of how a team is performing, can do more to enable and empower their teams. Share your Effectiveness, Efficiency and Engagement every chance you get!

As a leader, creating a culture of effectiveness, efficiency, and engagement is key to building a high-performing team. The secret lies in measuring, sharing, and continuously improving your 3E metrics. Remember, you get what you measure.

If you've been coached by me or any of the marketing coaches, you've no doubt heard us talk about the concept of the 3 Es - and why they create the feeling of speed.  The  3 Es  articulate a balance between execution, continuous improvement, and valuing individual interactions and individuals.  It can be easy for newer teams to over-index by focusing more on one particular “E” at the expense of the other two.  Healthy, growing and maturing agile teams  balance  all three of those Es every day, and while the Scrum Master is an important part of facilitating that balance - it's everyone's responsibility to ensure that all three are cared for!  Consider this... When talking about agile teams to “outsiders” (people outside of our core team) it’s easy to put an emphasis on  E ngagement , because, quite frankly, it really is an energizer!  But think about this, “Our highest priority is  to satisfy the customer .”  Sound familia...

Y esterday I was driving to meet a partner coach for coffee (yes I left my house...) and I heard a story on the radio that got me thinking about agile team metrics and how we use them.  To be fair, the story had nothing to do with agile, teamwork, business, customer value or anything like that.  It was about a study that highlighted a particularly unfavorable metric regarding police stops in a certain city.    Here's where my mind went -  "What will happen next is someone high up at the police department will inevitably not like these optics that these metrics show.  They are going to hate it so much they will convene a committee that will put new procedures in place for their rank and file officers.  The procedures will be a quota or something to that nature that will ensure the next time the metrics are reviewed, the ratios will look MUCH more favorable.  So favorable in fact, that people will eventually stop looking at that metric, a...

I bet you a week's worth of coffee - in my case, a fairly substantial bet - if you were to ask ten random leaders, "Why Agile?," the vast majority of them would say, "Speed." Ask a follow-up question, "What do you mean when you say speed?," and you will undoubtedly get the response, "Things get out into market faster!" Now pause for a moment and think about how people naturally respond when told to do things faster. Corners get cut, shortcuts get taken (often at the cost of quality), steps get skipped, and we start to rationalize that what we made was good enough. In the very best case, focusing on going "faster" is going to increase your risk - and no one really wants that! And by the way, Agile was never about being faster. It's about being better. Now, I'm not at all arguing that speed (being faster) is not an  outcome  of embracing Agile mindset, principles, and frameworks. By their nature alone, incremental and continuo...