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Building Great Teams with Acceptance and Respect
How building self-esteem through addressing acceptance and respect will boost your diverse team’s performance.
Building trust is seen as the go-to solution to create well-functioning teams. I argue that trust is not the best starting point to build great teams. Borrowing from psychological research about Reference Groups, I argue that building teams based on acceptance and respect is actually the way to go.
My Team
I was an Agile Coach at a large organization and next to coaching management teams I also was the Scrum Master for one of the Scrum Teams.
The team was a pleasant team to work with and they were really good at what they did for the organization — they delivered what they promised and often more, they were kind of the star team amongst the teams. That was one of the reasons they gave that team to me, so I would have plenty of time to coach the management teams as an Agile Coach.
But, after a while, I did notice some underlying fault lines in the star team. A team like this is a tough nut to crack as a coach: they deliver a lot of value each sprint and they are appreciated by the stakeholders, by management, by other teams, basically by everybody, but the individual team…
