teams

Empathy in Agile Team Communication: Why It Matters More Than You Think

Agile is a widely adopted methodology for software development that prioritizes collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement. These principles are the foundation of Agile’s success, enabling teams to work together effectively and deliver high-quality results in a fast-paced environment. However, in order for these principles to work at their best, team members must have a deep understanding of one another. This is where empathy comes into play. By incorporating empathy into their communication style, Agile teams can foster a more positive and collaborative work environment, ultimately leading to improved outcomes and success.

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. It goes beyond sympathy, which is simply feeling sorry for someone. Empathy allows us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes and see things from their perspective. This understanding allows us to communicate more effectively and resolve conflicts in a constructive manner.

The Importance of Empathy in Agile Teams

Agile teams rely on open and honest communication to succeed. Teams must be able to share their thoughts, ideas, and concerns freely in order to make informed decisions and find solutions to problems. However, this level of collaboration can only be achieved if team members understand each other and are able to communicate in a way that is both respectful and effective.

Empathy plays a crucial role in promoting this kind of communication. When team members understand each other’s perspectives and feelings, they are better able to work together to resolve conflicts and find solutions that work for everyone. Empathy helps to build trust, foster collaboration, and create a positive work environment where everyone feels valued and heard.

The Impact of Empathy on Team Dynamics

Empathy has a significant impact on team dynamics. Teams that lack empathy tend to be more siloed and less collaborative. Members may have difficulty communicating and understanding each other, leading to disagreements and conflicts that can slow down the project and negatively impact productivity.

On the other hand, teams with high levels of empathy tend to be more cohesive and work together more effectively. Members are able to understand each other’s perspectives and work towards common goals, resulting in a more productive and harmonious work environment. Empathy helps to build trust and promote cooperation, which is essential for success in Agile teams.

Team showing empathy

Empathy in Conflict Resolution

Conflict is an inevitable part of any team dynamic. However, it can be particularly challenging in Agile teams, where members are working together closely and must make decisions quickly. Empathy is a valuable tool in resolving conflicts in an Agile environment. When team members understand each other’s perspectives and feelings, they are better able to find solutions that work for everyone.

Best Practices for Empathy in Agile Teams

To promote empathy in Agile teams, it is important to implement best practices that encourage understanding and appreciation of each other’s perspectives and emotions. Some of the best practices include:

  • Active Listening and Seeking to Understand: Encourage team members to actively listen and seek to understand each other’s perspectives and emotions. This can be done through regular retrospectives, one-on-one meetings, or team-building activities.
  • Showing Empathy in Both Words and Actions: Empathy should not only be expressed in words but also demonstrated in actions. Team members should strive to understand and appreciate each other’s perspectives and emotions, and act in ways that reflect that understanding.
  • Encouraging Empathy in Team Culture and Practices: Empathy should be encouraged in team culture and practices. This can be done by promoting active listening, encouraging open and honest communication, and creating opportunities for team members to understand and appreciate each other’s perspectives and emotions.
  • Continuously Practicing and Developing Empathy Skills: Empathy skills can and should be continuously developed and practiced. This can be done through training and workshops, or through ongoing reflection and self-awareness.

In conclusion

Empathy is a crucial component of effective communication in Agile teams. It allows team members to understand each other’s perspectives and feelings, promoting collaboration, trust, and a positive work environment. Empathy also plays a key role in resolving conflicts, resulting in a more harmonious team dynamic and improved productivity.

It is important to understand the value of empathy and incorporate it into your team’s communication style. Empathy may not be a traditional technical skill, but it’s an essential tool in promoting effective communication and achieving success in Agile environments.

Incorporating empathy into your team’s communication style doesn’t have to be difficult. Simple practices such as encouraging team members to share their feelings and perspectives, or incorporating empathy-building activities into your team dynamic, can go a long way in promoting a more empathetic and effective team. So why not give it a try and see the positive impact it can have on your Agile team’s communication and success.

Building a High-Performance Team

In the book, The Wisdom of Teams, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith define a team as “a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they hold themselves mutually accountable.” There are some valuable aspects of this definition that are worth discussing. First, note that teams are described here as generally “small.” Keeping a team small (12 or fewer members) allows team members to develop better relationships and communicate more directly.

Second, team members have “complementary skills.” While individual team members may not possess all the skills required to complete a project on their own, the team collectively has the necessary skills. This could mean the team consists of specialists who all own their roles in the project, but agile methods also promote the use of generalizing specialists (multi-skilled individuals who can readily move between roles). Generalizing specialists with cross-functional skills can perform many different tasks on projects and can help smooth resourcing peaks and troughs.

Third, teams are defined as being “committed to a common purpose.” This means team members are aligned with a project goal that supersedes their personal agendas. Teams also share common “performance goals” and a common “approach.” In other words, team members are in alignment (if not always in agreement) as to how the goals will be measured and how the team should go about the work. Finally, there’s the idea that team members “hold themselves mutually accountable.” In other words, the team has shared ownership of the outcome of the project.

High-performance team

Many people have researched how we build high-performing teams, including Carl Larson and Frank LaFasto, authors of the book Teamwork. Larson and LaFasto interviewed a wide range of teams, including the space shuttle Challenger investigation team and executive management teams, and discovered a surprising consistency in the characteristics of effective teams. In their book, the authors explored the eight properties of successful teams and examined priorities in building a high-performance team. The following guidelines are influenced by their research:

  • Create a shared vision for the team: Doing so enables the team to make faster decisions and builds trust.
  • Set realistic goals: We should set people up to succeed, not fail, so goals need to be achievable. 
  • Limit team size to 12 or fewer members: Small teams communicate better and can support tacit (unwritten) knowledge. 
  • Build a sense of team identity: Having a team identity helps increase each team member’s loyalty to the team and their support for other team members.
  • Provide strong leadership: Leaders should be there to point out the way, and then let the team own the mission. 

Lyssa Adkins, an author of Coaching Agile Teams, has also explored the concept of a high-performance team and identified the following characteristics of such teams:

  1. They are self-organizing, rather than role- or title-based.
  2. They are empowered to make decisions.
  3. They truly believe that as a team they can solve any problem.
  4. They are committed to team success vs. success at any cost.
  5. The team owns its decisions and commitments.
  6. Trust, vs. fear or anger, motivates them.
  7. They are consensus-driven, with full divergence and then convergence.
  8. And they live in a world of constant constructive disagreement. 

Let’s look at these characteristics in more detail. Members of self-organizing, empowered teams are freed from command-and-control management and can use their own knowledge to determine how best to do their job. Empowering teams enables organizations to tap into people’s natural ability to manage complexity. We manage complexity every day, by juggling our work life, home life, e-mails, phone calls, and appointments. Organizations often fail to capitalize on this ability when it comes to executing project tasks, however. Instead of presenting team members with a number of items that have to be accomplished, they present a set of ordered tasks that, in reality, might best be done in a different way. Allowing teams to self-organize enables us to use the individual complexity management skills that we all have.

The recognition that the team is in the best position to organize the project work is liberating and motivating for the team members. People work harder and take more pride in their work when they are recognized as experts in their domain. When self-organizing teams select work items from the queue of waiting work, they have the expertise to choose those items that are not blocked for any reason, that they are capable of doing, and that will bring them toward the iteration goal. This practice alleviates many of the technical blockages seen in push systems where the task list and sequence are imposed on the team.

Thus we need to delegate responsibility for success to the team and allow them to do what is necessary to achieve the goal. This is the “downward serving” or servant leadership model used by agile methods. Instead of a “directing” style, which is a command-and-control approach where instructions are passed from the project manager to team leads down to team members, agile projects take a servant leadership approach, where the project manager or leader shields the team from interruptions, removes impediments, communicates the project vision, and provides support and encouragement.

High-performance team

Using trust (rather than fear or anger) as a driving force in teams’ motivation helps the team in establishing open, honest, and transparent communications. Trust is a key factor in team building and a needed enabler for cooperation. A high-performance team increases trust by building a culture of partnership and shared values. In general, trust-building is a slow process, but it can be accelerated with open interaction and good communication skills. Trust building needs personal knowledge and regular face-to-face interaction, but it also requires empathy, respect, and genuine listening.

Trust along with item 7 (“They are consensus-driven, with full divergence and then convergence”) speaks to establishing a safe environment in which team members debating or arguing over issues is seen as healthy and is encouraged because this practice ultimately leads to better decisions and stronger buy-in to those decisions once they are made. Divergence (the argument and debate) and convergence (the agreement about the solution) increase the team’s commitment.

Item 8 (“High-performance team live in a world of constant constructive disagreement) is related to item 7. Constructive disagreement is vital to really understanding and working out issues. Patric Lencioni, the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, lists the following dysfunctions that damage and limit team performance:

  1. The absence of trust: Team members are unwilling to be vulnerable within the group.
  2. Fear of conflict: The team seeks artificial harmony over constructive, passionate debate.
  3. Lack of commitment: Team members don’t commit to group decisions or simply feign agreement with them.
  4. Avoidance of accountability: Team members duck the responsibility of calling peers on counterproductive behavior or low standards.
  5. Inattention to results: Team members prioritize their individual needs, such as personal success, status, or ego, before team success. 
Five dysfunctions of a team

These dysfunctions all stem from avoiding conflict (or constructive disagreement) and not having a safe environment where it is okay to ask questions. Establishing a safe environment for disagreement is key to success; such an environment allows team members to build a strong commitment to decisions. If they have such a commitment when they encounter the inevitable obstacles on a project, rather than returning to management with a list of reasons why something cannot be done, they instead push past the obstacles or find a way around them.

In conclusion, a high-performance team is a small group of people with complementary skills that are united by a common purpose, performance goals, and approach. To be successful, teams should have shared vision, realistic goals, team identity, strong leadership, self-organization, empowerment, belief in their ability to solve problems, commitment to team success, ownership of decisions and commitments, trust, and consensus-driven decision-making with constructive disagreement. These characteristics enable teams to be agile, adaptable, and responsive to change and are essential for achieving high performance.