When I share the third behavior, “Work Together”, most teams proclaim that they already do. They’ll make a point of sharing - “We have daily stand-ups, planning meetings, review meetings, and retrospectives.”

Well, well… Look at all of that working together - they get together to discuss the work, get together to sequence the work, get together to review the work, and get together to review the work process.

Did you notice the profound lack of getting together to do the work?

Me too.

When I say, “work together”, I mean just that. Do the actual work together.

Every aspect of the product lifecycle is an opportunity for collaboration - Identifying problems to solve, user and market research, design and architecture, formulating experiments, development and testing, deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and gathering user feedback.

I, of course, am not suggesting that all of these activities be performed by all members of the team together, rather that most (if not all) of these activities involve two or more members of the team. Anything you suppose you are losing in the efficiency of a task will be offset by the efficiency of the team.

In future articles I will talk about tools, techniques, and roles that further explore “work together”.