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Key Manager/Leader Responsibilities

This article is part of our Key Manager/Leader Responsibilities guide. We have broken the responsibilities down into shorter articles. 

1. Overview
2. Debrief on Team Retrospective Results
   • Review assessment results and analyze data
   • Review organizational growth items
3. Participate as a Member of the Continuous Improvement Leadership Team
4. Continuous Improvement Planning
   • Attend the Continuous Improvement Readout and Planning Session for Leaders
   • Analyze multi-team data and look for patterns and trends
   • Create a plan for removing organizational impediments
5. Conduct Leadership Checkpoints
6. Demonstrate Progress on Removing Organizational Impediments

Debrief on Team Retrospective Results

After the teams that you manage have completed their Team Retrospectives, meet with the AgilityHealth® Facilitator or the Scrum Master to debrief on the results and learn where the team can use your help to remove impediments.

Reminder:
The team retrospective gives the team an opportunity to have open, honest conversations to dig deeper into how they can work together and improve as a team. Take care to honor the confidence in which those conversations took place and never use AgilityHealth® to reward or punish individuals or teams! 

Analyze Assessment Results

During the Manager Debrief/Leadership Readout with the Facilitator or Scrum Master, be sure to review the radar to see the overall maturity level of the team. The Facilitator or Scrum Master can help you with how to read the radar or review How do I Analyze Team Radar Results.

This article will focus on our TeamHealth® Radar. As you review the radar, look for factors outside the team’s control that may be impacting their health and performance. For example, if the team has some challenges around Team Structure with Allocation and Stability, it could be that team members are being pulled to special projects, assigned to multiple teams, or being moved from team to team, which impacts the team’s performance in areas such as predictable delivery. These are the types of issues that leaders will likely need to address.

To learn more about the questions that are asked and what the score represents in terms of maturity, click on the competency on the radar to view the details. If the Growth Portal is enabled for your organization, you can click on the Growth Portal button on the Competency Profile to access more information and resources about each competency.

For a TeamHealth® assessment, you will be able to see how strong the teams are in relation to each driver for performance metrics, confidence and happiness. 

Click on any competency name in the Performance Dimension, with the exception of Stakeholder, or click on the Happiness competency in the Culture Dimension. 

A pop-up box with the related questions, a list of the top drivers for that competency and a relative strength indicator for the team(s) will appear. If the Growth Portal is enabled for your organization, clicking on any of the top drivers will open a new window to the corresponding competency page in the Growth Portal for that driver. 

The Leadership dimension includes several competencies under Management, including Leadership, Developing People and Process Improvement. This is an opportunity to receive valuable feedback from the team on what they need from their managers and what is working well. Each individual answers the assessment questions in this section by thinking of the manager they report to. When team members do not all report to the same manager, the radar results provide meaningful information about how management, as a whole, is supporting the team.

The Analytics Section reflects the results from the radar and is a quick way to see where the team feels the strongest, where their greatest opportunities are, and their level of agreement (consensus) on how they are doing across the competencies.

To learn more about the questions that are asked and what the score represents in terms of maturity, click on the competency in the table to view the details. If the Growth Portal is enabled for your organization, you can click on the Growth Portal button on the Competency Profile to access more information and resources about each competency.

During the assessment, team members are asked to list the team’s top strengths, growth opportunities and any significant impediments. Typically, these comments are part of the internal team discussion that happens during the retrospective, but the team may choose to share them with managers as part of the debrief. (Note that any comments in orange come from stakeholders.)  

Finally, review the quantitative metrics, if available, to see how the hard delivery metrics align with how the team feels that they are doing. These are available if the metrics have been entered manually by the Scrum Master or AgilityHealth® Facilitator, or if your company has an integration pulling these metrics in automatically.

Review Organizational Growth Items

During the retrospective, the team identifies the issues they want to focus on for the upcoming quarter. It is recommended that the team prioritize 1-3 items in the areas that they believe will have the greatest impact on their health and performance. This is the team’s Continuous Improvement (Growth) Plan.

Issues that can be addressed within the team are labeled as Individual or Team Growth Items. The team will prioritize and work on these items on their own. Any issues that need to be addressed by leaders outside of the team are labeled as Organizational Growth Items. The team needs your help to resolve or escalate these items. You can pull these into a Continuous Improvement Plan to be worked on over the next quarter.

Review the Organizational Growth Items and make sure that you understand what the team is asking for and what they see as the acceptance criteria. Like any “user story,” this is an opportunity to have a conversation and develop a common understanding. Build trust with the team by being open to hearing and understanding their challenges, from their perspective.

There may be some impediments that you can own and resolve immediately to support the teams. You will also be forming (or may already be a part of) a Continuous Improvement Leadership Team with other leaders who support a group of teams, such as a program, line of business, or Agile Release Train. As part of this team, you will work together to address the common and highest-priority issues across the teams and escalate any issues that you can’t resolve to the Enterprise Growth Team. Learn about Creating and Managing Continuous Improvement Plans.

Once you have been debriefed on all the team's results and have reviewed all the growth items, you can mark the team's leadership readouts as complete in bulk. In the Growth Plan section of the multi-team radar, click the LR Completed button.

Clicking the LR Completed button will check the Leadership Readout is Completed box for only the most recent assessment for each sub-team that rolls up to the multi-team (as long as the assessments' close dates have passed).