More Effective Interactions (Teams)
Learn how more effective interactions help distributed Agile teams perform better.
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While every team can improve if individuals improve their software development capabilities, many teams struggle because of poor interactions. Agile development requires face-to-face collaboration, so frictionless interactions are more important in Agile development than they were in Sequential development. After working with leaders at many companies over the past 20 years, I believe the following interaction soft skills are most helpful to Agile team members.
Emotional intelligence
If you’ve ever seen two developers engage in an email flame war over technical minutia, you’ve seen evidence of the need for greater emotional intelligence on software teams.
For leaders, the value of emotional intelligence has been well-documented. Daniel Goleman reported in the Harvard Business Review that 90% of the difference between star performers and average performers can be attributed to emotional intelligence (abbreviated as EQ) (Goleman, 2004). A study of 500 executive search candidates found that EQ was a significantly better predictor of placement success than intelligence or experience (Cherniss, 1999).
Technical contributors can benefit from increasing awareness of their own emotional states and the emotional states in others, improving emotional self-regulation, and managing relationships with others.
I find the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence’s RULER Model ...