The importance of Team Cohesion and Business Chemistry are rarely discussed amongst agile team members.  By increasing Team Cohesion awareness on agile teams, agile teams learn to collaborate more respectfully and gel quickly as a team.

Team cohesion is the degree to which individual team members want to contribute to the group’s ability to continue as a functioning work unit. Cohesiveness develops over time out of interpersonal and group-level attraction, through collaboration, and as a result of a sense of belonging.

So how do you build Team Cohesion?  Team Cohesion starts when you select your team members… each team member selected has a unique personality and offers wisdom, but the team needs to fit like pieces in a puzzle.

Each team member has their own personality and strengths… and weaknesses.  The key is to understand this upfront so that you can capitalize on the team’s strengths and work on turning the weaknesses into strengths over time.  Remember that Team Cohesion is created over time, it just simply does not happen overnight.  With each interaction between team members, Team Cohesion is slowly created. Increased awareness of each team member’s collaboration needs helps build Team Cohesion faster.

To aid with Team Cohesion, it is important to understand each team member’s business chemistry.  If this is known upfront, imagine how easy it would be for team members to collaborate.  Team members could then tailor their communication to how the receiving team member could understand and hear it.

Deloitte has a wonderful tool called Business Chemistry.  They realized over time that there were four basic personality types often found on teams and they created 20 questions to determine which personality type you are:

Each personality type offers a unique set of strengths and weaknesses… the goal is to build up the scrum team so that it is balanced.  The diversity will help build a stronger product.

For more information… go to CFO Program Business Chemistry.