Patrick Heller - How Acceptance and Respect Build Great Teams

Most team coaching advice starts from the premise of Trust. Building trust is seen as the go-to remedy to heal non-functioning teams. I argue that trust is not the actual best starting point to build great teams. Borrowing from psychological research, I argue that building teams based on Acceptance and Respect are actually the way to go.

The eye-opener is the results from psychological research about reference groups. The key takeaway is the different starting-point - acceptance, and respect instead of trust. The actionable takeaway is the advice to build teams around individuals who accept and respect each other, in other words, let a person be a member of a team in which they feel accepted for who and what they are and respected for what they bring to the team. This is in stark contrast to how teams are usually formed - with a few seniors, many mediators, and a few juniors, based on technical expertise - after which the scrum master or agile coach is supposed to build the team by increasing levels of trust in the team. In other words, I would rather form a team of around seven juniors who accept and respect each other, than have a team with one or two superstars and then the rest of the team.

Patrick Heller https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickheller/