The regulars are the ones that show up every day. When times are good, when times are tough, when you’re flying high, or when you’re at the bottom, the regulars always show up for you, each and every day. They can be your family, your childhood friend, or the co-worker that you have kept in touch with year after year. The Regulars get a bad rap for being boring because they are always “there”, but…
Joining a new team is never easy. You don’t know all the “things” and “isms” that make the team work (or are holding them back). Whether it is formal or informal, the new team is always waiting for one thing to happen – the leader to emerge – not to assert their dominance or mastery, but the one that helps out team members, that leads by example, listens, takes their lumps, does the grunt work…
It’s not Agile. That’s okay, it doesn’t have to be. You might have some cobbled-together methodology that looks more waterfall, than Agile and barely thinks of scrum even though you are using sprints but they don’t start until everything is in the hopper. But you’re shipping, the team is delivering, everyone knows what is going on, and the team knows where they are headed and what is next. Sounds like you’ve figured out how to…
Baselines establish where you are at. Every Survival movie starts the same way – “What do we have?” – that’s the baseline. When you know what you have, and where you are starting from, it makes it that much easier to figure out where you want to go and what you want to accomplish.
The bench does not get built overnight. Building your leadership team takes time. It takes thought, on both sides, those putting out the offerings, and those receiving them. Our natural inclination is to rush in and build a team as quickly as we can, but this will always fail as quickly as we started. Take the time, find the right people, talk to them, build the bench you need for today and tomorrow.