Mitch Lacey

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, most company cultures nowadays seem too heavily focused on individuals. The biggest problem with this is that, when everybody is busy making sure their own needs are met and trying to sell their own ideas, the organization cannot hear the voice of the customer. And when a business doesn’t know what its customers want, that business will fail. To create room for the customer, business leaders need to enforce new rules of engagement.

I say new, but these rules have been around for a while. I’ve played soccer (football, for the rest of the world) all my life. When I was young, players were mostly interested in who scored the most goals and not as concerned about whether we won or lost. As I got older, the reverse was true: players didn’t care who scored as long as we won.

Scrum Teams do share one trait with successful sports teams: they win or lose together. The only way Scrum Teams win is to deliver value to customers. That’s why every successful Scrum implementation I’ve worked on has customer focus at the top of the decision-making stack. Two friends of mine, Scott Densmore and Brad Wilson of Microsoft, created a decision sequence that works well.

We do what is best for <X> in the following order:

1. Customer

2. Company

3. Group or organization

4. Team

5. Self

To develop this mindset, team members must first learn accountability. Accountability is owning your mistakes, even when it might be easier to blame others. My son discovered accountability when he forgot his homework one day and I refused to bail him out by taking him back to school to get it. He was furious at me, saying it was “all my fault.” But I stood my ground. I knew it was better for him to learn how to admit a mistake than it was to save him from temporary embarrassment. Similarly, a developer who sits back, smugly thinking, “I’m finished,” while the team struggles to get through a Sprint, needs a hard lesson in being accountable to the team.

Once team members demonstrate accountability, they can nurture a growth mindset. A growth mindset happens when we accept that we cannot possibly know everything by ourselves and that there is always more to learn when we let go of our own ideas and begin listening to others. Teams that develop solutions together, with their customer in mind, experience success—and that success feels so good that a growth mindset quickly becomes ingrained in their team culture.

If leadership establishes and promotes customer-first rules of engagement, the company can focus on its main goal: exciting and elating its customers and creating experiences that are out of this world.