Chapter 1. Autonomous Securities, LLC

Nathan Patterson walked out of his annual retrospective meeting with a great feeling. Sure, the bonus he knows he will see in his next paycheck is nice, especially in today’s economy. But what made him feel even better was the amazing sense of accomplishment he felt turning around his once underperforming organization. It was this time last year that his job was on the line. What had happened in the course of the past year that made things so drastically different?

At last year’s retrospective, Nathan’s group had missed all project completion milestones at Autonomous Securities. What puzzled Nathan was that he personally hired the entire team and, without a doubt in his mind, knew that his employees were top-notch based on all the technical interviews and tests he administered. Nathan contemplated all the project artifacts and history of events and hypothesized that the workers were simply not executing at their full potential. So why was this amazing group of people that Nathan assembled not performing up to his expectations?

At the conclusion of last year’s meeting, at the end of his rope, Nathan had decided to seek outside help and hired Lydia Stewart, a consultant specializing in increasing team efficiency. “I do not understand why we are not meeting schedules. I assembled the perfect team, and I am using agile processes,” Nathan explained to Lydia. Lydia immediately thought to herself that it was a yellow flag when Nathan referred to agile as a process instead of a set of values.

After observing Nathan’s team in action, it was evident to Lydia that the team was not behaving as a team but as a group of individuals. She explained to Nathan that the social factors in the workplace presented tremendous challenges to worker productivity—more than any other factor. Team dynamics, individual behavioral differences, motivators, leadership styles, and numerous other factors greatly affect productivity.

This book tells the story of how Lydia helped Nathan transform his team into what it is today. The goal of this book is to help you, the reader, better understand how and why individuals behave the way they do when working on a team. Through this transformation there is a point where you may come to differentiate the importance of personal success versus the success of your team. This book provides specific, detailed approaches and exercises that you can use to help your team perform as a team.