Team Intimacy and the Hyper-productive State

Dan Mezick, President of New Technology Solutions Inc. 

Dan's slides on Team Intimacy are located here.  Dan's slide on Boundary, Authority, Role and Task are located here.

NOTE: This is the session Dan gave at Scrum Gathering in Orlando in March 2010

The business literature is replete with papers, book and other publications that attempt to explain high-functioning teams. These writings describe how aspects of trust, disclosure and mutual respect are important ingredients in the team-building recipe. This paper asserts that intimacy is the primary social ingredient and that intimate is the primary social and cognitive state of high functioning teams. The impact of intimacy among individuals and the group-as-a-whole is explored.

Successful work means successful teamwork in most organizations. The topic of teamwork is a popular one in business books. Some writers discuss trust as a primary ingredient of teams. Still other books and publications on interpersonal relationships stress the need for mutual disclosure and mutual vulnerability (“openness”) in healthy relations between people. While all of these qualities are important, they avoid or otherwise omit discussion of any intimacy in teams. Intimacy plays an important role in high functioning teams.

This session identifies the ingredients of team psychological safety. This session also explains how team safety and group learning is facilitated by the 5 Scrum values of Openness, Respect, Commitment, Focus and Courage.

Bio

Dan Mezick is an Agile coach, Scrum expert and trusted adviser to executives, directors and managers seeking genuine and authentic expertise in Agile adoptions and transitions to Scrum.

Detailed biographical info on Dan is available at (http://www.newtechusa.com/agileboston/DanMezick.htm)