😲What Happened to "Co-Leads" and "Apprentices"?
Read about the changes we made in our efforts to build a cross-functional teamwork culture and find out what happened to "co-leads" and "apprentices" titles.
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Building an Agile Culture
Our community doesn't just teach agile and cross-functional teamwork. We live it. Everything members do should be cross-functional and should follow the agile philosophies.
We started building an agile cross-functional team culture in 2024. Our training programs built ways for people to model behavior of agile teammates. Our training templates and agile coaching offers ways for people to be coached in agile cross-functional teamwork for the first time. This helps people build experience and do it together with peers. Our culture of agility is a practice that always evolves.
Our community itself is driven by the principles of interacting with individuals, delivering working results, collaborating with others, and responding to change. We collectively live the ways of agile the same way we teach them. Being a teammate in our community means that you live the agile ways of life too. Everything you do in peer-to-peer work should be guided in the principles of agility and cross-functional teamwork.
What we noticed on our project training was the opposite of Agile. We noticed team dynamics of people "managing" others. Co-leads were expected to tell people what to do, how to work, what to work on, and whether they were doing it right. This creates a dynamic that hinders empowerment. It provides a way for people to stay with the old dynamics of "authoritarian boss and employee". What agile teams really should be doing is providing a forum for collective ownership and shared leadership. Decisions should be made together. People should be viewed as peers, not subordinates. Teams should provide the space for others to speak out, try new things, and fail in order to learn together.
We needed to respond to change to build a culture where empowered teamwork is at the heart of everything we do.
What Changed in 2025
Our journey as a community-driven ecosystem brought us to a new path of how we look at teamwork. We measured impact in our project training, and found the dynamic between "co-leads" and "apprentices" to be hindering. They behaved as bosses and employees no matter how much agile materials they read, or how much they learned about cross-functional teamwork.
We decided to experiment with a new dynamic on teams all across the community. We changed our project training so that there are only "teammates" instead of "co-leads and apprentices". Teammates learn how to behave as a cross-functional team through agile coaching and training templates (see more in the Agile Handbook and cross-functional team dynamics). They use RACI charts when they prioritize work to self-commit, instead of being assigned work. They span across functions so that the team feels ownership in a shared outcome that's not focused on one single person.
This changed everything on our project training. Teams became more cross-functional and more agile in nature (read the full report here). Cross-functional teamwork improved a whopping 20% on project training teams.
This dynamic needs to happen for every single kind of group in our community. Everything that we do should provide dynamics of empowered cross-functional teams. Our focus is to form team dynamics like this everywhere: in Tech Fleet's volunteer work, on the board of directors, in agile coaching communities of practice, in classes, you name it. The same things project trainees experience shouldn't just be in the training: it should be a practice and a way of life for members of our community.
This means any time you join a team, whether it be as a volunteer, a board member, a contributor, or a project trainee, you are a "teammate". Your title is not as important as the activities you commit to as a part of a group. You are a part of the shared outcome on the team. You have as much of a voice as anyone else on the team. You live the principles of cross-functional team dynamics.
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