How women’s football and the Agile Manifesto have Influenced Connection Heroes
Founding Connection Heroes has been a joyful and natural next step in my entrepreneurial journey.
But the path towards this new venture actually started back in 1998 when I captained Newcastle University’s women’s football team to the national finals. The surprising part of this achievement was the undisputable fact that we weren’t very good footballers. We barely had a coach and we were rather unfit – preferring to spend time in the pub instead of the gym.
However, we were an amazing team. We understood, trusted and liked each other. We were all driven by a genuine desire to continue our Wednesday afternoon shenanigans – and losing even just one match meant we were out of the league for good. No more fun!
And so, week after week, we showed up against teams who were technically and tactically superior to us, fitter than us and who fully expected to win. But our team spirit and tenacity, our commitment to each other, meant that we somehow won every match … until we reached the national final and lost by a landslide. We simply didn’t care by then as we had achieved our mission to have fun until the end!
This experience kick-started my fascination with the power of teams. It led me to undertake a Masters Degree in Human Communications, and it massively influenced the way I ran my first business. This was a creative agency, which my business partner and I grew to a team of 25, delivering important behavioural marketing campaigns for the Government and NHS.
Over the nine years of running this agency, we tended to recruit young graduates and give them tremendous levels of autonomy and responsibility. But we also established incredibly high levels of trust and support by building deep and authentic relationships. Everyone was empowered to think big and take risks, all whilst having a tremendous amount of fun. Again, we found ourselves pitching up against way more experienced agencies than us – and winning. I loved it!
When I exited to an investor back in 2009, I founded Stick Theory – a collaboration agency delivering with a fully remote team of experienced freelancers and consultants. No more team on PAYE for me, and no more office banter or face-to-face camaraderie. It felt very strange.
It also presented a challenge: how could I still achieve the sense of team connection that I knew was so important to success, when my team were not sitting near me, when I didn’t really know them, and when they didn’t actually work for me?
The answer presented itself in the form of The Agile Manifesto. If you’re not familiar with this, the Agile Manifesto is a document that outlines the values and principles of Agile software development. It was created by a group of developers back in 2001, who were fed up with the rigid, complex, document-driven approach that dominated software development at that time.
They wanted a different way of working, one that enabled teams to work more efficiently, flexibly, collaboratively and sustainably. At the core of The Agile Manifesto sit four statements that suggest teams should value:
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
As it happened, I was working with loads of tech start-ups and technology consultancies at this time, so my client teams were also familiar with this philosophy. I therefore embarked upon my first Agile practitioners course – learning a host of new skills, tools and techniques to empower me to work in this collaborative way with my growing network of associates.
Through this course, subsequent courses, and by absorbing the agile practices of my amazing tech clients, I learnt new ways to build connection with my clients and remote delivery teams. These new ways of working involved more screen time and less beer time. We got to know each other by collaborating rather than socialising. We were still able to build strong, authentic relationships – just in a different way. But critically, it was still fun and still delivered great results.
Through my love affair with agile and design thinking, I have learnt to craft clear and compelling project cases that help the whole team understand “the why” of our work. I have learnt to understand, record and apply user needs and map user journeys to keep the whole team focused on what really matters. I have learnt ways to involve the whole team in idea generation and prioritisation so that every voice matters. And I have made some great friends.
Connection Heroes brings all of this together, backed by evidence-based psychology and a deep understanding of the neuroscience of human connection. My team and I have developed a unique framework with Seven Core Strengths that help leaders, managers and teams to build understanding, trust, and engagement – even with colleagues they may rarely see.
Through our courses and community, we teach and coach people in effective ways of communicating, practising gratitude, thinking with agility and acting with radical responsibility. We underline the importance of human connection for both people and profit, and we help businesses build cultures of connection that drive engagement, productivity and well-being,
Our mission at Connection Heroes is to unleash the power of human connections in workplaces around the world. If you’d like to join this mission and empower your leaders, managers and teams with the new skills they need to build and maintain connections with colleagues they may rarely see, then please reach out. Or if you’d just like to learn more about our framework and the neuroscience of human connection, again – drop me a message. As you’d expect, I’m always happy to connect!
Thanks for reading – Di Gates, Founder.
