Bounce Back - Strengthen your Teams to Weather Change
Forming, storming, norming, performing. Long lived teams are best. Keep your teams together. You’ll lose predictability if you change. Over the years I’ve heard all of this too. But the fact is, your teams will change. It’s in their nature. You might as well lean into that.
Teams face predictable and unpredictable changes that typically fall into 5 specific base patterns that I wrote about in my book Dynamic Reteaming. They are:
One by one - someone joins or leaves your company
Switching - someone switches from one team to another
Grow and split - a team grows bigger and splits
Merging - two or more teams merge together
Isolation - form a team to the side and give them process freedom
Is your organization prepared to weather the changes that you plan, and that come your way by surprise? I like to think about team and organizational design with an analogy of trees, from brittle to dynamic.
Brittle teams crumble in the face of challenge. They’re high maintenance and are practically allergic to change. They’re like weak trees that fall over in the wind.
Strong, dynamic trees can bend and sway to withstand the rain, the hail, and the snow and so can some teams. Trees might lose a few branches and leaves but in the end they will survive and might even thrive with care and feeding.
Since team change is expected, let’s prepare now, and build stronger team structures that enable our organizations to move and sway and change when we want them to, and when we have to.
This does not mean go break up all of your teams, mix the people up and reorg like mad. You’re dealing with human beings and your strategy needs to put the humans into the design. Let’s explore.
What are your teams like today? Consider a spectrum from brittle to dynamic like the following:
What are the signals that your teams are brittle? What are the signals that your teams are dynamic? Here are some ideas.
Example signals that you are trending towards Brittle teams:
People do as they are told, they get things done however someone needs to keep telling them what to do.
Someone leaves with all the knowledge of a system in their head and it takes months to recover.
People aren’t collaborating within the team very much at all. They’re working alone and have really long integration feedback loops.
Issues are always found late which prevents the team from releasing to customers.
It’s very challenging to make changes to the existing codebase. Some of the code is downright scary to deal with.
Working on the stability of the system never gets prioritized. It feels like you’re drowning in tech debt.
Some teams are bottlenecks for other teams.
It’s hard to spread new ways of working across teams.
Teams must adhere to the structure dictated from leadership and must work the way other teams work without much freedom.
People don’t really know each other and have never met in person.
The only way for career advancement is to leave the company.
What other signals come to mind for your organization?
On the other end of the spectrum are signals I’ve noticed about dynamic teams that enable greater bounce back in the face of the organizational changes that come their way.
Example signals that you are trending towards dynamic teams:
People innovate and serve up ideas and solutions that help shape the strategy.
People work in pairs as thought partners and switch pairs within a team to share knowledge and build redundancy.
Software is integrated continuously when making changes.
Quality is shifted left, issues are discovered when pairing or when integrating frequently, they are prevented by having a quality mindset when writing acceptance criteria.
Tests of different kinds give feedback on whether changes broke new or existing functionality.
Prioritization takes into account new functionality as well as pragmatic efforts to strengthen existing functionality.
People pair across teams to share knowledge and learning, and to alleviate dependencies.
Ways of working spread intentionally by catalyzing new teams seeded and anchored by people skilled in what you want to spread.
The people in the teams feel ownership of their team composition. They are allowed to change it by splitting or merging, or working cross team, for example.
Teams reflect and learn how to shift their ways of working to meet the challenges before them.
The people get together in person for special events, and build shared memories and stronger relationships.
People seize opportunities to change teams or roles. You can witness the career renewal happening.
What other signals come to mind for your organization?
As you think about the teams in your organization, which of these dynamic team elements do you want to deepen? Which of the brittle team signals do you want to shed? You can approach your strategy from either perspective.
Now take a look again at the spectrum of brittle to dynamic teams. Where do you place your teams on this spectrum? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments, or feel free to reach out!
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News about Heidi:
Want help building dynamic teams, or shifting your organization into that direction? Book a call with me.
Context Switch- Discover the Four Contexts for Success as a Senior Tech Leader, is my new book in progress. All our careers we might have been fighting the urge to context switch but at higher levels of tech leadership it’s a necessity. Learn and get better at the four leadership contexts from the book: the managing up context, the peer context, the team context and the inward context . You can buy the book in progress here. My goal is to finish it by the end of the year! You get free updates to the book when buying it.
I’ll be traveling in the coming months to London, Berlin and Tokyo. If you’re in any of those places and would like a workshop or in person talk for your teams, please reach out.
Credits:
Thanks to Linda van Sinten for creating the incredible tree art for this and other Dynamic Reteaming materials.