Posts Tagged with "teams"

#3: The team, not the individual, is the smallest unit in an organisation.

At least amongst those who "do the work" (in an engineering organisation, these being engineers, designers, and product managers — individual contributors), the smallest atomic unit of work is the team.Read more →

#3a: Disassembling a team considered costly.

If the team is the smallest atomic unit of an organisation, by analogy it follows that disassembling a team is expensive. This is particularly true for high-performing teams.Read more →

#3b: A manager is not a full member of her team.

Managers are not part of their team the same way the people they manage are.Read more →

#3c: Why do teams break down past a certain size?

Small teams are, in most cases, preferable to large teams. This is in large part due to the web of human interactions that comprise a team.Read more →

#3d: On team alignment.

Only when a team is aligned is it more than the sum of its parts. When you provide a team with multiple — and competing — aims, you incentivise the creation of sub-teams within. The benefits of an aligned team cannot come from a fractured team.Read more →

#3d1: Create an ideal team by seeing the micro from the macro.

In Plato's Republic, Socrates frames the vast social enterprise of a city as a magnification of a person.Read more →

#3d2: Teams exist for goal alignment, not goal attainment.

Teams are beneficial but not necessary in enabling individuals to attain a goal. The individual, not the abstract concept of the team, does the work. And while collaboration and shared knowledge benefits goal attainment, these can occur outside team boundaries.Read more →

#13a1: To improve individual performance, improve team performance.

Individual performance follows a power law: the best outperform the worst by an order of magnitude. A manager is unlikely to change her people in a meaningful way, so it is unlikely for low performers to become high performers and shift the distribution (at least, within a company or team).Read more →

#17a: To reduce risk, aim for small, single-purpose teams.

From consideration of a portfolio-based approach to managing organisational risk and of the efficacy of single-purpose teams, it follows that a company should prefer to comprise many smaller teams — each managing a single project — over few, larger project teams.Read more →

#18: How organisations learn.

Organisations learn, yet organisations are made of individuals. These individuals are organised in a semi-static structure with the team as the fundamental unit.Read more →

#21: The goal of process is to remove itself.

The goal of process is to remove itself. Process should not be an end in itself, but a means.Read more →

#21a: How to help your team internalise a process.

After being introduced to a team, process may sometimes persist overly long and fail to become internalised. This may be due to process creator (often the team's lead) being invested more heavily in the process itself than the problem it aims to solve.Read more →

#21a1: Why your team isn't adopting a process.

Your team is unlikely to adopt a process they don't like or believe in. Seek to understand their perspective. If your team is not buying into a process, chances are it was implemented without sufficient consultation. They may disagree with the specific approach.Read more →

Reference #32: An Elegant Puzzle

Small teams are not teams. At less than four members, a team is a "sufficiently leaky abstraction" such that it takes on attributes of an individual. At this point, a team is noticeably impacted by sick days and holidays.Read more →

Reference #33: An Elegant Puzzle

The steady state of a team should be 6-8 members. To create a new team, don't start with an empty team. Instead, grow an existing team to 8-10, then split into two teams of 4 or 5.Read more →

Reference #34: An Elegant Puzzle

Disassembling high-performing teams leads to a global loss of productivity. This is an argument against re-allocating team members to where the highest urgency is.Read more →

Reference #35: An Elegant Puzzle

The expected time for a team to complete a task increases with utilisation. This time approaches infinity as utilisation approaches 100%. This is an argument for building slack into your teams.Read more →

Reference #36: An Elegant Puzzle

To balance team utilisation, prefer to shift scope (responsibility) rather than people. This can be done rapidly to improve slack, by moving scope to a team with too much slack and away from a team with not enough.Read more →

Reference #53: An Elegant Puzzle

To guide decision-making, consider your company (which includes other teams), your own team, and yourself, in that order.Read more →

Reference #54: An Elegant Puzzle

There three broad types of engineering management roles:Read more →

Reference #55: An Elegant Puzzle

As a manager, you should make your peers your first team. This means being able to disappoint your team to help your peers succeed; this comes from having a broad perspective.Read more →

Reference #56: An Elegant Puzzle

An environment of needing to "work harder" to solve mounting problem leads to the birth of hero programmers.Read more →

Reference #57: An Elegant Puzzle

These are two options to fix a broken engineering system — that is, one that is unsustainable and leads to hero programmers.Read more →

Reference #92: Reinventing Performance Management

A key difference between high- and low-performing teams is that the former are strengths-oriented — they strongly agree that they have the opportunity to do what they do best every day at work.Read more →

Reference #160: Peopleware

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment, but goal alignment.Read more →

Reference #161: Peopleware

Cliques are not inherently bad. A clique is a jelled team (though not all jelled teams are called cliques).Read more →

Reference #162: Peopleware

As a manager, you can't make the teams jell. You don't build teams; you grow them.Read more →

Reference #164: Peopleware

Building a low quality product leads to lower pride in product. This inhibits team jelling; team members lack a joint sense of accomplishment.Read more →

Reference #165: Peopleware

Managers are at best part-time members of a team. At higher levels in an organisation, jelled teams cease to exist; they are formed by people at the front lines, not by managers.Read more →

Reference #166: Peopleware

A commitment to working overtime generally cannot be applied equally to all the team members. For example, a working parent faces different constraints to a recent university graduate without children.Read more →

Reference #167: Peopleware

Peer coaching is ubiquitous in healthy teams. This is especially important in modern workplaces where the manager no longer has all the technical skills required by the team and hence cannot coach them in those skills.Read more →

Reference #168: Peopleware

Fragmented team can't jell. Team members split across multiple working groups have too many interactions to keep track of, and to few of the tight interactions required for team to jell.Read more →

Reference #194: The First 90 Days

Delegation is important at all level of leadership. The keys to effective leadership remains much the same: building a team you can trust, setting goals and metrics to measure progress, connecting high-level goal is to an individual's responsibilities, and reinforcing those through process.Read more →

Reference #257: The First 90 Days

When you join an existing team as their new leader, you will likely inherit some outstanding performers (A-players), some average performers (B-players), and some who are not up to the job (C-players).Read more →

Reference #259: The First 90 Days

How you structure individual- and group-based compensation as part of your overall performance-based contribution to compensation depends on the extent of interdependence in performance.Read more →

Reference #262: The First 90 Days

A common team dysfunction concerns who participates in key team meetings. These are too inclusive in some organisations and too exclusive in others.Read more →

Reference #267: The First 90 Days

Consider explaining to your team which decision-making process you're using and why.Read more →

Reference #269: The First 90 Days

You know you're successful in building your team when you reach the breakeven point. At this point, the team creates more energy than you need to put into it.Read more →

Reference #295: Empowered

There are three important differences separating strong companies from the rest:Read more →

Reference #308: Empowered

A tech lead is a senior-level engineer with the responsibility of participating in ongoing product discovery. She is a key partner to a team's product manager and designer.Read more →

Reference #452: Organizational Culture and Leadership

One approach to handling multicultural issues in a group is to focus on "cultural intelligence". This concept proposes that building understanding, empathy, and the ability to work with other cultures requires four capacities:Read more →

Reference #453: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A "cultural island" is a situation in which the rules of having to maintain face are temporarily suspended. Here, a group is allowed to explore its own values and assumptions freely, especially those around authority and intimacy.Read more →

Reference #463: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A model for the stages of group evolution was summarised by 1956 by Bennis & Shepard, then described "poetically" by Tuckman in 1965 as forming, storming, norming, and performing.Read more →

Reference #464: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a group realises (or has their leader point out) that their strength comes not from homogeneity but from variety, they move from norming to performing.Read more →

Reference #467: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The theory of management of Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, held that groups could make decisions, but individuals must be responsible and accountable for those decisions.Read more →

Reference #470: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every group has to go through Tuckman's stages of group development. They must answer questions of inclusion, identify, authority, and intimacy.Read more →

Reference #505: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

In a cross-functional team, everyone is responsible for the success of every function.Read more →

Reference #506: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Politics is when people choose their words and actions based on how they want others to react rather than what they believe. A team that is political often focuses on the success of individuals rather than the team.Read more →

Reference #507: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The need of some teams to reach complete consensus leads to inaction. These teams are unable to move beyond debate.Read more →

Reference #508: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Your first team is the team you give your loyalty and commitment to above all others. You can be a member of multiple teams. But you should not let your care for those teams come at the expense of your commitment to your team team.Read more →

Reference #509: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Organisations fail to achieve teamwork because they fall into five natural pitfalls. Lencioni calls these the five dysfunctions of a team. Each dysfunction builds upon the former. They are as follows:Read more →

Reference #510: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The five dysfunctions of a team are interrelated. The success of a team is dependent on its ability to overcome them all. Given this interrelation, allowing even a single dysfunction to flourish causes teamwork to deteriorate.Read more →

Reference #511: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The "five dysfunctions of a team" model can be inverted to see how members of a cohesive team behave:Read more →

Reference #512: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Without constant work, even the best teams deviate towards dysfunction.Read more →

Reference #513: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence that your peer's intentions are good. You trust them to act in good faith.Read more →

Reference #514: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

To trust is to be vulnerable. For a team to focus all their energy on achieving their task, each member must expose their weaknesses, shortcomings, requests for help, and mistakes rather than concealing them.Read more →

Reference #515: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Below are a few tools to build trust in a team:Read more →

Reference #516: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

When building trust within a team, the leader's role is to be the first to demonstrate vulnerability. This vulnerability must be genuine.Read more →

Reference #518: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Though teams often avoid conflict reportedly to "save time", engaging in healthy conflict is generally more efficient than avoiding conflict entirely. Through conflict, issues are resolved rather than being continually raised without resolution.Read more →

Reference #519: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

As a leader, to build an effective team you must allow healthy conflict. This may run counter to your natural inclination to interrupt disagreements and protect your team from harm.Read more →

Reference #520: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Commitment within a team is a function of clarity and buy-in.Read more →

Reference #521: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

The need for consensus and the need for certainty are the greatest causes of a team's lack of commitment.Read more →

Reference #522: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Good teams focus on results. Dysfunctional teams focus on team or individual status to the detriment of results.Read more →

The Three A's of Empowered Teams

According to a 2015 study, team empowerment accounts for almost 25% of team performance. Empowered teams are high-performing teams. Here’s what I’ve learnt about growing them.Read more →

Meet the team: a primer on product teams

Let's say you're running a software organisation for the first time. You've got plenty of questions: who does the work? How does work get done? Where does the work come from? And how do you keep your teams aligned? Let's answer these questions.Read more →

Authority: the first foundation of an empowered team

Empowered teams have authority. Without authority, there is no empowerment. Authority comes with many rewards for a team, but it's not without challenges.Read more →