How Do You Organize a New Team for Success?

A friend of mine who works at Google recently wrote to me, "I've just created a new team of five and we're just getting setup. We need to show progress on a problem in six months. I'd love your advice and resources on how to organize a team for success (norms, decision making, values, etc)." Another friend is starting a company on the side of his day job, and wanted to know how he should structure his team.

First, I'd recommend blocking off an hour for your team to come together and discuss how you want to work together. As HBR reports, “One of your first priorities should be to get to know your team members and to encourage them to get to better know one another. One particularly effective exercise is to have people share their best and worst team experiences. Discussing those good and bad dynamics will help everyone get on the same page about what behavior they want to encourage — and avoid — going forward." 

Here are some questions to ask to create norms around working and making decisions:

• What hours do we want to work? Where and how do we want to work (same room, what kinds of check-ins, what kinds of file sharing, etc)?
• What are our hopes and fears for this team or project?
• What are some of our individual goals we want to work on? How can everyone else be supportive of those?
• When work gets intense, what are our non-negotiables? (i.e. Kids come first, must exercise in the middle of the day, etc)
• How will we make decisions? What types of decisions need consensus? How will we deal with conflict
• How do we want to give and receive feedback (I have a whole guide on types of feedback here-- but basically, do we want to do it 1-1, in a group, informally, or during a specified time each week-- like at a retro?) It’s always better to start with more structure, more touch points, more check-ins at the beginning, and you can always remove them.

There are a bunch more questions here, along with sample norms (sometimes people find the word norm to be confusing, so giving examples is good). Keep asking questions of your team weekly or monthly: 

• The 10 Questions you Need to Ask Your Team Every Week 
• Questions to ask your team every month

For team values: it's hard to set team values until you've worked together for at least a few months. But you can start with personal values. Here is a good exercise for personal values: Personal Maps (it's fun and you get to learn about each other).

For team structure: 

• At a high level, here is a good overview of the five main types of organizational structures.
• For tech startups, here is what a team structure could look like when you start. 
• As you grow, your structure will become more complicated, but a good rule of thumb is to keep your teams autonomous. Pinterest's founder Ben Silbermann explains how they make their teams "feel as autonomous and nimble as possible within the constraints of the organization. That means over time we are trying to make it feel like a startup of many startups. We want units that encompass a super strong designer, or a super strong lead engineering, a writer, often times a community leader. We want them to be self contained. We put people together that have all these kind of disciplines." Pinterest then anchors the teams to certain projects and removes barriers to let them go fast.
• And remember to keep tweaking and making adjustments. As Cap Watkins, VP of Design at BuzzFeed writes, "Our organizations are our products. If it isn’t already, it should be someone’s (or multiple someones’) job to be planning for the future of the team; to set goals based on people and effective communication rather than product metrics. We should constantly look inward, making small adjustments and tweaks as we learn new information, adjusting our future plans as a result."

Monthly Culture Inspiration: September 2016

Every month, I post three types of culture inspiration: a visual, a book, and an article to bookmark.

Visual: Wave of Change

Wendy Hirsch is an organizational consultant who "works with individual leaders and teams to achieve clarity – about a challenge, a solution, a goal, a plan – and to use that clarity to organize their efforts to execute for better performance." I came across her work when searching for compelling visuals about change management. I absolutely love her wave of change visual. When organizational change happens, we react to it (we're human). This wave visualizes how important that cycle of reaction, resistance, and feedback is. So often we pretend this reaction doesn't happen-- but it does, and can make or break successful change.

Wendy Hirsch's Infographics, Image Source: Wendy Hirsch

Book: The Seventh Sense

I heard about this book from a great blog I subscribe to: A VC, written by Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson. After Fred's recommendation, I picked it up and couldn't put it down. Joshua Cooper Ramo touches upon so many thoughts and questions I've had about the future of our society-- but he articulates these future forces in a way that I've never seen before. Ramo argues that we are entering the "Age of Networks," which means we'll see more of: "Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances." 

“The Seventh Sense, in short, is the ability to look at any object and see the way in which it is changed by connection and networks.” Networks are changing the world and the implications of hyper-connectedness are changing the economy, politics, social relationships and just about everything else.

Ramo talks about what this means for the future of governments-- that right now, the majority of our new digital systems that governments are starting to use are being controlled by young, 20-something programmers, who are in their jobs because they are good programmers, not because they understand the moral implications behind what they are building! AND at the same time, many of our institutions are still being run by and "old-power" generation of leaders [white American men], who don't understand the power of networks and digitalization. They are being confronted by problems caused by networks (cyberaccidents, global warming, financial crises, terrorism)-- but they still see a world of risks that can be reduced to nouns: atomic bombs, fundamentalists, and derivatives. The sharpest edges of our problems stem from networks. A thought-provoking read.
 

Article to Bookmark: Culture is a Process, not a Series of Checkboxes

First of all, amazing article title, right? I want to print that line out and frame it. CultureAmp's Data Scientist Hyon S Chu borrows an anthropological definition of culture (a definition usually used for culture as art, language, and national traditions), and applies it to organizational culture: "Culture means the total body of tradition borne by a society and transmitted from generation to generation."

Chu then relates this to organizations: "If we look at organizational culture as a process, then it’s really about how we create and persist the behaviors that order the world and make it intelligible, not the values and standards themselves." I love this definition, and want to refer back to it!