Team Effectiveness, Part 2: Rapid Formation, Reformation and Gelling of Teams

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Part 2 of 3:
Rapid Formation, Reformation and
Gelling of Teams
11

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Building Team Effectiveness
in
High Growth Technology Businesses
Dave Litwiller
Three Part Series – January, 2021
22

3. DECENTRALIZATION-
CENTRALIZATION SPECTRUM OF
DECISION AUTHORITY
Project Phase or Characteristic Favour More Decentralized
Decision Authority
Favours More Centralized
Decision Authority
Determining Technical and Market
Scope of Activity
Design, Implementation &
Experimentation within
Established Technical and
Commercial Frameworks
Architecture, High Level
Design, Market Targeting, and
Value Proposition Definition
(or redefinition)
Coupling of System Elements Looser Tighter
Delivery Time, Issue Duration or
Customer Feedback Delay
Shorter Longer
Regulatory Compliance,
Safety & Security
Less More
Cost of Failure Low High
Cost of Change Low High

4. DECENTRALIZATION OF
DECISION AUTHORITY
• Decentralized works best when:
• The optimal form of the problem to solve, and the solution are both partially
unknown, at least at the outset; there is a lot of trial and error to find the winning
formula
• The work can be modularized
• Close collaboration and rapid feedback from end users can be achieved
• The cost of learning is low
• Competence on the team is uniformly high
• Change can usually be predictably brought to a point of closure, be it
technological, or related enterprise and ecosystem issues

5. CENTRALIZATION OF
DECISION AUTHORITY
• More centralized is preferred when:
• The problem to solve is well defined, and the architecture and high level design
to most efficiently address it is knowable up front, with enough work; there are a
lot of well proven guiding theories and precedents to use
• The system is tightly coupled (both organizationally and technologically)
• There are longer development and release realities, limiting the rate of near-term
feedback from end users
• The cost of learning is high
• The margin for error is low; people expect and will yield to more centralized
leadership as business and technical conditions become more extreme
• Change needs to be made faster than the natural rate of collaborative team or
project evolution
• Team goals can easily drift over time without active countering effort

6. DEGREE OF CENTRALIZATION OF
PROJECT DECISION AUTHORITY
• Team acceptance of centralized vs. decentralized leadership:
• People will be less patient with errors from more centralized leadership
• Corollary: People will be more accommodating of error-prone mutual learning,
where decision authority is more diffused
• A shift to more centralized emphasis is necessary if more democratic
behaviours are failing to select the right situational leadership as teams and
tasks evolve
• The most common form of this difficulty, especially in collaboration-prizing
environments:
• Where social conformity or popularity overtakes business and technical acumen

7. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Teams less than ~eight people more easily know what each other are doing,
with lower risk for hand off errors, mistaken assumptions and
miscommunication
• Larger teams require a greater proportion of time ensuring accurate, timely
communication and interpretation
• Smaller teams can work through individual, functional and hierarchical
differences much faster to reach an efficient group working dynamic
• Individual and joint accountability to the group’s goals and purpose are higher
with smaller teams, let alone the logistical issues of convening and polling larger
groups
• It is easier to keep all voices being heard, to diminish the prevalence of
groupthink and herd behaviours, by keeping up healthy competition for ideas and
surfacing honest differences in view

8. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Decision speed is paramount to keep teams coalescing, moving and executing
at high tempo
• The natural tendency for larger teams is for collective decision making speed to
slow down, unless there are active counteracting efforts
• Strive to have a clear, single owner for each major upcoming decision, even
though many will contribute
• Also describe what types of decisions the team can make as a group, and what
needs to be escalated for more senior input

9. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Decision parameters to define:
• Deadline
• Acceleration triggers
• Decision escalation path, and, in more egalitarian teams
• Who will act as a neutral arbitrator if group can’t make a timely decision with rapidly
forming and reforming teams
• It also helps to identify the extended bench of in-house and affiliated outside
resources to draw upon if timely access to sufficient expertise becomes an
issue

10. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• To diagnose and treat slow or otherwise poor decision making, the following decision
process anatomy can be helpful for further breaking down roles, responsibilities and
deadlines (Mintzberg, 1976):

11. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Continuous improvement needs to be built into the culture
• Basic:
• Continual improvement of work methods, tools, training, techniques with reflection
events and follow-up
• More Developed:
• Everyone seeing their job as not just completing the work, or doing the work
progressively better, but teaching others how to learn better and faster
• Always be asking “How can we get a bit more accuracy and a bit more
actionable information out of each interaction?”

12. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Team leaders need to be oriented toward continual onboarding
• Individuals
• Group dynamics
• Giving newly arriving individuals first tasks to provide perspective of the entire
subject as much as possible, to build the basis for greater autonomy over time
while maintaining alignment with larger goals

13. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• At moments of team reconstitution
• The leader has to have a map of the outgoing technical and team collaboration
dynamics contributions of departing team members, and, similarly, a plan for
rebuilding the same contributions among the reconstituted team and inbound
team members
• Technical expertise
• Functional expertise
• Problem solving skills
• Decision making skills
• Interpersonal skills
• General guideline: Skills are easier to replace than compatibility, especially in the
highest performing teams

14. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• At moments of team reconstitution (cont’d)
• Doing ingress of new members well requires doing egress of departing
teammates well; they are two sides of the same coin
• The transfer of knowledge and customs to depart responsibly is the mirror image of
what a new arriver needs to acclimatize quickly
• For example, in development work, start with material and unit development
transfer memos, then memos for components, sub-systems and systems
• Design goals, assumptions, limits, and remaining unknowns
• Technological means for achieving those goals and method of informing
unknowns
• Test plans
• Verification and validation trajectory
• Design maintenance and extensibility outlook

15. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• At moments of team reconstitution (cont’d)
• From time to time, review incidents of recent past offboarded team members
needing to be pulled back in, if only for consultation and hallway conversations,
to see if how offboarding practices should better evolve

16. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Prior to The First Meeting for a New or Reformed Team
• Get the agenda set
• Sound out key issues and differences among team members
• Make sure that a crisp, action-oriented first group meeting for the new or
reformed team will be held
• For newly joining team members
• Get to know their prior experiences, strengths and weaknesses
• Understand their backgrounds, biases and limitations

17. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• The First Meeting for a New or Reformed Team
• Frame (or reframe) the context, delegation instructions, and success criteria for
the project team’s work
• Make sure everyone is operating under similar understanding about the latest
technical and corporate circumstances, to (re)ground the go forward work and
decisions
• Providing goal clarity and up-to-date context is the most significant, controllable
factor in achieving goal acceptance by individual team members
• Clear success criteria force team members to opt in, out, or negotiate for a new
goal, but accountability becomes clear
• Performance goals should be as specific and measurable as possible to enhance
individual and joint self-regulation toward the desired outcome

18. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• The First Meeting for a New or Reformed Team (cont’d)
• Properly introduce new team members and the team
• Get people to open up, especially quieter team members
• Have everyone describe what they see as the critical information, perspectives and
insights on the state of the work at hand, not just thumbnail bios
• Then, place focus on the immediate task to start the process of joint discovery
among team members to expedite mutual learning and interaction dynamics
• The aim is to have people quickly understand how to fully leverage all of the
team’s human resources, and which people best map to which parts of the work
at hand
• Identify individual assignments

19. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• The First Meeting for a New or Reformed Team (cont’d)
• Lay out or recap the rules of engagement (author bias noted):
• Attendance and no electronic distractions at meetings
• Acknowledgement of any sacred cows
• Confidentiality requirements
• Fact-driven analytical style
• End results orientation
• Standard of documentation: Succinct written communication
• Use of meetings: Highly interactive problem solving
• Constructive confrontation, but no finger pointing
• Contribution: Everyone does real work
• Accountability as a team

20. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• The First Meeting for a New or Reformed Team (cont’d)
• Be clear about the latest state of:
1. Which technical and organizational interfaces have greatest sensitivity to change
2. The extent to which people should invest time and resources in furthering back-up
options
3. The relative priority of deploying asap vs. continuing to incorporate the latest
technologies and insights on a rolling basis

21. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• The First Meeting for a New or Reformed Team (cont’d)
• Lay out the ground rules and processes for how the team will work and
communicate together, particularly conflict resolution protocols
• Defined conflict resolution mechanisms help keep task level conflicts from
developing into more debilitating interpersonal conflicts
• If necessary, call out any resistance at the outset
• Use near-term deadlines, even if just internal ones, to drive the intended tempo
from the outset
• Speed is habit forming; similarly, slowness is infectious
• There is never a second chance to make a first impression
• Teams rarely have all the skills they need at the outset, they learn them as they
confront what the challenge requires
• Finish with a recap of action items, and an expectation that a call-down of action
item completion will be the first item of the next team meeting

22. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• The First Two Weeks for a New or Reformed Team
• Be everywhere as the work is happening, to understand and resolve any issues
with the pace of the work, and any divergences of knowledge, understanding,
and context
• Instrument the team’s boundary layer, to understand what interrupts are coming
to the team members from prior commitments, future projects, and adjacent
concurrent responsibilities which impact focus and throughput

23. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
Two Hats of Leadership at Team Transitions:
1) Defining, refining, allocating and co-ordinating the work
2) Aligning individual and group goals, and ironing out interpersonal conflicts
• The form of conflict that is more difficult to detect, but informative when it is sensed,
are minor differences of opinion among the team that go unresolved for a long time
• These low intensity, long simmering disagreements often reveal larger unspoken
interpersonal conflict issues that need leadership intervention to resolve

24. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Continually sense and act upon issues with:
• Relationships
• Communication
• People being able to effectively problem solve with one another
• Such issues often emerge or change:
• At team formation and reformation
• When creating the team’s identity (often ~first ½ of project)
• When facing a major deadline (often ~second ½ of project)

25. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Gather data on what issues the team is facing, periodically review, and act on
the most worthy
• Have financial and strategic control rules to decide which issues can be acted on
and how
• Strategic Impact: Value proposition and intentions for shaping of the mind of the
market
• Financial: Start with an articulated cost of delay
• Monthly or quarterly business reviews can be a suitable forum for deliberating on
these larger team issues and opportunities

26. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Keep team members in close contact with the voice of the customer
• Whether the customer is internal, or external (supply or demand chain)
• More insulated team members can otherwise make mistaken assumptions about
what the customer values, especially as velocity increases and pressures for
expediency rise
• The game is often won or lost on technology integration and enterprise
integration
• This is key to realizing global rather than overly local optimization
• In R, D & E projects, constantly build system engineering wherewithal, even at
component and sub-system team levels

27. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Target Team Experience Profile
• Experience is most valuable in the early phases of a project, when decisions are
being made in an environment of higher risk, both technologically and w.r.t. the
competitive environment
• Qualitatively, the ability to anticipate technological and enterprise cascading
effects of change reflect having the right experience, and good team interaction
dynamics

28. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Target Team Experience Profile (cont’d)
• The interpersonal chemistry of an early, healthy team:
• Members feel that the scope of insight, skills and energy of the team is well
matched to the task at hand, while still feeling individually responsible for the
outcome
• Forward pollination guideline in technology development:
• In tightly coupled system elements with a high cost of change, strive to have at
least 30% of team members have extensive experience with developing shipping
work items or products of similar technical character in the past

29. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Cardinal Rule of Complementary Skills: Every team member needs to bring a
unique contribution
• Distinctive value-add for each member is the foundation of:
• Sustainable mutual respect
• Individual self esteem
• Accountability to the group’s goals, and
• Achieving the benefits of diversity
• Skill complementarity is the basis of joint work and collective performance
through co-dependency, vs. only having shared values and information sharing
• Complementary roles can be formed early in the team’s work through
appropriate division of tasks, even if people have inbound skill profiles with a
high degree of overlap

30. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Where Team Start-up Speed is Paramount
• Try to put the team together even before the work requirements of the task at
hand are fully formed
• Composition of the team often more heavily needs to favour inbound expertise,
to hit the ground running, with less emphasis on long-term stability of team
performance
• Urgency for better immediate team adaptation to the task at hand can sometimes
mean slower adaptability to future needs

31. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Where Team Start-up Speed is Paramount (cont’d)
• The social dynamics of team interaction are typically the rate limiting process to
reaching full productivity
• Helping to finish defining the requirements and establishing the team’s full set of
goals is often a good, early deliverable to give the team a task-centred focus to
start working out interaction protocols
• Diagnosing and fixing a limited scope current state shortcoming can also be a good
short-term task to build team interaction

32. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Where Team Start-up Speed is Paramount (cont’d)
• The more that a near-term, time sensitive early team interim performance
oriented work item can mirror the character of the longer-term task, the faster the
group can ascend the learning curve of the best form of group dynamics to reach
full productivity; there is always some mutual discovery time
• Other candidate early tasks in technology development: Early preliminary design
reviews and comparative feasibility studies are often good candidate deliverables
• Design or milestone reviews also give the team leader a good forum to
communicate about preferred practices about technology and process for how the
team should work together moving ahead
• The sooner a team has to perform and achieve even partial results, the sooner it
can gel

33. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Emergent Team Structure
• Even in egalitarian teams, behaviours emerge in communication and decision
making that effectively define a structure to organization and authority
• Those behaviours form both bottom-up and top-down
• Emergent team structure can be good or bad, and it needs to be managed to
best effect

34. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Emergent Team Structure (cont’d)
• The limits of personalities, capabilities and extremes of the task’s requirements
tend to be where emergent structure can be seen first to guide any needed early
interventions by leadership
• If any undesirable structure becomes evident, it has to be addressed quickly, since
change gets much harder to make as time goes on, especially in more democratic
groups
• Symptoms arising from divergent purpose within the team and lack of mutual
reliance among team members usually require the strongest corrective actions

35. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Emergent Team Structure (cont’d)
• Like liquid to solid phase transitions in physical matter, emergent team structure
tends move from the extremes to more routine matters over time
• Informal structures and mechanisms always come to fill the gaps of the formal
structure over time
• Time sensitive problem solving situations tend to provide an early window into
the full form of team dynamics, both good and bad

36. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Classical signs of the early onset of difficulties to be sensitive to:
• Too much democracy; not enough action
• Symptom: Too many decisions have to be cleared with too many people
• Action: Provide training and greater delegation parameters to improve trust and
autonomy

37. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Classical signs of the early onset of to be sensitive to (cont’d):
• Too much escalation of conflict
• Symptom: Routine disagreements regularly escalate up the organization to be
resolved, rather than being worked out within the immediate community-project
group
• Action: Leadership to resolve larger policy and knowledge issues which prevent
local resolution

38. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Classical signs of the early onset of difficulties to be sensitive to (cont’d):
• Unilateral action
• Symptom: Overabundance of unilateral action by those who do not have the time
or the inclination to discuss and debate with constituents before taking a decision
• Action: Training on the medium- and longer-term costs of alienation of team
members from overuse of a unilateral decision style

39. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Longer Term Team Evolution
• Some individual contributors will want to advance their scope of responsibility,
others will not
• Advancing responsibility for those who seek it and are suited to it will take the form
of both new technical and functional frontiers, as well as leadership opportunities to
create lasting change
• Challenge the team regularly with fresh facts and information
• Evolving circumstances keep a team moving forward, helping build and renew a
sense of common purpose and collaborative work style
• Leverage positive feedback, recognition and rewards
• At the same time, keep the focus on the pride in the collective work, rather than
secondary or narrower measures of performance

40. LEADING RAPIDLY FORMING
AND EVOLVING TEAMS
• Intervention repertoire to heighten team performance:
• Hierarchy – centralized vs. decentralized
• Interaction patterns – participative (round robin) vs. delegation to most expert or
knowledgeable individual or sub-group
• Options and decision making
• Divergent vs. convergent phases
• Required speed
• Reversibility of decisions
• Feedback – positive and encouraging vs. critical and devil’s advocate

41. UP NEXT IN PART 3 OF 3
The Art of Delegation

42. FURTHER DISCUSSION
For additional discussion about building team effectiveness in high growth
technology businesses:
dave.litwiller@communitech.ca