Durable Teams – What All the Fuss is About
Eugene Yamnitsky, DrBA
Product Management Executive | Connecting Strategy to Execution | RPA | Cloud
Why Teams?
A trove of research exists on the topic of “teams vs. individuals”, and it’s common wisdom that when tasks require multiple skills, judgment, expertise, diversity of experiences teams outperform individuals. According to Salas et al. (1992), a team is “a distinguished set of two or more people who interact dynamically, interdependently, and adaptively toward a common and valued goal, object, or mission”. That interaction aspect is where teamwork shines: team members work collaboratively on shared goals, drawing on the diversity of their backgrounds, expertise, and ways of thinking and problem-solving. And it is that diversity-fueled collaboration, that enables solving complex business challenges in a distributed environment.
High-performing teams:
1.????Share a common purpose as outlined in their charter, mission, and goals
2.????Have common norms and shared values
3.????Have psychological safety which allows them to trust another
4.????Are empowerment to come up with solutions to problems
5.????Have a moderate cognitive load
Teams exhibiting these characteristics become teams of missionaries (see Marty Cagan’s book “Empowered”) ready to take on complex problems and solve them effectively.
Why Durable?
So, why “Durable” is such an important aspect of a team? Well, the answer is surprisingly simple: the five characteristics listed above take time to develop and mature. Additionally, over time teams develop idiosyncratic ways of working together, which, as research indicates, can be an antecedent of their high performance.
As we know, to get to the high-performing status, most teams will go through the 5 phases of team formation: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing. So, what happens if we shuffle individuals and rebuild teams every few months? You guessed it right: the process repeats itself, as it will take time for teams to gel, develop new idiosyncratic ways of working, and reach the high performing status, which they may never actually reach if teams are re-shuffled often.
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And so, let’s clearly define a “Durable Team” as a team that has a stable mission with team members working together long enough to develop and mature the five characteristics of high-performing teams to accomplish meaningful outcomes.
Lack of durability has negative downstream effects like inability to measure a team’s execution over time (predictability, flow, business value delivered, etc), loss of institutional knowledge, and code maintainability issues due to lack of feeling of ownership. If you see the need to re-shuffle too often, there might be underlying issues with the boundaries these teams are organized around.
How to get started?
Here is some advice on how to go about forming true Durable teams. A recent book on teams, “Team Topologies” by Matthew Skelton, advocates for the following key team organization patterns:
Engineering leaders should partner with Product Management to identify the appropriate boundaries for “stream-aligned” teams. This may take the form of aligning teams to a particular product area, or ideally – to a customer value these teams will deliver. This way, even though initiatives will differ, the teams delivering value would persist. Running a “Value Stream Mapping” workshop can be extremely useful to identify these “stream-aligned” teams.
Closing thoughts
In the long run, teams outperform individuals, and durable teams outperform teams created ad-hoc or teams that are re-shuffled often. Durable teams become high-performing teams of missionaries as opposed to teams of mercenaries and can deliver better outcomes more effectively.
Organizing with the four patterns in mind helps optimize for flow, where teams are formed around business domains and are self-sufficient with minimal hand-offs. This, of course, may not be achievable completely in every instance, due to the various constraints (skills availability, budgets, etc), and additional measures like cross-training, upskilling, and strategic hiring may need to be taken.
And finally, we need to recognize that changes to team structure and composition may need to happen as a result of changing and evolving business priorities.
Senior Pastor & Overseer at Harvest Pentecostal Church Int'l
2 年Sorry every one, there is any books in hard copy which explain this materials?
Explorer of the internal path
2 年very interesting Eugene. We've been experimenting with Heidi Helfand's concept of Dynamic Reteaming. a few of the purported benefits is that it allows engineers to learn horizontally across different processes, value streams, deliverables and of course with different people. It makes work more fungible across teams so better demand balancing and results in knowledge sharing. different interpersonal dynamics can result in creativity or at least creative tension. we've just finished our second reteaming event where engineers can select their top two choices. on the dark side, as a PM, it can really muck with our targets and estimates though we enacted a rule that said if your pretty far down the road with a deliverable it's going to stick with the engineers, not necessarily the teams. now, whether it's better than durable teams for us...time will tell. the desired outcome is that engineers working on the stuff they want will be happier and more productive. maybe stick around a little longer as we know how tough it is to keep good folks, especially in this environment... best to you and your family