A rapid review of The Team Onion by Emily Webber

The book, The Team Onion by organisation consultant, Emily Webber , is small and well-formed. It’s perfect for leaders forming new teams, optimising existing teams so they perform better, or ensuring they have the right teams to handle new challenges or goals.

I read The Team Onion as part of onboarding to leading a new team. I was interested in what’s worked well elsewhere.?

How do I use the Team Onion?

You can and should read the book solo in the first place. To get the most out of the model, however, your Team Onion must be owned and developed by you and your leads or key decision- makers; the people whose buy-in your team needs to succeed.

You can use the Team Onion to help form new teams, change an existing team so they perform, or to gain insights into who you need to succeed in meeting your goals.

Before you begin, it’s useful to understand WHY your goal is important, WHAT your goal is and to some extent HOW it will be delivered. All of this within the context of your business model.

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For example, will you need some technology? Do you need to change people’s behaviour? Must you make changes to policy, to form a community, or to launch a communications campaign?

This insight will help you map out the scope of your delivery and the people you’ll need to succeed.

What is a Team Onion?

The Team Onion is a practical model for designing the right-sized teams that deliver. It considers human group size, communication barriers, and the capabilities (knowledge, skills, experience) needed in each ring of the onion.

The inner ring or Core team is an agile, right-sized, autonomous, multi-disciplinary team (roughly 5-9 people) focused full-time on delivering a common goal. The core team relies on daily communications circulate essential information and unblock barriers to delivery.

The next or middle ring are the Collaborators. (around 4-12 people). Collaborators provide specialist skills and knowledge needed regularly by the Core team to make decisions, navigate dependencies, or unblock paths to delivery. The Collaborators you need will vary depending on the stage of development.

The outer ring are Supporters (up to 30 people) who help the Core team along with other parts of the organisation and with the ecosystem they’re working in. People involved in sign-offs and parties you’d identify in a RACI model as Informed belong here. The Core team will meet with Supporters at least once every two weeks and keep them updated asynchronously.

The numbers in each ring aren’t arbitrary. They are optimised based on Dunbar’s number and the number of links needed to manage a team as it grows.

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How do I get started on my Team Onion?

A Team Onion is best designed in collaboration with your leads or key decision-makers. You’ll need two groups of people:

1. People who understand the goal: WHAT problem are we facing? WHY is it important to resolve it? WHAT benefits or value do you get from a solution? HOW do you propose to solve it? WHAT are your assumptions?
2. People who understand your team’s capabilities (knowledge, skills, experience)

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Webber proposes five steps to create your Team Onion;

1.?????? Recruiting the right people

2.?????? Mapping out the onion rings

3.?????? Prioritising engagement

4.?????? Engaging the wider team

5.?????? Reviewing and iterating

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Some things to bear in mind when recruiting: the right people depends on what stage your team is at: Forming, for example, or what stage your goal is at: Kick off vs Retrospective.

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What else should I consider?

The book doesn’t cover in detail what’s gone wrong when implementing the Team Onion model, so the examples are biases towards successful implementations. I’ve extrapolated some things that will help your team be successful. I covered these above, in short you need to establish trust, understand and agree on your common goal(s) and include people who know where the bodies are buried.

The book also doesn’t go into depth about the multiple and overlapping Team Onions. I guess you need to walk before you run. Just be aware it’s possible,

?The models mentioned in the book and those that came to mind for me are:

1.?????? Understanding how human communication works: Dunbar's number

2.?????? Understanding your business model: Business Model Canvas

3.?????? Understanding how teams form, mature and disband: Tuckman’s stages of group development

4.?????? Understanding how to deliver as agile team: GDS Agile Delivery

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In conclusion?

?The book is well-written and easy to digest. Successfully applying the model relies heavily on doing the groundwork to build trust. Understanding your organisation, the work you’re doing, and why it matters is also key.

If your teams are already right-sized and in the performing stage of Tuckman’s stages of group development, you won’t get a lot out of the Team Onion.

Also, also, also: The real value of the book is in the examples near the end. These real-life examples of how organisations have used the Team Onion model will give you ideas and inspiration for using the model with your teams.

However: you will need to do some work to prepare the way and beware of the bias in the examples towards successful uses of this model.?

What to do next?

1.?????? You can buy a copy of The Team Onion

2.?????? Learn about the Team Onion model

3.?????? Download the Team Onion tools and templates