On Team Formation, Episode 2: "Who's Driving This Thing?"

Do you have a team of rockstar product managers, analysts, strategists, engineers, horse trainers, chefs, or whatever you may oversee? Are they steering the ship and their leader is just holding on? In this three-part series (go back and take a look at Episode 1 on the "Prophet") I'll take a look at different models of team formation, where they can be effective, and how you can help migrate your team to the best space for your circumstances. Like many aspects of work and life, these are points on a multi-dimensional spectrum, and no one team will match any of these archetypes perfectly. Think of these as caricatures to avoid or aspire to. And of course,?any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is?entirely coincidental.

Today we will take a look at the strong team with a leader who helps to connect the dots, but hasn't taken the time to lay out a cohesive vision that the whole team can agree to and aggressively address intentionally and directly.

In this article we will look at the role of the Leader, the role of the Team, Success conditions, Risk factors, defining Attributes, and Escape plans.

Role of the Leader

• Observe the work being done by the group and stitch together a cohesive(ish) vision from the work of each individual
• Explain the work of the team to others.
• Build buy-in outside of the team.
• Attempt to secure resources.
• Improve individual ideas through one-on-one conversations.
• Apply smaller amounts of pressure than the 'Prophet' model (check it out again if you missed it above)

Role of the Team

• Generate ideas based on distributed subject matter expertise.
• Open your own doors, solve problems independently.
• Grow your knowledge and your network on your own.
• Pressure your Leader for clarification on priorities and to secure resources to get your piece of work completed.

Success Conditions (not mutually exclusive)

• Organizations where the rules aren’t written yet and there are still many two-way doors.
• More than one right answer exists.
• Big things are not urgently needed, and small incremental output is acceptable.
• Many individual contributors (ICs) are highflyers and don’t require extrinsic motivation.

Risk Factors

• Large change is needed in an organization and coordination of the work is needed for the big swings.
• The necessary resources to realize the IC’s mini-visions are constrained and contested either within the team or in the broader organization.
• A 'bake off’ mentality where multiple groups are trying to solve the same problem, and none are sufficiently resourced to break through.

Key Attributes

• Freedom for IC to create; high productivity in feature development and iterative progress.
• Lack of cohesive direction; groups will generate an ‘accidental vision’ that is coincidentally the sum of their efforts, but not necessarily in line with any specific corporate goal.
• Leaders that help to shape and develop resources and ideas, but disproportionate energy to pruning ideas that don’t meet the ‘accidental vision’ of the team.
• Slightly more exchange of information, than the Prophet formation, biased more towards bottom up.
• Pressure to deliver exists at the IC level as the leader doesn’t have a vested interest in individual work products.
• Ambiguity on priorities.
• Constant pressure from ICs to the Leader to clarify resource allocation and find more.

How to Escape This Formation?

Similar to the first formation, if your organization can live with this formation, and there are bigger opportunities to address, this can be a perfectly fine state of a team.? One of the biggest opportunities for a team like this is to bring them together and forge that coherent vision.? Many times, the leader of this type of team has been there for a long time and may have lost some of the initial energy.? They are sometimes aware of it, but generally it has eroded slowly over time, and they may not be aware or ready to admit it.??

No one strives to not positively impact the environment around them, and a bit of outside energy either from a more senior leader in the org or a facilitation expert from the outside can revitalize a team like this very quickly.? The revitalization should result in something larger than the current backlog of epics and stories (in a product management org) and focus on where the group collectively wants to move towards.? A great mechanism for this is adapting some flavor of Amazon’s PR/FAQ template (for more check this article out) and forcing people to take a longer perspective on their teams work and value.? This vision exercise should involve the direct team, as well as any support functions (engineering, operations, etc.) and should result in a document or series of documents that can be referenced back to.??

In another nod to Amazon methods (but generally less rigid), my team and I at Carvana leaned heavily on written narratives and commonly available documents on our team as a forcing function.? Everyone was given a chance to read, consider, and comment on documents in scheduled meetings that started with a silent reading period.? The silent meeting can be a difficult adjustment for people that are not used to the forcing mechanism, but the value of it forcing disagreement and misalignments into the forefront is paramount to bringing team functionality to its highest level and ensuring a constant flow of value generation.

What about you?

Have you worked in this type of team? What worked? What would you change? Would love to hear your feedback and stay tuned for the second formation, "Who's Driving This Thing?"