Dynamic Reteaming at Fast-Growing Companies

Dynamic Reteaming at Fast-Growing Companies

Heidi Helfand @heidihelfand https://leanpub.com/dynamicreteaming

Dynamic Reteaming is Team Change

“When your teams change, you’re not doing it wrong.”

eco cycle - move between maturity - rigid to renewal - birth - growth - adolescence

Problem: Pivot or die (Poverty trap)

Reteamimg: Innovation by isolation pattern

  • “skunkworks” team that doesn’t follow the process rules
  • form team
  • isolate
  • process freedom
  • dissolve

Good for crisis management Why do we have to take teams off to the side to go faster?

Problem: Mandate to grow

Reteaming: One by One

  • mentors as the first pair

Reteaming: Batch Addition

  • onboarding needs to be more formal
  • new hire retros
  • mentor retros

Problem: Duplication of mentor effort

Reteaming: Bootcamp

Problem: Relationships limited to teams

Reteaming: Bring people to the new hires

  • Meet new people during bbotcamp / intro project
  • Then when they join their “graduation team” they have more connections

Problem: Team too big

  • Planning takes forever
  • Hard to make decisions
  • Stop caring about what other people in the team are doing

Reteaming: Grow and split

  • 2 new teams restart the growth cycle

“Separation of the fellowship cake”

Do we have to split? Why do we split?

  • inexperienced fasciliators
  • big teams have more variety and perspectives

What if the people decide? (self-organizing team)

  • Retro on team composition

When teams split:

  • Don’t share teams
  • Avoid creating dependencies
  • Don’t drag it out
  • Change it physically
  • Team reset

Market of skills: Share the skills you bring Interest of hobbies What you want to learn

Visualize workflow to define team agreements

Design alliance / conflict protocol

  • we’ll have disagreemnts, how do we want to handle them?

Book: Liftoff

should I work harder at building relationships even though I’m part-time? I’m helping the team handle new people showing up

Problem: Tower of knowledge

  • only one person knows something
  • can’t go on vacation

Reteaming: Pairing, switching pairs Track how long people have been together Cross-squad pollination Redundancy, fault tolerance

Prevent team towers of knowledge Nomads

Problem: Individual stagnation

Reteaming: Opportunity matching

  • Shift the Energy
  • Reteam at an offsite
  • Hackathon
  • Overcommunicate the plan Book: The advantage - Lencioni

Problem: “Fast” Growth - Who are these people

  • “Feels like culture change”
  • Is my status changing, roles

Cut through the confusion

Reteaming: Guild formation

  • Self-selected
  • Open space
  • People build the schedule
  • People find each other
  • Leaders self-select

Creative Destruction to move from stage 4 to stage 1 How to apply this personally?