Turning People into Teams

Rituals and Routines That Redesign How We Work

David Sherwin, Mary Sherwin

• Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781523095766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Forecasting
• Index: Business

"Project and team leaders, do yourself a favor and make this book required reading by each member of your team!" —HR Professionals Magazine Collaborative strategies work when they're designed by teams—where each person is heard, valued, and held accountable. This book is a practical guide for project team leaders and individual contributors who want their teams to play by a better set of rules. Today's teams want more alignment among their members, better decision-making processes, and a greater sense of ownership over their work. This can be easy, even fun, if you have the right rituals. Rituals are group activities during which people go through a series of behaviors in a specific order. They give teams the ability to create a collective point of view and reshape the processes that affect their day-to-day work. In Turning People into Teams, you'll find dozens of practical rituals for finding a common purpose at the beginning of a project, getting unstuck when you hit bottlenecks or brick walls, and wrapping things up at the end and moving on to new teams. Customizable for any industry, work situation, or organizational philosophy, these rituals have been used internationally by many for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. By implementing just a few of these rituals, a team can capture the strengths of each individual for incredible results, making choices together that matter.

PART 1

BETTER BEGINNINGS

It’s a beautiful Monday morning. Red and yellow leaves dance on the trees, and there’s barely a cloud in the sky. People are jogging on the trails through a small park, their bodies haloed by the sun—at least, that’s what you can see from the office window. You’re stuck in a freezing conference room with a bunch of coworkers you don’t know, listening to leaders you’ve never met explain exactly how important this upcoming project is for your company.

What do your team members think about this project? You leaf your way through the three-day kickoff agenda. It looks like you won’t find out until late Wednesday. Your gaze wanders back to the window. You can almost feel the sun on your face, the cool breeze on your skin. Oh well. Maybe the boxed lunches will have those cookies you like.

New teams don’t need to start this way. Except for the cookies, perhaps.

In the first weeks of working with a new team, you have to figure out why you’re needed and what your personal contribution will be. You have to agree on which problems you’re trying to solve together. You need to have a plan for how everyone will work together—from everyday communication to handling the things that could potentially go wrong (or right). And it would be nice to know a little more about the people you’re working with and how you can best support each other.

When starting a project, we explicitly look for these things. Yet on so many teams, this information is absent. It can take weeks for team members to be fully invested in a project, and many more weeks to iron out issues that could have been handled from the start.

This is a shame, because patterns of team behavior are established at the beginning of any collaborative effort. The longer these behaviors persist, the harder it is to change them as a project moves along. While kickoff meetings are important for talking about team cohesion, they’re also one of first opportunities to establish and model important behaviors for the team. This is even more critical when working with teams that bring people together from across different functions and cultures.

In the first part of this book, we’ll share a series of rituals that help people set better expectations for how they want to work together, and make choices that bring them into alignment as a team. These rituals are best used in the first two weeks of starting a project, but they can also be used if a team starts to veer off course. We’ll close this part with rituals for planning a project kickoff with your teammates, so you can make the best use of everyone’s time and expertise.

You’ll find a lot of ideas here that your team can try. However, it’s unlikely that any new project could accommodate all of these rituals before you dive into the work. Choose the ones that you think will best help your team and get going!

Start the Team by Talking about the Team

Unknown quantities. That’s what we are to each other when we’re starting on a team. We’re sitting around the proverbial table, drinking our favorite coffee or tea, but none of these hot beverages will wash away our jitters. Who are these people? How do I want to work with them? And how are they going to best work with me? If these questions aren’t answered right away, we start to make assumptions about what’s best for ourselves and others—and those assumptions are usually wrong.

We encourage every team to conduct one of the following rituals before they kick off a project. By using these rituals in advance of formally starting projects, team members can get to know each other better as people, find shared points of connection, and begin to develop norms for how they want to work together before they feel the pressures of their work.

Because these rituals happen at the outset, this is the opportunity to clearly communicate to your future teammates the reasons why you’re taking the time to conduct them. Likewise, after performing these rituals, be sure to conduct any necessary follow-up conversations before you prepare for the project kickoff.

RITUAL What Do We Bring to the Team?

Norms are common understandings about what is or isn’t acceptable for a team in terms of behavior. Shared team norms include things like when employees show up to work or how team members want to communicate. Norms are part of our everyday interactions with coworkers, and they help shape the patterns of how work gets done.

At the start of a team project, many norms and their corresponding ways of working are unspoken. They aren’t discovered until the team begins working together. It’s important to formalize these unspoken norms as quickly as possible, and to let people choose which ones they want for the team. You can’t always control the cultural norms and values that shape your workplace, but you can control what your team agrees to regarding how they want to work together.

This ritual is designed to help the team foster a shared picture of their skills, interests, and hobbies. It will also help them identify the areas in which they want to support each other over the course of the project. But the most important part of this ritual is when the team has their first discussion about their working norms.

This ritual is our adaptation of frog’s “Skill Share” activity from the Collective Action Toolkit (of which we were both contributors) and frog’s “Team Leap” (created by Tanya Khakbaz). We recommend using this ritual with teams that will be working together for up to three months. If you’re working together for longer, the next ritual (“What Do We Value As a Team?”) may be better suited to your team’s needs.

1. Answer questions provided to the team

Ask your team members to answer the following questions on their own. They can either answer them at the start of the ritual, or these questions can be shared in advance of the meeting so people have time to prepare their responses.

FIGURE 2 “What Do We Bring to the Team?” example output

What’s your name and your role?

Tell us what you want to be called by the team, as well as your job title and role if we haven’t worked together before.

What are your personal interests or hobbies?

Share what you feel comfortable letting the team know. Some teams work within organizations that discourage talk about personal lives. We’ve seen teams use this question to either create new behaviors around those conversations or to continue the practice by simply describing what people are interested in around the company’s products or initiatives. Your team can decide how they want this to go.

What skills do you bring to the team?

Describe what skills you use as part of your job, plus those you want to share that aren’t always used at work. This is where personal life skills may rise to the surface. In order to be effective in our professional lives, many of us draw from expertise that was not obtained “on the job.” We rarely get the opportunity to express this knowledge. Now is your chance.

When do you prefer to work on your own?

Some work that happens on projects has to be done individually at first, then completed as a team. Which work tasks or situations do you prefer to tackle solo?

When do you prefer to work in collaboration with others on a team?

Be honest here. A simple story or two about situations you’ve been in on previous teams can be a good way to answer this question.

What do you want to learn while working on this team?

We have to get things done, but we’ve also got a great opportunity to learn from each other. This could be a personal or professional goal or just something you’ve been curious about.

If you want to add additional questions to this list, include some that relate your teammates’ personal experiences to the subject matter of the project. For example, if the focus of your project is helping people manage their personal finances, you could include questions like “What was the best advice you received from a friend about money?”

2. Share answers with the team

Set up this ritual’s diagram in a location that all of your team members can see. Ask each person to read out loud what they’ve written. As they share about themselves, write their interests and hobbies in the first column, their skills in the second column, and what they want to learn in the third column. Don’t label the information with the names of team members. If you have multiple coworkers with the same skill or interest, mark a star next to that information.

After everyone has spoken, describe to the team what you’ve discovered about everyone’s skills and interests, noting both the unique skills and interests that individual people have, as well as any overlapping skills or interests. You might also identify skills the team doesn’t have that are required for the project, which you can use as an input for project planning.

3. Create preferences for how you want to work together

Now that everyone has a sense of each other’s skills and interests, ask each team member to list the norms they want to see for the team. For a workplace team, these norms fall into the following categories:

• When you want to work

• Where you want to work

• How you want to work

• What we’ll learn from the work

Every team member should write a response for each of these norms on an individual sticky note. People can use their answers from the first set of questions as a starting point for this activity, especially if they spent a lot of time talking about when they prefer to work collaboratively or on their own. It’s important to remind everyone that these are wants. They represent best-case work scenarios rather than “what I’m supposed to say to look like I’m dedicated” or “what I’ll put up with.” The viability of individual wants varies from culture to culture, but if you don’t ask for what you want, you’ll never be able to negotiate for it with your teams.

Questions That Help Teams Determine Their Norms

When doing this ritual, people usually a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Shared Rituals and Routines Turn People into Teams
• Part 1 Better Beginnings
• Part 2 We’re Stuck, Now What?
• Part 3 Sprinting to The Finish
• Afterword
• Turning People into Teams Toolkit
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors